She bathed in the bay of bitterness. An islet of granite rock, covered with barnacles, sea snails, sea-eggs and tiny crabs that scurried all over it, stood at the entrance of the bay, indifferent to the wind, indifferent to the waves that prostrated themselves at its feet and the clouds that wept copious tears of remorse. She compared the rock to her father. Silent all these years, unyielding, unforgiving. But he was dying now, of cancer, and before he died she hoped to transform this rock into flesh, free its soul from the hardness of its core, and give it voice to sing her name once again.
All these years her mother had stood by her. Her mother was her rock against the onslaught of the wave of scandal and the wind of shame. After the birth of her son, her mother took her and the child down to the bay and baptized them under the breaking waves in the shadow of an albatross that soared overhead on extended wings. It was a secular baptism, a rite of passage to a different idea of herself. She was a mother now, a woman now, innocent no more; she was no longer an adolescent girl, green and tantalizing. Her spirit had risen and become one with the albatross. She soared like a song, like a seagull. Read more of this article »
The morning sun was a mammy apple, big and round and yellow. On this mammy apple morning a child awoke and went out into the world. It was in the morning of life, filled with the fragrance of lemon grass and the freshness of orange blossoms. There was a green glossiness about the world like the glossy smoothness of mango leaves. Films of dew had formed on the grass and on the tiny leaves of the shy Ti Marie and the precocious jump-up-and-kiss-me that ran together on the ground. Dew dripped from the leaves and branches of the bird-cherry tree and the sugar dish bush. The aroma of coffee and homemade cocoa, brewed from freshly baked and grounded beans had not yet contaminated the scent of lemon grass that was the natural aroma of the mammy apple morning. The makers of breakfast were still cuddled in their beds, late risers on Saturday mornings.
The child skipped gingerly over the gravel and dew-drenched grass towards the gifts that waited under the big longe mango tree at the back of the house. The windblown mangoes lay where they had settled after falling and rolling, waiting for him. But the night wind was not the only bringer of gifts, for there were plums to be collected under the mango tree, big red dimpled plums, sweet-scented pink-skin pomme rose and yellow skin cashew with blushes of red, the nut intact at the bottom end, to be twisted free, put out to dry and, later, roasted. Presents from bats and owls. All went into the old straw hat, one by one, two by two. All except their gifts of galba, good only for pitching as marbles or as missiles for catapult. Read more of this article »