Here's a little story I've started to write. The idea came from a nightmare I had about a soul-sucking demon who wanted to take my daughter (of course, I have no living children, but our subconscious minds, in dreams, cannot know this), and I would not let it. Give it a read and see what you think. There is more written, and I'll continue to post it in parts.
Now here was Nab’hia, back in our home again. I had heard my mother’s cries when Nab’hia had come to talk with her in the secret, purple shadows of the dusk, and now I feared that she was here to talk with me. I feared that she would separate me from the other women as she had done to my mother in the past, and lure me out into the yard, and that somehow, on the cusp of our little farmyard between where my papa's land married itself to the jungle, she would show me what it was that made my mother cry so.
If only, I thought, If only I could convince Nab’hia that it were my mother she wanted to see, perhaps then she would not be here to see me after all.
Nab’hia played at being our friend, but there was something in her deeply exotic face that just wasn’t right. Somehow, when her smooth dark features and pronounced bone structure came into just the right lighting, it was as though I could see something about her that gave me a chill, even in the humid tropical air. When she looked at me now from under her heavily lidded eyes, I could feel that dread chill growing in my bones. She mingled with the other women who were at my mother’s hut, moving about them as though she were one of them, but she was not. They were all uneasy around her, and my mother’s high-pitched, nervous laugh spoke to me the volumes that her words would not. Nab’hia was not welcome at our fire, and yet we could not make her go. I never understood until today why we could not make her go.
Nab’hia played at being our friend, but there was something in her deeply exotic face that just wasn’t right. Somehow, when her smooth dark features and pronounced bone structure came into just the right lighting, it was as though I could see something about her that gave me a chill, even in the humid tropical air. When she looked at me now from under her heavily lidded eyes, I could feel that dread chill growing in my bones. She mingled with the other women who were at my mother’s hut, moving about them as though she were one of them, but she was not. They were all uneasy around her, and my mother’s high-pitched, nervous laugh spoke to me the volumes that her words would not. Nab’hia was not welcome at our fire, and yet we could not make her go. I never understood until today why we could not make her go.
I had seen her coming. The sun was setting in a blaze down the mountain, its rays shooting like fire through the leaves of the calabash trees, and I had seen her walking up the dirt road toward our home. For a moment she had looked like she was ascending to us out of a pit of flames, and I couldn’t shake that image from my mind. Her exotic bone structure had become pointed, her chin and nose like hooks, and her yellow eyes had seemed to glow from under their heavy lids. Before she could reach our yard, I had invented an errand to send Gécy on. We needed some cow’s milk, I told her, and she would need to run down to old Norberte’s down the mountain trail. It was foolish, even Gécy was old enough to know that a luxury like cow’s milk was not something that we should need so desperately that she should have to go running down the mountain at dusk for it. But she was a good girl, and she took my tin pail and set off begrudgingly down the trail. If it was too dark when she got there, I told her, she should stay the night with Norberte and Pedro. Gécy looked at me as though I were a crazy person, because we both knew that it would be too dark when she got there. But she humored her idiot mother and set off on my fool’s errand.
I couldn’t risk her coming back early while Nab’hia was still at our house. I couldn’t forget the promise I had made to Nab’hia years ago and the strange ritual I had watched her perform on me in the dark. Couldn’t forget how she had reached into my chest and taken out a piece of my heart – that it hadn’t even hurt as I had watched her do it, her hand bloody with the small, thick piece of muscle tissue that she had held between her fingers. I remembered the way the warm blood had felt on my own dark skin, and how I had never felt my heartbeat so acutely before. I have never felt it beat so since either. But more than that, I couldn’t forget the promise that I had made her, the exchange she had let me make as a part of that ritual. I would have my man. I would have my Josue. But in exchange, she would get my daughter. I had laughed inside at the time, so young and naïve. I did not have a daughter, I did not have any children, nor did I plan to. I would not be like my own mother, saddled down in one place, waiting for a man to return from the village when he was done with his drinking and his whoring. I would have my Josue and he would have me. There would be no daughter.
But Nab’hia had been right. Josue had been mine, and though he had put off marriage, to my chagrin, there was a daughter. There was Gécy. And no sooner was she born than Josue was gone. At first I had hated Gécy. I had blamed her for Josue’s faithlessness. For the first two years of her life I blamed her. But then, one day as I dressed, I noticed a small scar on my chest. It was the scar where Nab’hia’s hand had entered between my ribs and touched my beating heart. As if remembering a dream, I remembered the promise that I had made to her, and I remembered that she was supposed to return and claim my Gécy.
Continued in Part 2: Secrets and Silence (posted 10 May)
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