Susumba's Book bag issue 8

Short Stories by: SharonMillar, GarfieldEllis, BarbaraJenkins, AliciaValasse, KimRobinson-Walcott, Lesley AnnWanliss, EmmaLewis, WandekaGayle, KwameM.A.McPherson, SheldonMorgan

Featured Writer: Nicole Dennis-Benn - Writing as Self-Discovery

Issue 8, July 2016

Searing hot fiction!

Susumba’s Book Bag is a quarterly digital magazine dedicated to showcasing writing of the highest grade from new, emerging and established Caribbean writers at home and in the Diaspora. The magazine is an offshoot of the Caribbean arts and entertainment online magazine Susumba.com We will publish poetry, fiction, flash fiction, interviews as well as reviews of Caribbean books. Occasionally, we will also publish one-act plays and monologues.

Currently, we do not offer remuneration for the writings we publish, but we believe that writers should be paid for their work, and so we working on a way to do that in the near future.

Submission Guidelines We accept a maximum of 5 poems and 2 short stories at a time and we have no problem with simultaneous submissions but ask that you notify us immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere.

We have no bias of genre or style. Our only requirement is that it be good, so send us your best stuff.

Short stories should range from 2,500 to 3,500 words while flash fiction is from 10 600 words. We prefer our poetry to err on the side of Mervyn Morris, the shorter the better. We do accept longer work but if your poem is at the 33 to 64 line tipping point (longer than a page), please only submit two poems at a time.

We try to keep our response time to a month, but alas we are human and so it may go beyond that. If you have not heard from us in 90 days, please feel free to send us a query.

Though we publish quarterly, we currently accept submissions throughout the year, except in December.

There is no reading fee, and submissions are only accepted via email.

Send submissions to info@susumba.com Subject: Lastname-Firstname-Submission.

Send your work as an attachment (.doc, .txt or .rtf), not in the body of the email. Works sent in the body of the email will not be accepted.

Send submissions to info@susumba.com Subject: Lastname-Firstname-Submission

2

Growing up is hard.

You know this.

You not sure you can manage it at all.

Who in their right mind could?

You?

ALL OVER AGAIN

by ADZIKO SIMBA GEGELE 1st prize Burt Award for Caribbean Literature

“An endearing, enduring paean to youthful joys, All Over Again resonates deeply,... ” Trinidad Guardian

An exuberantly hilarious coming of age novel! www.facebook.com/BlueMoonPublishing PO Box 5464 Liguanea PO, Kgn 6, Ja.

“Makes you want to read it all over again!”

The Gleaner

@blumoonbooks www.blumoonbooks.com

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Blouse & Skirt Books

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Editor’s Note With the majority of entrants coming from poets for each issue, sometimes it feels like Caribbean fiction is in short supply. So, when we decided to bench the poets for one issue, and focus on fiction, there was more than a moments hesitation. The resulting entries were pleasant and surprising and we’re happy to share them with you. Derek Walcott once said that, “stories are what the human heart craves.” It is our pleasure to give you your hears desire.

Tanya

Tanya Batson-Savage Editor in Chief

A publication by Blue Moon Publishing Cover Photo by William Abbott Editor: Tanya Batson-Savage tanya@susumba.com Sales:

info@susumba.com

PO Box 5464, Liguanea PO, Kingston, Jamaica W.I.

www.susumba.com

www.susumba.com @onsusumba www.facebook.com/Susumba 4

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Contents 6

Lettuce

Sharon Millar

12

Spreeing in the SUV

Kim Robinson-Walcott

14

The Shootout

Garfield Ellis

19

It Trembles but Stands Firm

Kwame M.A. McPherson

20

Apocalypse and Lucifer

Barbara Jenkins

24

Yamaye Kaya

Sheldon Morgan

26

A Tap on the Shoulder

Emma Lewis

30

Assau’s Rise

Alicia Valasse

35

Melba

Wandeka Gayle

42

Moonlight

Lesley Ann Wanliss

51

Featured Interview Here Comes Nicole: Nicole Dennis Benn on Jamaica and Writing as Self-Discovery

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Lettuce

by Sharon Millar

Seb was standing at the stove, gently prodding a large rump roast while a mushroom sauce puffed fat bubbles on the burner behind. The kitchen was hot, the heat of the day still pulsing off the walls. But through the northern windows a cool breeze was coming across the ridge and bringing the smell of ylang ylang into the room.

“Is the meat ready?” Elise asked, screwing in the backs of her earrings as she came through the door, trailing wisps of perfume.

The kitchen was a large room lined with mahogany cupboards with tiny inserts of stained glass, an industrial stainless steel stove and wide malachite counters. Outside in the garden, Sara and Ambriel were decorating the dinner table which Elise had put on the lawn so that they could eat under the stars. The two girls looked like Elise. They were placing bright pink bougainvillaea bracts along the centre of the table, the type of tropical centrepiece that they knew foreigners loved.

Seb had custom designed the kitchen himself, throwing himself into the project after his affair ended. In the long painful months that followed the end, Seb spent his time poring over kitchen design books and drawing floor plans. He had knocked out a wall and incorporated an old store room, doubling the size of the kitchen. The new kitchen looked out onto the lawn, its line of sight clear to the end of the garden. He told everyone that it was his tribute to Elise’s cooking. She was an excellent cook, a natural. From the old kitchen, a steady stream of light flaky pastries, creamy murgh makhanis, veal marsalas, stuffed artichokes, basil pestos; chocolate mousses and tender baby pavlovas had flowed, her long slim fingers rolling and kneading, fingering the food with tender hands. There’d always been a pot, hot and fragrant on the stove. The new kitchen, he’d said hollowly, was his tribute to her. It was what he told their friends. When they were alone, they never spoke about the kitchen..

She was not cooking tonight. It had been Seb’s idea to have the Smiths to dinner and she had gone along with the idea easily enough. There was none of the old enthusiasm, just an agreeable placidity and a refusal to cook. She wouldn’t even fry an egg. Occasionally she made cheese and toast for the girls but generally, she took them out to eat. Elise came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the rump roast that sat on the stove. It had just come out the oven and was leaking pink dots of blood from its surface. In the hot kitchen, Seb stepped away from the stove to look at her face as she examined the meat. He was tired and irritated by the smell of heavy meat grease. In a thin white muslin shirt with small gold buttons and a pair of white jeans, Elise looked cool and fresh. He’d started

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Lettuce Sharon Millar

cooking hours ago, enjoying a false feeling of competence, but he was not a natural cook and he’d kept calling up to her for help. Eventually she’d come downstairs and sat with him, polishing her nails while she gave instructions.

Did she know? He’d asked himself that question over and over. She’d never accused him, never given him so much as an inkling that she suspected anything. She had never asked. Not even when she’d caught him crying in front of the television late one night. She’d simply turned around and gone back to bed.

Now Elise stood next to Seb and looked at the meat. She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder as she bent over to check the meat thermometer.

“Perfect. I’d say it’s done,” she rubbed his back lightly as she walked away. “It’s time for you to get ready. I’ll light the candles and get you a drink. They’ll be here in half an hour.”

Seb thinks they will make love tonight. She’d changed the sheets today and her fingers and toes winked vermillion at him as she walked away. They still made love often and he was careful not to change routines or patterns long established. She was long bodied and flat stomached, even after two children. Not long ago, Elise had surprised him in bed with a sudden mothlike swoop, her hair running over his belly, her mouth opening. He’d lain back waiting for the soft wetness of her mouth but she had bitten him once before nipping her way up his stomach.

He’d invited the Smiths because Kate Smith was a new colleague. She was senior to him at the multinational oil company where they worked. It was the first time the local office had been assigned such senior legal counsel and she was young and pretty. Very easy on the eyes. He’d never met the husband but Kate had said that he was a geologist waiting for his work permit. An amatuer archelogist as well. Like my Elise, he’d said. They should get on very well. Come to dinner on Saturday night. Sevenish.

Kate Smith was sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for Dylan to finish dressing. She’d spent most of the afternoon lying in bed in a bra and panty trying to get cool. Even though their first posting had been in Egypt, she was not accustomed to the heavy island humidity. She had not known what to expect when she’d received the Trinidad and Tobago packet from head office. But once here, she’d settled well. She enjoyed the exotic feeling of a new country. She was looking forward to meeting Seb Macintosh’s wife. Seb was part of her team in the office and they often worked late, a small group of them staying behind and ordering Chinese food to finish government tenders. She liked Seb but she’d met his type before. He talked about his wife. She had a pretty name. Elise. And Kate was expecting a pleasant, slightly meek housewife. Sophisticated enough for an island girl but probably provincial. Seb talked a lot about his daughters and how much his wife liked to cook. He emitted just the slightest pulse of availability; a dim but unmistakeable signal, as relentless as that of a firefly. But, she thought to

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Lettuce Sharon Millar

herself, there was nothing wrong in going to dinner. Nothing wrong at all. It was a good idea to get to know the locals. It would be fun.

“You look nice,” she said to Dylan, catching his eye in the mirror as he buttoned his shirt.

He looked polished and handsome. It was hard to know what to wear to these dinners. He’d chosen to wear a pair of khaki jeans and a denim shirt. He’s met the wife, he tells her.

“Where would you have met Elise Macintosh?” Kate was surprised he hadn’t mentioned this before.

“I met her when I volunteered at the archeology dig last month. I didn’t make the connection until you said her name,” he was still buttoning his shirt. “Elise.”

Something in the way he said the other woman’s name made Kate look at him more closely.

Some languidness on his tongue, a subtle heaviness deep in his throat that she alone could hear.

“What’s she like?”

“Tall. Striking. She studied archeology but stayed home once she’d had the children. Now she volunteers on weekends.” he paused. “She said I sounded Trinidadian, with the Welsh accent. It’s similar” Kate was careful to keep her face neutral. Now she really wanted to meet this Elise.

They’d been digging at the Banwari Trace site. That large shell midden on the southern edge of the Oropuche Lagoon. He was from Wales, he told her. A geologist. But his wife was the one with the job.

“Dylan Smith,” he’d said, holding out his hand.

“Elise Macintosh,” she’d rocked back on her heels to take off her gloves and shake his hand. It was warm and dry. She liked the way he held her hand in his palm.

“This site is famous, isn’t it? I read up on it before I came.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a faded folder.

Banwari man. The skeleton was discovered lying on its left side. In typical Amerindian fashion it lay along the northwest axis and had been lying there just 20 centimetres below the surface.

“It’s the oldest archeological site in the Caribbean.” She liked that he had researched her home before he’d come. So many foreigners came and went with no sense of the island beyond what lay in the tourist brochures.

“How old was the burial site?”

“5,400 years old.”

He whistled softly. “That puts it at…” he stopped to calculate. “3,400 BC?” He shook his head in amazement. “That’s hard to comprehend.”

“You can visit him. Or her. They are not sure of the gender. I like to think of her as the first woman. So you can visit the oldest person in the Caribbean at the University museum. One of our well kept secrets.” When she smiled, her face opened and relaxed, making her beautiful.

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Lettuce Sharon Millar

“Maybe you can take me one day.”

“Yes,” she hesitated for a second. “Yes. I can.”

She’d been just four years old in 1969, she told him. Occupying the earth for the equivalent of a breath. Just think. 5,400 years ago, someone was buried here. She did not usually talk like this but there was something in Dylan’s attention that drew the words out. They were working on a kitchen midden, carefully sifting and looking for potsherds and small bones. Clues to meals that had been prepared and served. They’d worked all day carefully bagging and documenting small fragile finds. She told him about the time they had come upon the remains of a cachalot whale on the Manzanilla coast. Unusual. They were accustomed to otters, manatees, and water rats. But a whale?

“Strange to imagine all the cooking that must have happened here,” she said. “All the meals eaten. It’s such a human thing. To eat with people. To feed the ones you love.”

“Do you cook?” he’d asked.

“I used to. Not so much anymore.”

It was just past four in the afternoon when the shout came down the line. That’s it for the day.

They’d hugged before saying goodbye. A quick short hug.

“Don’t forget you have to take me to see Banwari Man,” he’d said over his shoulder as he walked towards his car.

“I won’t,” she said. “See you soon.”

She took the long way home, coming back via Mayaro and Manzanilla, wanting to see the ocean. Here at the Ortoire river was the gentle swing onto the main road that passed the fishermen hawking red fish and lobster. And soon the crisscrossing of wavelets where the Nariva River ran into the Atlantic sea. In the old days, Elise would have stopped for lobsters but Seb did the cooking now and she was sure he didn’t know how to cook lobster.

Seb was relieved the food was out of the way. It had gone better than he imagined. The roast was perfect. The potatoes not overdone and the broccoli salad not too wet. The introductions had gone well but he’d been surprised to find that Elise and Dylan knew each other.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d met him?” he whispered, catching her in the kitchen.

“I didn’t make the connection,” she said. “Honestly, I was just as surprised as you.”

He knew her well enough to see she was lying.

“Hurry, it’s time to get the dessert on the table.” And with that, she was out the door, bright and smiling.

“A toast to the chef,” said Elise, raising her red wine high. “And a toast to new friends. Welcome to Trinidad.”

When Seb looked at her, she was flushed even though she’d only had two glasses of wine.

“Yes, a toast,” said Kate. “To many more dinners on your beautiful island.”

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Lettuce Sharon Millar

“What a lovely kitchen. Seb says you’re a wonderful cook.” The women had pulled the chairs onto the edge of the lawn and the glittering city lay spread out below them. The men stood behind them chatting softly.

“I used to be. And then one day I just wasn’t interested anymore.” Elise smiled and shrugged.

She was smoking a joint now that the girls had gone to bed. The Smiths didn’t seem shocked but Seb still thought it risky. He didn’t know where she’d found the joint. He hadn’t seen her smoke in years and he was afraid Kate would say something at the office. Elise sat in the shadow of the jacaranda tree, which shed purple flowers in corolla of violet around her chair. Kate found her lovely, with her long angular face and high forehead and she suspected Dylan thought so as well. She’d caught him looking at Elise, watching her movements. Elise’s hair was pulled back from her face with a wide black band exposing a brow as smooth and calm as that of a child. She held the smoke from the joint in deep in her lungs before expelling a long lavender plume. While Elise exhaled into the sky, Kate noticed the small pair of gold hoops that matched the tiny gold buttons on her shirt. She was not at all what Kate had imagined.

“But I still grow vegetables,” Elise said suddenly, stubbing and extinguishing the joint in a silver ashtray. “Come, I’ll show you.”

The other three followed her around the side of the house and through the latticed side gate that opened onto a small terraced patch. From here, the side of the garden sloped away and the city was again spread out before them. Elise grew yellow and red sweet peppers, tomatoes, long pendulous purple eggplants, and small, upright, lightly furred ochroes, some of which lay on the ground, split to reveal tiny pink pods. There was also basil and fennel, rosemary and mint. But it was her lettuce that took up most of the plot. Row upon row of green, flawless, ribbed leaves. Some had opened wide and lay with their leaves spread back, older and darker green, revealing the pale tender hearts, with puckered surfaces. Others were still young and closed, the frilled leaves tightly clenched over hidden centres.

Dylan moved in front of Kate and followed Elise down a narrow path making it impossible for the other two to fit in the tight space. From where they stood at the edge of the small path, Kate and Seb could see the dark heads of their spouses in the dim light. Elise broke a leaf of lettuce. She bent and snapped it from the centre of a young plant, pulled it from the heart where the tiny fronds were curly and delicate and green. Before Kate could call out, Elise had fed Dylan the leaf.

“Dylan!” Kate’s voice carried an edge of desperation. “You can’t just eat lettuce from the ground like that. You’ll get sick. Dylan! Stop! Stop!” They could hear the desperation in her voice as she pushed her way down the narrow path. She pulled Dylan away, tugging him hard and pinching the soft underside of his arm.

Back inside, Kate stayed close to Dylan. She tried to make a joke about eating unwashed lettuce, giving a complicated story about getting sick in Mexico after eating local salad.

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Lettuce Sharon Millar

“Don’t you remember Dylan?” She was still trying to reclaim lost ground. “You were dreadfully ill. We almost didn’t get on the plane. You never know when you’re in a strange country,” she paused after this, flushed and sweating, a red wash coming up from between her breasts and rising in spotty patches up her neck. Elise and Dylan were silent.

“We’ve been sick as well on holiday, haven’t we Elise?” Seb was helpless as to how to save the evening. He had the extraordinary sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff, a tinny, hollow feeling of loss that he was unable to pinpoint. It was only a lettuce leaf, he wanted to say.

Later that night, after she’d made love to Seb, Elise imagined the water in the gulf rising. She imagined crevices and hidden caves and steep slopes; slatey phyllites and pleats of metamorphic rocks. Silts, and gravels with their seepages of crude oil. She turned onto her stomach, enjoying the movement of her body. She wondered when she would see the Welsh man again. She lay still until Seb’s even breathing told her he was asleep. Quietly she made her way through the still house, through the beautiful kitchen. Even in the dim light, the counters and appliances gleamed, every thing in its place. But there was no trace of her here.

Out in the garden, she sat for a long time, the jacaranda slowly shedding slivers of violet.

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Spreeing in the SUV

by Kim Robinson Walcott

I always wanted to be rich. People with money had cars. When I was a little girl I used to ask God to give my daddy a car so I wouldn’t have to get up at four in the morning to go to school. I wanted to reach school not tired but clean and fresh like some of the children in my class.

God didn’t listen. My daddy never got a car, and then after a while I didn’t have a daddy because he left us to look work in foreign and never came back, and when I was twelve I had to stop school anyway because there was no money.

I still had to get up at four, though, because I had to get my younger brothers and sisters ready for school and then I had to mind the baby while my mother went out to work. And then when I was a little older I had another baby to mind, mine this time, and then when I turned seventeen I started work myself so I still had to get up at four.

Now my job is with some rich people up at the top of Cherry Gardens and no bus runs there, so if I don’t leave Portmore at minutes after four, then by the time I get the bus to Half Way Tree and the taxi to Barbican and then walk up the hill I will reach work late, and the mistress warn me already that if I get there after seven again I won’t have a job. When I get there I’m tired. Sometimes when I’m walking up that hill I try to beg a ride, but the people who drive up that way act like they don’t see you, they just flash past in their big Bimmers and Benzes and SUVs. The people where I work have a SUV. The wife has her car, the husband has his car, they park the SUV at home and use it to spree. Some evenings if I’m lucky I get a ride down the hill if one of them is going out that time. I love how that van rides. When I sit in it I feel strong and powerful, specially if it’s the husband driving, because he drives hard.

I like the man, but I don’t like the mistress, she too miserable and she speaks to me bad and she goes on like she better than me just because she has more money even though she black like me. It’s not even her own money, to me it look like is her husband make all the money, I hear her say she’s a businesswoman but to me she’s just a higgler with her goods from foreign pack up in her car trunk even if the car is a Benz. Is her husband who is the lawyer. He knows how to talk good to people, not like her.

That’s why I don’t mind when he calls me into the bedroom sometimes in the mornings after she’s gone. When I’m on her bed it’s like I’m her, though I’m better than her. Then if it’s evening time and he drops me down the road I sit in the front of the SUV and I feel good and I don’t think about how

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Spreeing in the SUV Kim Robinson Walcott

long I’m going to have to stand up on the roadside waiting to get the taxi back to Half Way Tree and then the bus back to Portmore. I sit there and feel the wind on my face and his hand on my thigh, and I smile and say to myself, Serve the bitch right.

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The Shootout

by Garfield Ellis

Deputy Superintendent Blake aka Fargo and his men got to Linstead around two am and waited in the parking lot of Dinthill High school. Fifteen minutes later, Sarge came in his old beat-up, unmarked police car, to confirm that the two of Jamaica’s most wanted had finally arrived and settled down in a little house at the back of the Charliemount housing scheme.

“I have two men outside the house watching the place right now. If anything change they will let us know.”

Without a word, Fargo signalled to his men and the little convoy of police vehicles slipped quietly from the school compound. Charliemount was less than ten minutes away.

Sarge’s two men emerged from the darkness as the three police vehicles slipped slowly by the two-bedroom house at the far end of the little housing scheme. They confirmed the house and gave the layout of the inside to Fargo as he disembarked, checked his weapons and slung the M-16 submachine gun over his shoulders.

“Alright, Sarge, you and your men can leave now I will take it from here.”

“You don’t want the back up.”

Fargo ignored him, beckoned to his second and instructed his men who fanned out and approached the little house from different sides.

It did not take much to surround the house. It was a basic twenty five by twenty five prefabricated two-bedroom structure. Unlike most of the houses in the scheme there was no improvement or addition to it from the basic unit the developer delivered some twenty years before.

The yard was unkempt, the grass was high on some sides and the front of the yard had a gravelled driveway. The small verandah had two chairs pressed neatly against the wall. Fargo went over the layout of the house in his head. Two ten by ten bedrooms on the left divided by bathroom and a long hall with living room and kitchen to the right - basic and simple.

And inside in some state of sleep or repose were two of Jamaica’s most wanted men.

Fargo parked directly across the street from the house. His driver, one of the top marksmen in the police force, stood on the far side of the van and trained his automatic rifle across the roof of the

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The Shoutout Garfield Ellis

vehicle at the center of the front door. Fargo knew another marksman covered the back door and the rest of his team in dark blue was scattered around the small yard from all sides.

Fargo paused to strategize. The house would be grilled with burglar bars. But that did not matter. No bad man ever padlocked the burglar bars on his house. Burglar bars prevented quick escape. But still Fargo was not sure. Gunmen had been known to do stupid things. On the other hand it was never a good idea to storm a house with burglar bars without something to ram through. Burglar bars can frustrate an attack and give them time to prepare themselves. And the best way to hit a bad man was swift and hard in the early morning when the sleep was sweetest.

But this time it really did not matter. Burglar bars or not, surprise or not. No one was leaving that house alive that morning. No one in that house would kill another innocent person or return to The Valley to shoot policeman from high-rise buildings. Every member of Fargo’s team understood that.

They were not there to take prisoners. They were there to serve justice.

Fargo signalled to Spoon who rose quickly and crept with him across the hard gravelled yard to knock on the door.

“Police! Open up.”

No sound came.

Spoon hammered the door hard and aggressive.

“Police! Open up.”

There was a flurry of movement inside.

“Police! Open up.”

A flurry of sounds. Then silence. Then whispered conversation.

“Police. Open Up.” “Coming!” A woman’s voice shouted nervously from inside the house. “Coming. Who is it? Who that?”

“Police, open up.”

The louvers of the window next to the front door cracked open. Spoon moved away from the window to along the concrete wall.

“Is who that?” The woman asked through the cracked louver.

“Police. Who and who in there? Open up.”

“Is just me and mi baby and mi family.”

“Well open the door.”

“Well how I know is police.”

“You see the police van across the road?”

“All right officer.”

And even as she spoke the first sound cracked the morning. A single shot from the gun of the police marksman covering the back door. Whoever had tried to escape was down.

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The Shoutout Garfield Ellis

“ Alright!” the woman screamed. “I going open it. I going open it. We give up. We give up. Onoo don’t kill me do. Don’t kill me please.”

The unit to the back were already pouring into the house through the back door left open by the man who was shot while trying to escape there. By the time the woman opened the door, the house was filled with police and the area was under the full control of Fargo’s men.

Fargo walked calmly through the front door. The woman was seated trembling on a little sofa with a child, no more than two years-old, in her hands. Three men lay face down in the centre of the living room. Another lay on his back inside the back doorway with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

“What’s your name?” Fargo asked the woman.

“Shirley, Mr. Fargo” “Oh so you know it was me. Is you name Sherese?”

Silence.

“No you name Sherese?”

“They call me so sometimes, sir.”

“You a Coolie Man’s woman . . . Is you walk around May Pen an’ give out extortion letters. No you shoot the shopkeeper down at Palmer’s Cross last month . . . then run back to hide down a The Valley?”

“I never shoot nobody sir.”

“No you name Sherese, Coolie Man’s woman?”

Fargo moved away before she could answer as if she was boring him. He walked over to a thick half-Indian man lying on the floor “Coolie man! You see how you make me have to come and look for you. You not tired a killin people. You no tired a walk a road and kill people?”

“Do Mr. Fargo. I give up sir.” Wailed the man on the floor “You give up. Why you never give up when Ah send message to you? You run to The Valley, man, Father Prof - big Don protecting you. Which one is your room?”

“The back one.”

“Come.”

Spoon lifted Coolie Man by the waist of his shorts and raised him to his feet. As he stood in his shorts he looked more like a shopkeeper than one of Jamaica’s most lethal murderers.

“Come,” Fargo said, “come with me. Is your gun that?” He nodded at an AK – 47 lying on the ground. “That is your gun?”

“Me never shoot nobody sir. Please don’ bother kill me, Mr. Fargo.”

“Sit down on the bed, man. You must tired.” Fargo motioned with his head at an assortment of money, jewellery, cell phones and other electronic items strewn around the room. “Where you get so much money, so much jewellry - so many things? Who you kill for it? You no tired a killing people?”

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The Shoutout Garfield Ellis

F argo left him sitting on the bed and walked back into the living room. “What is your name?”

He kicked one of the men on the ground.

“Leslie sir,” the young man.

“What you doing here?”

“I just come visit my sister sir.”

“Is my brother Mr. Fargo.” Shereese called out from across the room, “Him not involved in anything.”

“I ask you anything?” Fargo snapped at her as if his anger was about to show for the first time that night. Then he returned his attention to the young man on the floor. “Young boys murder people too. You know who that you lying beside? You know him? They call him Scatta. Is three people him kill last month. And you tell me you just visiting. How you so salt to be visiting at a time like this, how you so unfortunate?”

It was his nonchalance that made the room cold. The quiet of his voice, his casual indifference and conversational tone caused them to tremble. He spoke as if unwilling to ruffle feathers or change the state of the room. He talked casually of their murders and their crimes; ignored their pleas with a quiet sigh in order to make his point as if he knew them more than they knew themselves - saw through their games as an adult saw through the tricks of a child. He moved smoothly from person to person not bothering to interrogate them or asked about the guns in any official way or move to handcuff or arrest them. His easy nonchalance - that is what was scary about him.

He walked away from the men lying on the ground, did not even glance at the room in which Coolie Man sat on the bed with the policemen guarding him. Then he stopped in front of the woman on the sofa and reached out his hands. “Give me the baby.”

“Please Mr. Fargo, do.” The woman held the baby tightly to her as if trying to squeeze life from it.

“Come.” Fargo said softly. “Come, give me the baby.”

“Do Mr. Fargo.”

“Give me the baby.”

She handed the child quietly over to him.

He took the child like an experienced father and without another word walked from the house. He was halfway down the hardened, gravelled path when the first gunshot sounded behind him and by the time he got to his jeep, the sounds rose to a crescendo and died leaving a strange silence on the predawn of the misting Linstead morning with the acrid smell of death upon it.

When he got to the car, he took the radio proffered to him by the driver who still had his gun trained on the house. He sat, placed the child upon his knees and spoke softly into the microphone.

“Unit two to base, come in base.”

“Yes unit two, this is base,” the radio crackled back.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

The Shoutout Garfield Ellis

“Base this is DSP Blake.”

“Yes DSP, base hearing you loud and clear.”

“Yes base, this is DSP Blake. Ah would like to report a shootout.”

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

It Trembles but Stands Firm

by Kwame M A McPerson I don't see it coming. One minute we're fine; next, he flips like a switch - off to on, hot to cold. I swear it's something he remembers more than what I've said. This is not like the last time. Or is it?

He said it was my fault. I can't see how but then, I can't see. It's obvious. No work again for a few days, of course until it's less gruesome to look at. The last time, a co-worker threatened to call the police. I laughed and told him it was fine. Steve was like that. Always caring.

The door shakes. He's punching it. It trembles but stands firm. I wonder if he thinks the barrier is me. I look in the mirror. There is a bump above my eyebrow, another, along my jawline, just below the lip. Some blood. A tooth is missing. I inhale. It hurts.

Bastard.

I sit on the toilet seat. He's still hammering at the door. I touch my side and squeal. Yup, a cracked rib in there somewhere.

There is silence. Has he given up? Where is he?

Then a noise. Shouting. He's screaming. To who? I hear only gibberish. Is the door blocking his shrieks? I know he's cursing me. Again.

Tears scroll down my cheeks. I swat them away. There's no place for that now, not ever.

19

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Apolcalypse and Lucifer

by Barbara Jenkins

One evening, after Lucifer’s advanced aggression training class in the Botanic Gardens, KarlLee and Sunity, feeling a little peckish, decided to go to De Rightest Place for supper, taking their pet pit bull with them. They put him on a leash and the three occupied a table near the door where Bostic could see them and exchange banter. Mellowed by a superb lamb tajine and its accompanying Rioja, Sunity relaxed her attention and it was only when piercing screams, a scatter of people and a tumble of chairs alerted her that something was amiss, she realised that Lucifer’s leash was no longer in her hand and that he was standing, four legs firmly planted in the doorway, looking straight ahead, his nostrils flaring, and an eerie whinnying sound issuing from his throat. It was as if he had seen a jumbie or some other invisible presence. What he had intuited was immediately revealed when, with a single bound and a flash of black and tan, Apocalypse vaulted over the bar counter. She proceeded to walk sedately towards Lucifer. She placed her dark muzzle against his white one and, turning around, tail twitching, she presented her rear end. The pit bull was too gallant a gentleman to offend the lady by refusing her advances, especially as the gift of love was so gracefully offered. Without hesitation he mounted and despatched this delectable piece of business with a few swift and frantic thrusts, a long tie and finally sated, a separation.

The customers had by then formed a ring around the animals, looking on in silence with an awe they would normally reserve for a leatherback turtle egg-laying or a reality TV human baby birthing.

When the dogs were done, some of the young men at the bistro arc of the circle burst into spontaneous clapping and shouting as if their football team had just scored a goal. The young women with them, perhaps to cover their obvious discomfort, joined in the merriment and a celebratory round of cocktails was called for. Whether the young men were hoping that, inspired by the dogs’ example of unhesitatingly following their natural instincts, their accompanying young ladies could be persuaded similarly to throw caution to the winds later in the evening, there is no way of knowing, but it should be noted that the bar regulars, a more blasé and world-weary lot, went back to their games, their drinks and their conversation, as if there was no interruption.

The only people who seemed to be put out by Lucifer and Apocalypse’s short-lived love affair were Sunity and Bostic who, while KarlLee held the errant Lucifer firmly by his leash out on the

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Apocalypse and Lucifer Barbara Jenkins

forecourt, engaged in an intense, if low-pitched, conversation at the far end of the bar counter. The conversation did not end then.

The following afternoon at siesta time KarlLee and Sunity, Bostic and Indira are gathered behind closed doors to resume the discussion. Indira speaks first.

We are all friends. You agree? They do. Do we want to stay friends? Again, nods all round. Can we then agree that we will not let two dogs spoil that friendship?

Lucifer is not just a dog, Sunity interjects. To me, he is a person.

Bostic rises to the bait.

And you think Apocalypse is less than Lucifer?

Just a minute, the two of you. I am the only one here who has no vested interest in this. So, if it’s OK with you, I’ll tell you when you can speak so we can settle the matter amicably. OK? Indira waits for the two to agree and she continues.

Sunity, you speak first.

Lucifer was here quietly minding his own business when his dog… she paused to point dramatically at Bostic. … his dog jumped out of nowhere and raped Lucifer.

Indira struggles to keep her face straight as she turns to Bostic.

Your turn.

I hope nobody here seriously believing that a female dog can rape a male dog. Everybody here see what happen. Her dog climb up on my dog and sexually assault her. Not the other way round.

But she jumped over the counter. She jumped over begging for it.

You should a have your animal under stricter control so he wouldn’t go around interfering with other people’s females. Apocalypse was in her own home. Your animal was an intruder. Breaking and entering.

Wait, wait, wait. This is getting us nowhere. Everybody saw that the two dogs mated willingly.

Consenting heterosexual adults. No law against that. So, what is the real problem?

Pups, says Bostic.

Puppies, says Sunity.

What?

Lucifer is a registered prize sire. When he is mated, his puppies get a certificate showing that Lucifer is the sire and they sell for at least two thousand US dollars each, depending on whether the dam, the mother, is also of a high pedigree. I don’t let him mate with just any and every bitch.

I hope is not my Apocalypse you referring to as any and every bitch. She has papers too.

Rottweiler papers. Pure breed. From a dam and sire with papers. And now she is contaminated by some …

Contaminated? Did you say contaminated? You know how much is the fee for Lucifer to line with a bitch? A carefully selected pedigree bitch?

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Apocalypse and Lucifer Barbara Jenkins

Bostic looks from Sunity to KarlLee and back again. It 1s on the tip of his tongue to lower the tone of the discussion and make reference to Sunity’s obvious inability to apply a similar degree of fastidiousness when choosing her own mating partners. His mind flies to imagining Sunity demanding to see KarlLee’s papers and checking his pedigree before consenting to a coupling and this image makes him laugh out loud.

Look, Sunity, the dogs did their thing. You not happy, but I even less happy. Your dog do his business and for him it done and over with, but is my poor little Apocalypse probably now impregnated with half-breed pit bull pups. And to make matters worse, this is the first and only time she ever mate. Last time she in heat I take her to a proper Rottweiler stud to line but all she do is sit down and only snapping, snapping at him when he come round her sniffing. She just wouldn’t consent and you can’t force her. Our two dogs choose each other. What you want me to do?

Take her to the vet. Get an abortion.

Abortion? His voice shrieks to crescendo. Abortion? The wine glasses rattle on the bar counter. You mad or what? Indira, your friend totally out of her freaking mind. You hear what she say?

She want me to take my Apocalypse to the vet for him to put her under anaesthetic, cut her open, take out whatever in there and then what will happen next? I’ll tell you what would be the consequence. Even if she come out alive, she won’t be the same dog again. And, too besides, she wouldn’t be able to have any pups afterwards. You expect me to do that to my Apocalypse?

Look at it from my point of view. Lucifer’s stock will fall if word gets out that it is diluted by cross-breeding.

Just then, who should push open the door and come in to start work on the evening’s supper menu, but Jah-Son. He signals to Indira that he’s going upstairs and she motions him to wait. She speaks to KarlLee who has been silent throughout.

Tell me something KarlLee, what breed are you?

Breed?

Well, race then.

Hmmm… Human? OK! OK! … I see you not in the mood for jokes. Well, from my father’s side, pure Chinese, from my mother’s, African, Portuguese, Warahoon they say, and I not sure what else. Why you want to know?

Just hoping to make a point. Jah-Son, what are you?

I suppose I am mixed African.

What about your mother? Your father?

My mother? Who is that? I only see my mother once, when I was maybe two or three years. I can’t even picture what she look like. She living in the States. And as for father, worse yet. I never even know who my father is. But I know my grandmother and my half-sister. I more mixed than Gran-Gran, I think. I plenty fairer. And as for Maisie, she looking kinda dougla, you don’t find? Like her father could be Indian or at least part Indian.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Apocalypse and Lucifer Barbara Jenkins

Answer me something. Anybody here see anything wrong with KarlLee? Anybody can find fault with Jah-Son? These are one-of-a-kind people. Not even their brothers and sisters are just like them. So I don’t understand what all the cross-breed angst is about, Sunity.

Indira, you are talking about people. We’re here to discuss dogs. People are free to breed how they want but you can’t allow pedigree dogs to do that.

Well, Sunity, it seems to me that your dog and Bostic’s dog really believe they are people too.

23

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Yamaye Kaya

by Sheldon Morgan

The hunter crouched in the bush at the foot of the wayaba tree avoiding the light of the full moon. It was early and the moon appeared from behind the peak of the blue-hued mountains, casting its beams everywhere, revealing shadows in the thick green bush.

The hunter used those shadows now and about ten paces ahead the beast waited for him in its own bush. There was no wind and no movement. The light of the moon stroked the clearing between them and made the beast’s low grunts seem more menacing.

The beast was waist-high to the hunter and nine times stronger. Its tusks were half as long as the hunter’s guanin blade and twice as deadly. This was its bush and two legs had come too deep into it.

Now two legs would die as all the others had died beforeinnards ripped out, flesh a feast for the flies.

The hunter had been searching for huti and iwana. The search carried him deep into the bush where he found a wayaba tree. He climbed it to pick some fruit and the beast wandered out of the bush as he jumped down.

They were both surprised but the boar charged first. The hunter avoided the attack by retreating behind the tree; his macana was still hanging on a branch. The wild boar pursued him, grunting loudly and thrashing the thicket around the tree.

The hunter moved around the tree-trunk but the boar anticipated his move. It broke left and moved under the hunter, raising its head under his legs, tusks aimed at his inner thigh. It lifted him in the air, tearing skin without puncturing flesh. The hunter groaned loudly.

The hunter reacted instantly as he fell; hand to waist, blade in hand, blade to beast’s neck. The guided guanin blade slid between the thick bristles, across the dark skin at the beast’s outstretched neck. It left a white gash as long as the blade, which immediately turned red.

Grunts became squeals, piercing the stillness, scattering the nesting birds across the face of the moon. The boar charged again, spitting froth. The hunter sidestepped the charge. The boar slid past him mowing the undergrowth and the hunter moved to put the tree between them.

The boar spun wild-eyed as its neck burned and charged again. The hunter circled the tree while stabbing at the beast. He still could not reach his macana.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Yamaye Kaya Sheldon Morgan

The full moon rose higher above the mountain into the clear cloudless sky. The beast retreated to the bush about ten paces away grunting heavily. The hunter faced the tree trunk watching the beast being absorbed by the bush. He was winded too but he calmed his breaths and crouched, thinking, Could it be, Abosom, demon boar? If the legends are true, what chance do I have against it?

Then he shook his head, “I am Gana Kaya, first son of Gana Akwasi, son of the Gana Tunka Manin, son of the Gana Bassi. I am a prince of Yamaye and all here is my birthright. This boar is no demon or I am no prince. Surely it will die now.”

His heart pounded in his chest like the drums in his yucayeque during an areito but he kept it out of his head. He was ready.

“This night” he shouted to the boar as he rose and grabbed his macana from the branch, “my people will drink our batata wine and feast on your flesh.”

But there was no reaction. The night was as reticent as the burial grounds. The wild boar had dissolved into the shadows.

25

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

A Tap on the Shoulder

by Emma Lewis

Leckie sat and watched the sunlight leaving his acre of land. The sun was wishing his banana trees and his Scotch Bonnet pepper plants and his yam sticks a good night. It was not in a hurry to leave, but it had a timetable to meet. It was off somewhere else, leaving Leckie sitting there.

Leckie narrowed his eyes at the sunbeams winking at him through the trees and said silently, “Goodbye, sun. Until tomorrow, God’s willing.”

It was time to go home. He put his hand on his machete and his bag of provisions - a few green bananas and a couple of dasheen – but still did not get up to leave the rock on which he always sat, rounded smooth. Sometimes, he liked to linger for a few more minutes, watching the shadows deepening under the trees and listening to the tiny frogs and insects tuning up their nightly orchestra.

For Leckie, it was the best time of day. When he was a young man, needing some peace, he would light a little fire to keep away the mosquitoes and stay up there all night alone, resting and dreaming on his rock. As the woodpecker cried in the trees in the pale morning light, he would roast a piece of yam on the fire, eat it and go home, his head clear once more.

It was about an hour’s walk to his home, depending on his pace and whether he stopped to sit down by the roadside for a few minutes, along the way. Sometimes the heat of the day that had passed tired him so much that his walk turned into a shuffle, barely lifting his feet. When people asked him his age, Leckie would give a half-smile and say he had been “troddin this earth a good while, now.” He did not always remember his birthday these days, but no matter. He knew he was growing older, that was all.

Leckie stood up, straightening his back and tucking his machete under his arm. He slung his bag over his shoulder, as he did every evening. This was the moment when he felt most content. He started down the path, worn with his footprints and the footprints of his father before him (and his uncle, too) to the road below. A small animal rustled in the grass. The trees stirred in the evening breeze.

The road was darker than his hillside plot had been. The moon was not up yet, and only the breeze kept him company. A few stars began to flicker in the sky, still streaked with orange. A car

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

A Tap on the Shoulder Emma Lewis

passed by, shaking with a heavy bass line, lighting his way for a second or two with its headlights. It disappeared down the road, the sound echoing behind. Leckie sighed, and continued on his way, wrapped up once more in the cries of the tree frogs, and his own wandering thoughts.

And another sound. Someone was walking behind him. He had not noticed anyone else on the road, but they must have caught up with him. He walked slowly these days. There was no hurry to get home since his wife died. The house was dark and empty, and no pot on the fire - just the dog wagging his tail from his spot under the mango tree. The house was just a place to sleep.

Who could that be, walking so silent behind him, with no greeting? He wanted to turn round and look, but something told him not to. Anyway, the dim starlight would not allow him to see far behind, or in front. He continued walking.

His thoughts drifted back to his wife, Louise. Although she was gone six years now, he still missed her in odd little ways. Sometimes he thought he could hear her rasping cough out in the yard.

He saw the movement of her arm as she hung the washing out. When they were courting, many years ago, he used to tell her what strong arms she had. They were to hold him tight, she told him.

The footsteps behind him paused and Leckie paused too. He turned, peering sideways out of the corner of his eye. He thought he saw a shadow, some way behind, but it could have been the shadow of a tree. He started walking again, picking up his pace just a little. He had reached the low wall of the cemetery, with its tottering stones. The moon was rising late tonight.

Someone was right beside him, walking clear and strong right beside him. How could he have caught up with him so fast? Leckie’s machete slipped out from under his arm and clattered to the ground. He bent down to pick it up, and as he straightened he found he was looking at his old friend Maas Johnny.

“Wha’ppen?” said Leckie. How strange and yet delightful it was, to meet him on the road.

“Nice breeze tonight,” responded Maas Johnny, in his usual casual way. He gave a little chuckle.

He was wearing the old flat cap he had brought back from England, years ago. He looked good and full of energy – or “vim and vigor,” as he used to call it.

“What’s the matter, Maas Johnny?” Despite the chuckle, Leckie knew something was wrong.

“Wha gwaan?”

“Well, it’s the missus.” Maas Johnny loved to use these funny English expressions. “She’s a bit under the weather, these days.”

Leckie thought the weather was nice for the time of year. But he thought he knew what Maas Johnny meant.

“Last time I saw her, she look fine,” he told his friend. “Nuh worry yuhself. She’s fine.”

Maas Johnny said nothing. He was so quiet Leckie looked to see if he was still there. He was walking slightly ahead of him now, his body almost seeming to merge into the roadway. Leckie blinked and wished the moon would come out.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

A Tap on the Shoulder Emma Lewis

Maas Johnny and his wife Maisie lived at the end of a narrow pathway fringed with hibiscus, just five minutes from Leckie’s house. The two of them used to operate the little building at the front, its zinc walls painted blue, as a shop selling drinks and snacks, until a few years ago.

“Yuh tink so? She fine? Well… Me hope so,” Maas Johnny said. He sounded cheerful enough. He tapped Leckie on the shoulder, as he always did when he was giving jokes, a white rum in his hand, at the bar.

“Likkle more!” said Maas Johnny. And again, in a curious, high-pitched voice: “Likkle more!”

Leckie had never heard his friend speak like that before. It didn’t sound right, to him. Then, he made a sound – maybe it was intended as a chuckle, but it came out more like he had something stuck in his throat.

Maas Johnnie pulled on the peak of his flat English cap in what seemed to be a gesture of farewell, and leaped over the wall of the cemetery, nimble as a young boy, one arm in the air, his legs swinging up to one side. Like he was doing the high jump, thought Leckie, with some surprise and admiration.

Leckie stopped and stood still. The tree frogs stopped too, then started again even more loudly and insistently, a crazy warble. Leckie felt dizzy. Time to take a little rest, he thought, as the edge of a lopsided moon crept above the hills. He sat down.

He was not sure how long he sat there by the side of the road. The stars spun, and the moon tilted its hat at him. Soon come!

A little further down the road, was Maas Johnny and Miss Maisie’s house. Leckie turned down the pathway, and knocked on Miss Maisie’s door. He knew she went to bed early, but she was still up. A television flickered in a corner of the room behind her. She offered him a cup of tea, but he refused. He felt weary. He just had to see if she was OK. Miss Maisie was surprised by the evening visit from her husband’s old friend. Usually, she only saw him at church, and he didn’t attend church regularly, either. She was even more surprised when he asked: “How yuh keepin’, Miss Maisie? Mas Johnny’s worried about you. I decided to come see you. See if you’re doing OK.” Miss Maisie’s eyes widened. She took a deep breath, but did not let it out. She sat down, pressing her hand against her chest as if she felt it would explode. She did not reply for quite a while, and when she did her eyes were closed.

“So… You did see Mas Johnny?”

Leckie felt even more confused. Of course he saw him, on the road just now. Why did Miss Maisie look like that?

“No, Mr. Leckie. I think you been drinkin. You had a dream. Or someone playing games with you.

Go home, go rest. And don’t come back here talking about Maas Johnny no more. It nuh make sense.

No, it nuh make sense at all. Go rest up. Take a likkle break. It late. Go home nuh! Please.”

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

A Tap on the Shoulder Emma Lewis

Miss Maisie’s words tumbled over each other, her eyes cast down. She couldn’t look at Leckie.

She kept clenching her fingers to stop them from trembling. Was she afraid? Why was she afraid?

“Miss Maisie. It’s OK. I’m leaving.”

Leckie backed away from her towards the door. Perhaps Maas Johnny was right; she wasn’t so well, after all. He put his hand in his bag, and placed the green bananas on a table near the door.

As he bade her good night and turned to leave, she called out.

“Mr. Leckie! What’s that on your shoulder?”

He turned sharply, pulling the sleeves of his old shirt towards him to look. On his right sleeve was a bright, white patch. It glowed like the moon, and when he touched it, it felt cold as river water.

He told her it was nothing; it wasn’t painful.

When he got home at last, he stood outside his front door for a long time, while his dog snuffled at his shoes. Then he opened the latch, and went inside, where it was darker than outside. The only light was the faint moon glow he was wearing. His arms felt loose and heavy at his sides. He dropped his bag on the ground.

He took off his shirt and lay down on the bed. He took a sip of tea, and closed his eyes.

The next day, Miss Maisie tapped on Leckie’s front door. She wanted to thank him for the bananas, and to bring him a little peppermint to make tea. It was Sunday; she hoped he was resting today. He was acting strange last night.

The door was not closed properly. She called out; the two-room house was silent. She could see the corner of a bed in the room next door. She went in.

Leckie was lying in the bed, on his back. His shirt lay across the back of a chair, and a cold cup of tea stood on a table beside it. When she picked up the shirt and examined it closely, there was not a mark on it. The window rattled in the breeze. Rain was coming.

Miss Maisie touched the bed. She was afraid to touch Mr. Leckie himself. His feet protruded from the sheet, the toes turned out. His mouth was half open, but the movement of breath was gone.

Miss Maisie gave a long, deep sigh.

Likkle more, Mr. Leckie. Likkle more!

29

SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Assau’s Rise

by Alicia Valasse “Coutou! Coutou! Come quick! Come quick! All de goats missing,” Delaire lamented outside Coutou’s closed door. His rare, frantic outburst had shattered the silence in the sleeping village. The morning stillness was no more. It was now replaced by the familiar echoes of caged cockerels, the quickening squeaks of opening doors and an unfamiliar uproar.

The morning orchestra began; men sharpening cutlasses, children yawning reluctantly, axes attacking dry wood, water falling on aged concrete and tyres screeching on dry dirt and loose gravel.

Soon, these sounds were joined by the clicking of metal spoons on worn-out black pots and enamel plates. Life now flourished abundantly – responding to the urgent call of one of the elders in the village.

Coutou had heard the outburst and the noise which followed too. As one of the village’s elders, he was often called upon to deal with problems and offer advice when necessary. For years, the villagers had sought his counsel as a shaman and he’d grown accustomed to the spontaneous calls.

Without delay, he opened his door to welcome the village’s buzz. He walked around briefly secretly hoping that someone would point out the source of the disturbance. Suddenly, another clamorous outburst disturbed his flustered countenance.

“Mésyé, Mésyé, somebody drain all de blood. All de blood I tell you. All mi goats dead. Dem flat like pancake on de ground,” Joseph wailed - his hands in the air signalling his alarmed state.

Immediately, an inquisitive crowd gathered leaving the children to fetch their breakfast. Fires were left unattended to smoke slices of left-over meat and abandoned houses waited patiently for brooms to free them from dirt and dust. All eyes were now focused on the flattened goat on the ground. Its face and hooves remained intact but it was noticeably void of organs and blood.

Within minutes, murmurs emerged creating a crescendo of uncertainties. Some voiced fear of the unknown, some expressed concern about the village’s lack of preparedness for such necromantic occurrences and others simply echoed calls for God’s guidance.

“Okay, Okay,” Assau, one of the renowned elders of the village disturbed the murmurs. “We know what this is. De spirits on de mountain unhappy with us,” he proclaimed.

“What nonsense you talking Assau?” Allean the village medicine man questioned.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Assau’s Rise Alicia Valasse

“Why you acting like you don’t know what I talking about?”Assau answered. “All dem people they sacrifice on that mountain, all dat blood dat flowing up there – dem spirits angry. Since de leaders of de ole religion gone, we change. We forget them. We forget de ole ways. All we saying now is Hail Mary and Psalms,” Assau said.

“What dat have to do with de goats?” Allean asked.

“As if you don’t know,” Assau slowly took his place in the middle of the gathering. “De ole religion tell us dat every February and October, de spirits get angry because we don’t remember dem.

Dat is why dey come and take away de lives of de animals.”

The murmurs recommenced. No one had spoken of the old religion, Kélé, for two years. Its believers feared the nearby mountain of La Sorcière – believing that the atrocities committed there haunted the village. To make subtle reparations for the recorded sins of their ancestors, the villagers would drink the blood of a pure ram and offer gifts to the wronged spirits at a mass. They believed such sacrifices calmed the spirits and enabled an aura of tranquility in the village.

“So what you saying Assau?” Allean interrupted the murmurs.

“I say we bring this plague on us. We stop de offerings. We stop de ceremonies. We go back to de ways of de plantation owners. Now, de animals dying again. I say we go back to de old religion. We must go back now,” Assau suggested.

“Ole religion? And who would lead us? All de ole leaders gone,” Allean explained.

“Listen, I have plenty experience with Kélé. I know de service well. Remember I use to work for de leader. De man teach me everything, ” Assau continued.

“So, you saying you should be de leader?” asked Mary.

Mary was Allean’s wife and one of the spiritual leaders for the women in the village. Her opinion was revered amongst villagers as she was well-respected. None of the other women would dare interject in what was deemed to be male conversation. Mary would often ignore such talk.

She stared intently at Assau. He stared back understanding what her gaze meant.

“Well, of all de people in de village is me dat have more experience. So, I should take over,” proclaimed Assau hoping he’d satisfy Mary’s concerns.

The villagers stood aghast at Assau’s proclamation. Then murmurs swiftly followed. Like Mary, Assau was respected amongst the villagers. He was well-known because of his vast knowledge of village history and his perceived connection with the ancestral spirits. When he spoke, the people listened. When he advised, the people followed.

“If you don’t believe me, check de records,” Assau interrrupted the susurrations. “When de Folly’s boy go mad after reading de dirty book, it was me dat fix him mind. When de demon enter dat other girl down de road, it was me that free her. It was me de demon listen to,” Assau relayed confidently.

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Assau’s Rise Alicia Valasse

The villagers were soon silent but their exchanging glances revealed their knowledge of the truth in Assau’s words. No one in the village had come face to face with a demon and won. Assau had the pleasure of knowing this feat and today he was using it to acquire a new position as the high priest of Kélé.

“Well … if nobody want to talk I have something to say,” Johnson, the owner of the biggest cattle ranch in the village spoke out. “I eh know nothing much about what Assau saying but I know we animals blood draining and we cyaan do nothing”.

The murmurs continued amongst the dismayed villagers. The unknown frightened them. There was now an enemy with no face. It carried death in its gaze and it had attacked ferociously while they slept.

“Now I know we scared,” Johnson interrupted the village murmur once more, “But we have to listen to Assau. I was dere when he choke that demon out of Folly’s boy and I never hear demon scream like young woman so.”

“Well, how we so sure Assau know what he doing?” Mary questioned.

“Well, how many of you know about demon? How many of you kill demon already? If we look around, there eh have nobody else here who know anything about dem demon. I say we have a chance with Assau,” Johnson suggested.

The emergence of lethargic nodding from the crowd signaled the gradual acceptance of Assau as the new spiritual director of the village. Wearing his new invisible crown, Assau smiled subtly – aware of his new found prestige. He walked around slowly accepting his new religious subjects. They looked up to him and he fed on their fear and uncertainty.

“Okay,” Assau pronounced, “Today we stand against dem enemy with no face. I will make you see dem. They may even be here with us now. I will make dem show dem evil face.”

Everyone listened. Assau’s words were now everything. They moved towards their homes after Assau had reassured them of their safety with him. Soon they immersed themselves into their daily routines and all was soon forgotten. Assau’s reassuring stance had spread a blanket of tranquility over the invisible hand of death which had threatened them. There was now hope.

Days passed and death evaded the village. There was no talk of obeah, demons or blood until one day when a young boy discovered four sheep flattened in an abandoned field. The gruesome scene had intimidated many but such abhorrence was temporary. Assau was informed immediately of the new threat. He summoned a few holy men and immediately outlined a response to the problem. It was agreed that they would gather at midnight to appease the angry spirits. Assau had convinced them that this was the only way to stop the mysterious killings.

When midnight came, twelve holy men had gathered at the scene of the butchery. They carried with them clear glasses, white towels and twelve female virgins. The new high priest of Kélé had

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proclaimed that the singing of virgins was necessary to gratify the angered spirits at La Sorcière. It was claimed that this had been revealed to him in several dreams by the ancestors and he was now charged to execute his sacred duty.

Wearing a beige soutane, a bright red zucchetto and a pale pair of outmoded moccasin, he raised his hands signalling the holy men. The men moved slowly with their virgins forming a circle. Assau removed his moccasin revealing feet marred by the harshness of rustic living and grime. He gently placed several Shango stones on the dry ground forming the shape of a cross. The holy men followed swiftly adding their stones to form a circle around the cross. Without delay, the virgins were then signalled by the holy men who stripped them bare and ordered them to sing and dance to appease the angry spirits. During the singing and dancing, some of the holy men retired to a remote spot with a white ram. There, they washed its legs and killed it with one sudden blow to the head. Then the blood was drained into a large silver chalice – later to be shared among them. When all glasses were filled, Assau raised his glass slowly.

“To the spirits of our fallen brothers! We have grieved you. We have insulted your name. Have mercy! We hailed you!” Assau proclaimed seemingly in a trance.

“We hailed you! We hailed you!” the holy men repeated incessantly.

In that instant, they drank – each man emptying his glass as a symbol of brotherhood. Then they looked on silently as their leader smashed a large brown calabash to pieces to release a mixture which the villagers called Djinification. It was believed by the children of Kélé that this act would inevitably dismiss the vicious spirits known as Akeshew.

“It is finished. We safe once more,” Assau proclaimed as he stepped forward to address the gathering.

“Now we have to go to de people and proclaim that de Kélé council will charge a new tax. De ancestors tell me dat in a dream last night,” Assau announced in a serious tone.

“New tax?” one of the holy men questioned.

“Yes, it is we who protect dem now. It is our holiness dat keep monsters from this place. It is our prayers to de spirits that cause de children to sleep well at night and de women to have plenty children. Look how de sheep flourishing. It is we dat cause de spirits to have favour on them. This is now our job and we must be paid. I say we charge each house fifty dollars and we charge de farmers double,” Assau enunciated clearly.

“But what about we? We have to pay de tax too?” another holy man asked.

“No, it is we who keep dem safe. Now, go and tell de people. We will start collecting at de end of every month,” Assau announced.

All breathed a sigh of relief. They were relieved that they were not among the taxpayers.

Without further delay, the virgins were re-clothed, the pious men returned to the sinfulness of the

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village and Assau retired to his cottage alone. This was the life of the high priest – a life of celibacy and loneliness.

Imbued with the new proclamations of the high priest, the holy men of the village knocked on every door to announce the new tax. At first, most villagers questioned the high priest’s bidding but soon all of them gladly paid their dues every month. Once dues were paid, ceremonies were performed and the killings would cease for some time. Villagers who were delinquent with their dues would often suffer the massacre of entire herds of cattle. This led the villagers to believe that the tax was undoubtedly a request from the vengeful spirits. It was clear that the spirits were pleased with Assau’s work and they sought to repay him through this tax.

Every month, the holy men collected the taxes and every month one of the holy men delivered the taxes to Assau. He accepted them graciously in the name of the spirits before taking them to the newly- renovated basement in his cottage.

Assau was exhausted. But at least, he had been successful at three things: the villagers revered him; he lived in the most luxurious cottage in the village and his role as high priest now ensured his financial security. He did not have to work. He did not even prepare his own food. His sole responsibility was to incite fear in the village.

Slowly, he packed the butchery tools in a box which he kept under the stairs. They were not to be used again until next year.

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Melba

by Wandeka Gayle Melba could make out the upturned soles of Edgar’s water boots from the kitchen and knew he was dead. The realization spread cold through her chest, but for the next five minutes, she stood paralyzed at the sink and watched the water pour over the Pyrex dish in which she had made the macaroni casserole they had just eaten together.

They had sat across from each other chewing in silence. He had long since stopped complimenting her on the cooking and that had been the extent of their dinner conversation in the last ten years. Once, after Melba began lamenting the way the principal at her elementary school still went over her teaching plan more than she did the other teachers, and that she was certain that it was because she was the only black Caribbean woman on staff, Edgar said too much talking interfered with his digestion and so they often ate in silence thereafter.

He’d always been a man of few words but when the house had been full of the noise of children, it had bothered her less. They had come fresh from Jamaica in 1985 when they were married less than six weeks. She had left her job at a small school in Mandeville to follow him to first Florida, then New York and now settled in Louisiana as a retired contractor.

Then the accident took both her fourteen-year-old Eliza and sixteen year old Phillip and Melba and Edgar learned they no longer knew what to say to each other.

She dried her hands on the embroidered hand towel and went out to the rose bush. She looked down on him, his hands slack around the hose that spewed water around his head.

This was where they had sprinkled the ashes of their children and Edgar had insisted on planting canna lilies and roses. They never spoke about the accident but argued about cremation.

Melba was Pentecostal and Edgar had rescinded the Presbyterian faith of his childhood, so in the end, the practicality of cost won out and their children became, as Melba thought about it often in disapproval, manure for roses.

A reporter had taken a quote from them after the memorial service for what the media was calling, “The School Bus Tragedy.”

Edgar had deferred to Melba. Melba had said simply, “It is the worst feeling to bury a child. It is far worse to bury two.”

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They had been one of many parents left to rebuild their lives after the unnatural loss. The man who drove his pick-up into the bus died instantly, and Melba had thought this a small mercy that his name would live no longer than her children, headlining newspapers and television screens in the would be chase to recover him. She could grieve her children. The man would meet his maker. That was that.

She retrieved his straw hat laying a few feet away, held it there in her hands for a moment, looked down on his weathered face and began to weep quietly. Edgar had been a stubborn man, who shunned doctors and concocted his own medicines, despite Melba’s warnings. A few years before she had seen him hold his chest and he reluctantly concede her prodding to go to a Walk-In. She remembered his gruff resignation when they found him a high-risk heart patient and he waved it off as Melba overcooking the beef every Wednesday.

Melba snapped out of her trance, ran back inside and called an ambulance. They would find her lying beside him shrieking and pummelling his chest. The paramedics would mistake her clutching his chest and getting mud on her clothes, fighting them for the body as grief at the loss of her husband of 30 years. They would not realize that she wept for herself instead. She was neither wife, nor mother now.

America had been unkind to Melba, but she loved Edgar from the moment he stood at the doorway of her grade six classroom at that Mandeville school asking directions to the principal’s office.

Their courtship had been brief, she distracting him from his work as a construction worker on the new basic school site, and their talking in the hallway parlaying into trips to the cinema and concerts in Mandeville square.

Yet, as the years ebbed, she found she could love him less. He made the thing between them die from neglect, often becoming sullen without provocation. He seemed to change overnight after they started their new life in America becoming less and less the man who wooed her with his notes, june plums and hibiscuses. Then, in America began the pulling away.

Once, early in their marriage before the children, when they lived in rundown apartment in the Bronx, she had followed him to a bar, imagining that he had lovers, brash black American women on the block who loved his accent and work man’s build, but instead, she found him sitting by himself nursing white rum, his face drawn. She didn’t know how long she watched him but realized she did not feel any more relieved. Perhaps it would have been better had he been with another woman. Hate was a far more satisfying than worry.

“Is what, Eddie?” she had asked one night, when she found him sitting in their darkened living room. “Something happen at work? You want us go back home?”

There was something almost hopeful in her voice.

“Is nothing, love,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

“Edgar, tell me. We can go away. Somewhere.”

She came and sat beside him on the sofa.

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“I don’t want to go away. Plus, we cannot afford it right now, and we don’t have anything back home. This is where we live now, Mel.” He patted her hand.

It was true. Between them, they had one relative, Edgar’s elderly aunt, Ruthie McDermott, who lived in New York and who had eventually made it possible for him to live there permanently.

“This is where we live now,” he said again quietly and kissed her forehead.

Melba was not assuaged by that, yet she decided to leave him be. As she got up, she felt his hand on her leg. She turned back and his hands encircled her waist, and he slowly pulled up her polyester night dress and brought her flush against him. She wrapped her hands around him, and kissed him tentatively, holding her breath, willing this fleeting intimacy to last. She marvelled that when they came together, he knew how to make her feel safe, yet their lives diverged as soon as his body left hers. As they rocked together, she kissed him and felt his face wet against hers, and it was a wonder to be this close to him and be unable to comfort him.

When he would succumb to whatever torment he was enduring, he would often pull away, even in spirit. She would find him weeping, often like this, at night. Soon, when she witnessed his tears, she pretended not to notice to preserve his pride, even as it ate away at her.

Then, years later, when the world was already becoming unbearable for them as a couple, a drunk driver slammed into the school bus carrying thirty children, capsizing it and killing everyone including their own Phillip and Eliza.

Then, in fact, their whole world seemed to stop and they became figures living in tandem with each other, yet wholly apart. * It was two weeks after Edgar’s funeral that it started. She got on the Lafayette city bus after doing the shopping and just did not get off again until all the buses stopped running for the evening.

Edgar had been the one to drive their station wagon. So, it sat in their driveway and she took the city bus.

On her way to the corner store, it struck her that she did not have to rush home. That morning, she had gotten up at dawn, shredded sweet potato to make the sweet potato pudding that Edgar enjoyed on Sunday afternoons and realized that Edgar was not going to come in from the garden to enjoy it.

Now, she clutched the large bag of rice, wondering when she would ever prepare this much rice again and looking out the window at suburbia at the lots where miniature plantation style houses sat. It always amused her that many Americans in the South did not have gates but hedges to mark out their territory. A hedge would not work in Spanish Town back home, she thought, where some people had concrete fences and two sided grills on their windows.

She knew her stop was next and she knew she would not get off.

The lane leading to her green door came and went, she still clutching the plastic bag of rice. The bus jostled along and when it stopped, Melba watched with a strange fixedness as people boarded and

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Melba Wandeka Gayle

disembarked. She stayed until the bus completed the route and returned to the terminus and Melba got on the Number 65 because it was the longest route.

She would do the same thing the next day and the next.

Perhaps it was that when she was at the house, she thought only about joining her family nestled out there, somewhere in the earth, she thought of Edgar’s ashes in the garden with the children’s. Like his desire for his children’s farewell, Edgar did not want to be buried. So, Melba and three others – an elderly white man she did not quite know, Frazier from Baton Rouge who worked alongside Edgar at the construction business for fourteen years, and Melba’s neighbour, Phillis, who had tried without much success to befriend Melba – sent off Edgar without fanfare and she admonished him to take care of the children, and then, set his ashes to the wind.

Every night, she would dream about falling into a bed of thorns. She would wake up calling out for Edgar, then when only greeted with the silence: then, she wept until she fell asleep again, often as the sun rose.

Perhaps it was that when she rode the bus, she found she had space to think about other things. She thought about how as a girl she rode the bus from Zephyrton to Brunswick Avenue and felt calmed by the early morning fog blanketing everything. Somehow life seemed more bearable when the scenery was transient. She would take trips to Boscobel and Port Royal. She would rent a little house near the sea and grow scotch bonnet pepper and Pak choy like her mother did when they lived in Clarendon.

She wanted to go back even though she would be going back a traitor of sorts, swearing allegiance to the stars and stripes all these years. Edgar had always promised that he would go back when he turned sixty-five and retired.

Perhaps she could find work. She was still strong and just fifty-seven. She had experience in both school systems both in Jamaica and Lafayette. Yet, she worried about the fate of some returning residents, whom unscrupulous people preyed on, those who watched the number of barrels a person claimed at the wharf or learned how long they had been away and some who turned up in the marshland with their throats cut.

So, Melba and Edgar decided not to make any concrete plans, not to build that house on the south coast like they had dreamt in the warmth of early love. They were frugal, planning instead, for college tuitions that would never be used, denying themselves annual vacations back to Jamaica but they had promised themselves early in their marriage to provide instead for their growing family. In rare good humour, Edgar would joke about owning a private beach in Jamaica in their golden years, that their children would be judge and doctor and his investment.

“Jamaica go always be there, Mel,” Edgar had said to her, while she breastfed two-month old Phillip one August evening.

“But I want to show Phillip where him really come from,” she had said, smiling down at the pudgy little boy.

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“Phillip is American and plus, you see this is an election year and you know how fool people behave when MP full up them head with promises.”

The next year Edgar declined again because the family expenses were “bleeding him dry,” he said, so Jamaica was once again out of reach.

The next year they did see Jamaica when Edgar’s aunt died from heart failure and had to be interned at Bethel Church of God in Westmoreland where she had tithed for up to ten years after she had moved to Brooklyn. But Aunt Ruthie died in debt and Edgar bore the weight and it made him surlier than usual.

Still, Melba had made use of those seven days and held the memory close watching now twoyear-old Phillip try his little teeth on jackass corn, enjoy sour sop and otaheite apples and spend time at a Lucea beach. He would have no memory of it, but Melba had felt somehow she had been given a gift. They had come down during Jonkunu season and toward the end of the trip, even Edgar had softened, being affectionate, holding Phillip on his shoulders as they danced to mento and calypso and reggae and watched the effigies of past prime ministers and National heroes in the parade, and this time not wilting from his wife’s arms around him. She knew Jamaica would be good for them and often wondered if it would have been better to have stayed. They would go back all of four times before the children died but Melba and Edgar never reclaimed that jubilance and ease with each other they had had in those early days. *

On the fourth week of Melba’s bus escapades, with her all-day pass in hand, she boarded the number 45 and took her usual window seat at the very rear of the bus. She had begun to see some passengers regularly and thought perhaps it was the people themselves populating this moving world that made her forget her own loneliness. She had secretly named them, though she was sure they hardly saw her, this grey-haired woman with cream sandals, peasant skirts and calico beads, watching them.

The woman who came on from the corner of East St. Mary Boulevard and Johnston, like clockwork, at noon every day, was “Miss Inez” in Melba’s mind. She wore a black apron, black baseball cap and was gaunt and angular like a woman of the same name who worked at the tuck shop in Melba’s Mandeville school. Then, “Ralph” would come clattering into the bus with his signs, his trombone, his dirty pants and makeshift straw hat. She had seen him playing downtown with his straw hat face up in front just like the street performers she had seen on the subway in New York. She had known a Ralph once, who took her virginity behind the star apple tree and never spoke to her again.

She liked to think that this was how he ended up, relying on the generosity of strangers. Others bled together like the students pouring in at the stop just outside the university.

In fact, it made her think too much about how Eliza would be a sophomore in college and Phillip, graduate school had they lived.

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Melba Wandeka Gayle

When the bus coasted along the airport road, Melba watched a distant aircraft’s ascent with a pang. She had begun to tire of this meaningless traipsing up and around the sleepy town. She would go back to the little green door on the house that Edgar built.

She had nothing and no one and the people from the lane she grew up would pity her, outliving everyone in her whole world, and the new people from the new lane in the new parish would learn to do the same. Here, at least, in Lafayette in the hated house, the hated garden still held her loved ones and to leave would feel also like abandonment.

Melba looked up and found the female bus driver furrowing at her in the rear view mirror.

“Not getting off today again, baby?”

Melba looked around and realized she was alone. She had hated how grown people in this town called strangers “baby” and “honey” with a familiarity that she could not bring herself to reciprocate.

“No. No. It’s fine.”

She had not realized that anyone had noticed her unusual habit and hoped the woman would not pry. Thankfully, the bus merged again with the traffic.

“You not from here,” the driver shouted, again glancing at her and then back at the road. It was not a question.

Melba did not welcome this intrusion, this particular line. It would lead to a line of questioning she found exhausting. She could not just shake her head and appease them. She would have to explain her whole origin story. Sometimes it irked her when people said she did not “sound” Jamaican. She still had, she thought, a very thick Trelawny accent but they would be hard pressed to understand her if she spoke to them the way she would to a countryman who heard the nuances of difference between the way she spoke and someone from the other end of the island.

Today, Melba was not inclined to participate.

“No. Not from here,” she replied and looked out at the window.

“I could tell,” the woman was grinning but Melba did not smile at her. She noted instead the way she wore her hair in four plaits and it reminded her of a woman she used to buy yellow yam from in Mandeville market every other Saturday. Somehow that made her dislike her more.

The woman seemed to be waiting for a response but graciously did not continue the conversation. When the bus turned into the terminus, Melba decided to get off. She felt wearier than usual. It was just about noon but she would go home and turn in.

“Bye now,” the friendly bus driver said, extracting herself from the driver seat.

Melba waved a thin hand.

“Wait,” the woman said. “You left your bag, here, baby.”

The driver walked to where Melba had sat, picked up a blue canvas bag and handed it to her.

“Wait, you worked at the DaCosta School?” the woman asked, looking at the school name etched on the bag.

“No,” Melba said.

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Melba Wandeka Gayle

She couldn’t believe she had taken up that bag of all bags that morning. Melba stepped off the bus. The woman followed.

“My daughter went to that school,” she said. “She died in the school bus accident in ’01.”

Melba looked at her, amazed at how easily the words came out.

“Sorry to hear that,” she said, simply.

She noticed they were walking in the same direction.

“What was her name?” Melba asked, feeling trapped by the conversation, but still somewhat intrigued.

“Sarah, after my mother,” the woman said. “She was such a bright little girl. Really good at her figures.”

“I lost two that day,” Melba said before she could realize it. It felt strange to say it out loud after so long. She thought how she had wanted to say it Edgar. We lost our babies, she would have said. We need to talk about them.

“Two at once?” the woman said, stepping back. “I couldn’t imagine losing all of my other children like that.”

“Yes. Phillip and Eliza,” Melba said, her voice softening. “Phillip was good at figures too. He didn’t get it from me. That was his father, my husband, Edgar.”

Melba turned the calico beads around and around on her wrist.

“He died a few weeks ago,” she said.

It was coming out of her involuntarily.

“Oh my dear,” the lady kept saying. “Oh my dear.”

“Eliza could sing,” Melba said, brightening again. “She would sing around the house and drive my husband crazy with it. She would have got private lessons if we had the money.”

“That’s the thing,” the woman said. “But I’m sure she knew you loved her. I’m sure they both knew you loved them.”

Melba nodded.

Melba started when the woman hugged her.

“Listen, I need to go, but you should come by the Baptist church right around the corner on Jefferson,” she said. “Ask for Miss Linda, okay, baby?”

Melba nodded again.

She watched the woman disappear into the transit office and found she was crying. The tears were spilling out of her but she somehow felt lighter.

She walked toward the Number 30 bus, this time, it would take her to the lane that led to her green door.

There were things she need to say to Edgar.

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Moonlight

by Lesley Ann Wanliss “Mr. Barry, we can no longer afford it. Just make the arrangements.”

This full moon night Miss Audrey was sitting in bed, the light of the moon silvering the blue sheets on the bed. The conversation took its fifth revolution in the same direction. Mr. Barry, frustrated and unbending in his point, was standing by the window.

He knew Miss Audrey was right. Times were changing fast. Earlier that year, right after the national elections, food got scarce. It had something to do with importation and USA trade embargos.

That was what the Government people called it.

Then, to add to that, Mr. Barry’s crops were not being sold. The boxes filled with fresh pineapples were stocked high in the fields and he wondered what else they could make. Already he had fired one of two nurses and a few of his field workers. The five he let remain, he was sure, could not be paid. In his hand, he held the bill for the chemotherapy and medication; their cost was so far beyond his reach.

“I will figure out a way, don’t I always?”

“Everything due, tomorrow-Monday.”

“I said I will fix it.” “ Mr. Barry pulled the tab from the bottle, poured the tablets into his hands and counted them.

They were the same as he had left.

“You thirsty?”

“You talk to the pastor yet?”

“Do you need something to drink?”

“Why so you can crush the tablets and give me something to ease the pain?

“Take the tablets.”

“So I end up with a disease that eating me out, just the way you do. But, at least it will kill me.

You are the kind a parasite that want me alive, so you fatten me and then feed, fatten me and then feed on me. Not even sleep you sleep with me since I sick. Why you refuse to let me go man? Let me go to rass.”

As he placed the tablets back in the bottle Mr. Barry turned towards the window. From there he could see Matthew Burrell, the half white shopkeeper, in his usual khaki pants, sandals and white t-shirt

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Moonlight Lesley Ann Wanliss

in a frenzy of secrecy. He was putting Clyde Parker’s wife and the three children - two girls, one boyon a taxi. Her hands were filled with bags, his hand was holding another. The husband was nowhere in sight.

It was known around Red Light District that Mr. Barry had one altercation with Matthew Burrell. Decades ago, Matthew Burrell threw a stone in the mango tree that landed on Teacher Francis’ car. Teacher Francis was the most quick to beat teacher in the whole of Craigton High School. Matthew Burrell, in quick pace raised his hands and pointed his finger at the young Mr. Barry, walking up the road trying to make it home before his father left for market that weekend.

Matthew insisted, even made a cross as sign of proof, “Cross my heart, hope to die, me see it with me own two eye, if a lie me a tell God strike me right here.”

Mr. Barry had never forgiven Matthew Burrell for that beating.

Mr. Barry kept a close eye out for Clyde.

“Mr. Barry,” a wheezing Miss Audrey was now at the point of begging, “If is God’s will, it makes no sense you fight it. I don’t need the chemotherapy and the radiation. Let me go to God whole and it will be alright. I am not your wife. I am not your responsibility. Not even your woman since I catch this thing. Is like we are brother and sister. No. Hm-hmm, I don’t want any more of this.”

“Miss Audrey, why you don’t just rest? If you need something you can call the nurse. You are my woman, but since you so hell bent on leaving me, make me go outside.”

He was now sure what he was seeing on the main road.

“Look like Sylvia leave Clive, you know.”

“Your nose is always in people business.” “ Woman...”

“Mr. Barry, talk to the Pastor Peterson. Make the funeral arrangements for me please. I don’t want no more suffering.”

“Talk to the pastor yourself. He here every week, you can make your own funeral arrangements. Sometimes I don’t understand you...”

“You know what I have been thinking about today? Look at the way I let you take me from my father’s house and all now we can’t married sake of how you believe that God will strike you for divorcing and taking up a second wife. But, not once did you think about the kind of crosses that would land on me for living in unholy matrimony with you. And now you barely want to even be in the same room with me. I sick and I dying and I doing it alone. At least let me go quickly.”

“So now is me and God why you sick? Cancer is not supposed to be easy, you suppose to fight.

That is why they call them cancer survivor. You is a fighter Miss Audrey, so fight and stop this foolishness ‘bout suffering. Death…no… murder has no place in my house.”

Mr. Barry walked out the door.

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Moonlight Lesley Ann Wanliss

He walked down the hill. His mind was filled with the bills he may never be able to pay, now that the recession hit the island the way it has. Not without some kind of intervention. The half mile of hill he descended to make his way into the town had to be handled carefully, but he was like a goat, aware of sure spots where the smooth bottom of the shoe would make him shuffle under the dirt then slide down the hill before he was prepared. With his hand in his pocket and sure steps he was aware that the patches of grass were only an indication of where the precipice began. He had walked this hillside often enough, jogged down the slope, matching pace with his goats and bulls in his youth.

This night time trek would be no different from the rest, except this was the first time it felt like money was strangling him. This hill had always been in his family. He could never sell the land.

The district had so many men without work, night time shenanigans were the only way to ease the discontent and the poverty. In the square, men and women sat talking and laughing with cups in hand; ludo, domino and card games at their heights. A few heads rose as he bent the corner into the square. Some said their greetings, others didn’t acknowledge his presence.

In the bar, the light was dim save for behind the bar. Miss Joyce’s daughter Carlene poured Mr. Barry his drink of white rum and milk before he asked.

“How Miss Audrey doing these days, Mr. Barry?”

“She up there.”

“You see Clive in here from evening?”

“He been sitting over in the corner all day, looking like the bailiff come for his things,” “That don’t make one drop of sense Carlene. Why you love talk things you don’t know so woman? Your mother in the house? I going up to see her.”

“Remember to pay for the drink!”

The house was above the bar. To get to Miss Joyce you had to walk through the back door and up the stairs. The back door led to the passageway with the three ice machines, one broken, one off, and the other rumbling through the night as if any minute now it too would give way. At the top of the stairs was a brown door with the sign, “Bathroom Downstairs. Knock First” Mr. Barry knocked and entered. The sound of the seven o’clock news was blaring through the room.

“Who the rass!”

“Is me Joyce.”

“Ohh, Barry.” Miss Joyce was the only person who didn’t call him Mr. Barry. There was no need.

They knew each other before her money came, when they were children running behind their hawker parents in Kingston’s market.

“What brings you up these stairs Barry boy?”

“What I can’t come and look for my favorite. Plus, I need a loan, just until the coffee come in.”

“You see my age? Anything you borrow from me you had better keep it ‘cause I not going to live much longer to get it back. I don’t have your good genes and strong back. Sometimes when I here coughing up my tripe and barely making it down the stairs, I swear you must have found the fountain of

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Moonlight Lesley Ann Wanliss

youth on your land. That’s right. Maybe you should just sell me your land.” She laughs hard and the coughing begins.

“If I had it I wouldn’t be here begging you to help me pay these doctor bills for Miss Audrey.”

“Rum and milk you drinking right?”

“You daughter just charge me for that drink downstairs, it free up here?”

“Things getting harder Barry, free drinks in the bar come from in front the counter now, not behind. New policy.”

“New policy?”

“New owner, new policy.”

“I may have to give away every thing from the land that bare this season, American companies say my pineapples don’t make the grade, and nobody buying pine in the market at my price these days. I am not selling the land.”

“How much you need?”

“Three Hundred Thousand.”

“So what you going to do? I could ask him for you.”

The two sat in silence for a few minutes both drinking from the glasses of Wray and Nephew white rum and Milk. There was another murder on the news.

“I saw him put Clyde’s woman and children in a taxi about an hour ago,” Mr. Barry said.

“The man refuse to let people trust from the shop but he going to liberate a woman from her crazy, drunkard husband. White people so strange, like they think their way to heaven need a big act or something. I glad Clyde wasn’t out there; next thing he kill him.”

“At least so you would get the bar back.” Mr. Barry said. But Miss Joyce only looked at him. A gentle reminder that Matthew Burrell was as much her friend as Mr. Barry was. “Who gonna tell the man his wife and children gone leave him?”

“Whoever do it going to be accessory to the fact when the court case come, ‘cause that man stupid as a jackass in a horse race. Don’t put your mouth in this one Mr. Barry.”

Downstairs, a brawl had erupted. Miss Joyce didn’t stir. Mr. Barry could hear Clyde’s voice.

“What he saying?” she asked. For the first time since Mr. Barry entered the room she turned the television down. They listened.

“I don’t know. But knowing him...”

Miss Joyce turned the television back up and laughed.

“Barry see if you can get them to get that fool out my place before I lose money in there today. I sure Carlene too caught up in the foolishness to remember is a business she running down there.”

It took Mr. Barry and four men to separate Clyde from his cutlass and take him down to his house.

When he got home, Miss Audrey was already asleep. He stood by her bedside, his hands buried

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in his pockets. He looked at her in the bed. Her skin was no longer the smooth shade of black she wore in her youth. It now had blotches, like a child left to wander in the world alone; bearing sores, no one to slap the hand and scream don’t pick it. Her body smelled like death, her chest heaved in pain.

He moved to touch her, but his desire retreated.

He had not been in their bed since the diagnosis. He hated the sound of her pain; even in her sleep she would wince with pain. But still he thought that this is what life was about, fighting for everything you wanted. He went to the living room with his pillow and sheet and tried to sleep.

When Mr. Barry went to the old church the next day, his heart was heavy. The church was a commission from the British government to ensure that the soldiers in the camp further up the hill would have a place to pray. The structure was made from broken lime stone and marl, each stone had been laid by hand. The three aisles of wooden pews were carved specifically for this church and were also installed by hand.

But Mr. Barry did not choose this church because of its history; it was because of PastorPeterson. The pastor had not cast a shadow on his union, he did not say a word about the fact that Mr. Barry had never divorced his first wife, the brown skinned woman who had fled the coffee, pineapple and banana farms. He knew what to talk about and what not to. And like all in this hillside community Mr. Barry was sure that there were just some things Pastor Peterson would not tolerate, not in the name of Jesus.

So, Mr. Barry came to see pastor himself, because Pastor Peterson was the closest he could get to God. After all, Mr. Barry only knew God because, like his mother ordered, he prayed before bed, before meals and at the end of the day. And, when Miss Audrey was diagnosed with stage four cancer, he found himself praying more frequently and thinking of going to church once. He could not afford to lose her. And now that she would not let up about dying, God was all that he could see.

But today, it was not his first visit to the church, it was his third, yet he still had not found the confidence to move to the middle row from the last row in the back, and had it not been today, he would have been the first to leave, even before the last song or the prayer was said.

This Sunday, like the three Sundays before, Mr. Barry, put on his best pants, the one he wore to Miss Audrey’s yard gate fifteen years ago, to ask her to move into his house with him. The same pants he folded along the seam, then threw over the wooden hanger and hung up in the closet. It was now a little tight at the thighs, and worms had chewed tiny holes in to it, which were distinctly different from the larger tear that was patched at the foot of the pants. The tear happened that same day fifteen years ago, when he did not cleanly make it over the fence after someone- whom he thought was her father- opened the door. It was easy to ask a girl to move into the house of a man separated from his wife; it was harder to explain to her cutlass wielding father. Jumping over the fence, tearing the foot of his pants, and wetting himself a little was understandable.

Mr. Barry spent the entire sermon shifting from cheek to cheek; his bottom pained him against

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the hardness of the warm pine and mahogany wood. He was restless.

The first thing Mr. Barry planned to tell Pastor, even before hello or howdy do was the importance of family life in Red Light District. The rest was not yet clear. And before he could arrange those thoughts, Reverend Peterson stood in front of him.

“Mr. Barry, Miss Audrey had called to say that you would be coming to get things ready for her funeral?”

“Pastor, I know she send me here to do that, but what kind of man just watch someone die just so, ehh? And don’t do anything? Is dead she want to dead on me! She want me to stop buying medication and taking her to the doctor. I cannot do that. I won’t do that” “So… why have you come?”

“Something from last night just sitting on my chest, Pastor Peterson.”

“What is it Mr. Barry?”

“The way things are Pastor, with this harvest going to waste in the bush, look like I am going to have to swallow my pride and sell me land to Matthew Burrell. But that man have no scruples, no principles, Pastor Peterson. See how him take over Miss Joyce bar and shop? Plus last night, you see, I see him with my own eyes, put Sylvia into a car. That man has never lived with a woman who was not his own relative. He don’t know what it feel like to love a woman so dearly you feel as if whatever happening to her is happening to you as well. He don’t know the fear of failing a family. Or the way it feels when you are nothing but helpless. But he would separate a man from his wife and children…”

“Mr. Barry, inside the church is not a place for rumours and gossip.”

“Yesterday, I pulled Clyde out of a bar, he was so drunk he scream for hours for his wife. My conscience heavy with this pastor. I should have told him then that is Matthew Burrell who send his wife away. White men are always taking from us. Always. Burrell family, come here poor like us and now the ‘mount of acres they own is like they themselves is God. Meanwhile, the little Clyde have, the little Miss Joyce have gone. And after all that everybody say me must be quiet and don’t put my mouth in it?”

Pastor Peterson held a small wooden cross in his hand, he clutched his gold leafed bible in the other, the red carpeted aisle beside them and to their left behind the pulpit the mosaic of Christ hung above. Outside the mumbling of the congregation, the laughter of children reached in from outside.

“Be careful of the drowning man Mr. Barry, he will pull you down too.”

“Poor people might not have it but we look out for one another. We not trying to have more than everybody else. We don’t try to save just for ourselves. What the church going to do about it?

The man need his wife and his children to help him stay strong in these times.”

Mr. Barry buried his head in his hand. His thighs were tightly printed out in his pants, and his water boots were exposed.

“It is the way of God. What sin is there when a woman leaves her man, or when a man leaves his children? These are daily events, hurtful, traumatic, yes. Is that sin greater than when a man uses his

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wife’s body as an outlet for all his pain? So what else can we do but pray? I am the pastor of this church, charged with bringing innocent souls to God. But if the heart is not open to God then there is no more that I can do. Soon, all we will have left is God and we are all to be judged for our choices.”

“Pastor Peterson, Clyde has a cancer, he is no different from Miss Audrey, he is dying and we just going to let him die? The thing he had to help him through the hard times, Matthew Burrell like he is God took it away. And I must sit down quietly and don’t say anything?”

“Sometimes what men like that need is to hit rock bottom so hard that all that can happen is they have to fight their way back up.”

“Pastor, this is about life.”

“All we are Mr. Barry are our choices. In the meantime, I will keep Clyde and Miss Audrey in my prayers.”

When Mr. Barry came home. Miss Audrey was sitting on the verandah, her eyes closed while the small black and silver radio played the tape of Sunday Gospel Classics. Her head rocked from side to side. It was hard to know if this was pain or the sweetness of the music.

“You eat yet?”

“Stuueeps. Clyde stop by here earlier, say him on him way to Miss Joyce to apologize for the other night. Me tell you say you love people business too much for a big man.”

“Well, I glad he calm down. I decide to sell the land.”

“To Matthew Burrell, I refuse to take that with me on my conscience to my grave, Mr. Barry. You do that on your own accord.”

“All we are is our choice Miss Audrey.”

It was late evening when Mr. Barry made his way up the long drive way that led to the shop.

The shop sat as a single unit. A white grill connected the main house to the shop. The shop was a rectangular building with a large wooden door that doubled as the billboard with posters of items sold in the shop and the sign written boldly on cardboard with a black marker: “In God I Trust, Every Body Else Pays”, beside it the sign of the married items tied together because of the scarcity and abundance: Salt fish and Scotch-Brite, Corned-Beef and Toilet Paper, Flour or Rice and Deodorant.

Beyond the door was a small patio and a glass frame separated the customer from the merchant. The full moon was now at its peak and the blue light was soft across the night.

But, something made Mr. Barry stop dead in his tracks. He heard screams. And there in the drive way, in front of Mr. Barry, between the house and the shop, was Clyde, like a man removing a stubborn shrub of grass; he was letting his cutlass hack away at Matthew Burrell. Only an arm protected Matthew Burrell’s face. Mr. Barry watched the way Clyde’s hand rose to the air every time he took a

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breath and fell every time he exhaled. There seemed to be a sweetness overflowing him every time that cutlass fell. Mr. Barry just stood, and watched Clyde.

“Clyde no.” A whisper fell from Mr. Barry’s lips. He was frozen, unmoved except for the steady stream of urine running down his thighs, easing between his pants and thighs, and running down into his water boots.

In truth, he didn’t even know if he’d actually said it. It might have been a thought, a thing he told himself to say. He was sure that what he wanted to say was: yes, chop him, chop him Clyde, that white man take everything from us, make man beat me for nothing, he deserves it, he deserves everything.

But he was smiling, that much was certain, even while he pissed himself, he smiled just a little more.

Clyde did not run from the scene. When he heard Mr. Barry, he put his cutlass down in front of Matthew Burrell and walked away. Clyde placed his index finger on his lips as he walked past Mr. Barry.

“Drunk or sober, Mr. Barry, min’ you own business,” Clyde was blowing as hard as a sprinter after a race, his finger pointing towards Mr. Barry’s face.

Matthew Burrell lay bleeding in the drive way. The grill was open. His car was parked outside; its doors open.

Matthew Burrell stared vacantly at his own arm. Mr. Barry wanted to go closer but the thought alone made him queasy. He watched the pain take over Matthew Burrell. Miss Audrey would have been so much better at this than he was. He turned to go home.

“Mr. Barry, my phone. It’s in the car, get my phone.”

Mr. Barry kneeled into the car, aware of his own stench. His pants were wet from his piss, his boots soggy. In the car, was an open box with a bank bag. The bag was filled with cash. His eyes could not move from it.

“Don’t call the police, call Pastor Peterson. It’s okay.”

“But Clyde…”

“What else was he going to do?”

“He almost killed you.”

“It’s my fault. I am not pressing charges.”

When Pastor Peterson came, he and Mr. Barry lifted Matthew Burrell into the car as he drifted into unconsciousness.

“Who did this?” Pastor Peterson asked as he closed his car door.

Mr. Barry waited for the car to leave the driveway. He reached inside the car and counted the money. It was more than he wanted to borrow, more than he was going to get for the piece of land he wanted to sell. Three Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars. It was enough to pay the overdue bills.

At his home, Mr. Barry ensured that the front door was securely closed.

“What you doing?”

“Clyde chop up Matthew Burrell.”

“What you say?”

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He walked into the bedroom, then, he took Miss Audrey’s tablets from the side table into the bathroom. He emptied them into the toilet.

“Clyde chop up Matthew Burrell, him bleeding like him not going to make it. Him say him not pressing charges.”

“Hmmm.” Miss Audrey groaned from the pain.

“Is either me stupid or him stupid. But I going to give a report tomorrow.”

He went back into her bedroom where he undressed.

“You smell like blood and piss.”

“We smell the same then.” Mr. Barry slid under the sheets.

The two lay in silence.

“I don’t know how to watch you do this Miss Audrey.”

“Me know.”

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FEATUREDWRITER Here Comes Nicole!: Nicole Dennis-Benn on Jamaica and Writing as Self-Discovery Interviewed by Tanya Batson-Savage

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SUSUMBA’SBOOKBAG July 2016

Writing as a Path to Self Discovery: An Interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Norton/Liveright), hailed as one of summer’s hottest books by New York Times, BBC, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, Bookish, and more. Dennis-Benn has also been recently nominated for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, Red Rock Review, Mosaic, Ebony and the Feminist Wire.

Dennis-Benn reads at Calabash 2016

Nicole Dennis-Benn has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been awarded numerous fellowships including from Macdowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, and Hurston/Wright.

Her writing has been awarded a Richard and Julie Logsdon Fiction Prize; and two of her stories have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in Fiction. Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

It’s a crisp summer’s day, high up in the Blue Mountains. Kingston is spread out in the distance and everywhere else is lush greenery. Nicole Dennis-Benn has returned to Jamaica to participate in the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach. It will be her first time reading on the island, and it’s a few weeks before the launch of her debut novel Here Comes the Sun, and what we did not know to be the start of rollercoaster ride to literary stardom.

Dennis-Benn left Jamaica in her late teens after leaving high school. She explains that she left the country for reasons as complicated as the island itself. A chief driving factor, however, was the stifling economics of the island, which seemed to put a cap on possibilities. Going to America to attend college while living with her father who had left the island when she was a tot, opened up a world of possibilities.

“When I left, I felt I could really be myself, not just sexually but also to achieve economic growth.”

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Writing as a Path to Self Discovery: An Interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn

Even so, it wasn’t a quick path to writing, as Dennis-Benn lived in the closet with her writing and her sexuality for years. So, even though the US offered freedom and possibilities, she sought the safe and ‘respectable’ path, going pre-med in her undergrad years.

Her focus on writing began in 2009 after much encouragement from the woman who would become her wife in 2012.

“I really began in 2009 because that was the year I was serious about getting into workshops.

Before that, I wasn’t owning myself as a writer.” This meant that for the first time she would start to publicly acknowledge that she was a writer. “I was coming out as a writer, coming out as a lesbian, how many coming out can you have in one life time?” Dennis-Benn says with a laugh.

Her first attempts at foregrounding her writing started with attending workshops such as the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and Tongues Afire in Brooklyn, where she continues to live.

“To me they were really intensive and that was the time I was writing and rewriting,” DennisBenn explains. Not long after, she did an MFA at Sarah Lawrence, even while still holding on to a the security blanket of “a regular job”.

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Writing as a Path to Self Discovery: An Interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn

“I still didn’t have the guts to quit my job and say I was doing the MFA full-time,” Dennis-Benn confesses. Yet, doing her MFA brought her deeper into the writing world of academia, a she quickly jumped at those opportunities soon finding that teaching writing helped her to grow as a writer.

“It has been the most joyous and liberating experience,” she explains. “I’m writing and teaching writing. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like giving back.”

So, in 2014 Dennis-Benn started her own writing workshop, the Stuyvesant Workshop, which she explains is was to help bring the access writers who attend MFA’s have, to those writers who don’t attend them.

“I really wanted to give these individuals a chance to write. When you’re in an MFA, you’re in the know. You know what journals are taking what, you know about conferences.”

Along with running Stuyvesant, Dennis-Benn currently teaches at Baruche College. Her writing influences include Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Toni Morrison.

“I read Toni Morrison for craft,” she explains. “She is the greatest teacher any writer could have and she gives me permission. I write about black women’s sexuality and she shows hot to dive deep into that without being too gimmicky.”

Though her journey to become a novelist has been shaped in the US, the road to her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, which is set in Jamaica, began on the island.

“The seeds were planted in 2010 when I visited Jamaica for the first time after a really long time,” Dennis-Benn explains, acknowledging the complicated relationship she has with her homeland. It’s a relationship that many Jamaicans understand, that you live in a place that is often sold has paradise, that has many of the qualities that should make it so, but is stuck in a reality that makes it the opposite for so many of its citizens.

Dennis-Benn points out that in her writing she treats Jamaica as though it is another character in the novel, and deserves to have its flaws scrutinized.

“I treat Jamaica like a character. All characters are supposed to be rounded - the good and the bad,” Dennis-Benn says. “I love my island and I love my country but there are things I am writing against. In Here Comes the Sun there is the classism, the shadism and the sexualization of young girls.”

Her reading at Calabash will be her Jamaican literary coming out party. Most of those gathered under the tent would not have heard of her before, but the buzz was rising, and to Dennis-Benn getting a chance to read to her home audience is an important achievement.

“It’s surreal. I’ve been so grateful to be here in this capacity,” Dennis-Benn says. “In my quiet moments there is this intense gratitude that I feel.”

Even so, she also admits to a little nervousness.

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Writing as a Path to Self Discovery: An Interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn

“I was at first nervous because I’ve never read to a majority Jamaican audience before, but now I’m excited because it feels right. It’s only right that if I’m writing about Jamaica, I read to a Jamaican audience.”

So, it is a nervousness that cannot outshine the pleasure at being back home, even for just a while, and it’s a pleasure she intends to explore again in the future.

“Writing is what brought me back to Jamaica,” Dennis-Benn says. “I’m not done with Jamaica.

She’s my muse and it’s awesome that Jamaica has opened its arms to me again.”

Yet, Dennis-Benn doesn’t wait on time with her muse to write. She explains that she tackles writing just as she does other work.

“I do routines,” she says of her writing practice. “I teach every other day. The days I’m not teaching, I get up, just like I’m going to work and I write from 10 am - 4 pm.”

And though this feels like the rigour of office work, it comes with a great bonus package.

“Writing brings me back to myself,” Dennis-Benn says. “I feel like I’ve rediscovered myself through writing. The things that are coming out of me are some things I didn’t even know I remembered and then I seem them like a mirror held up before me.”

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