EXCERPT

“That sodomite in the care…” My body twitched. I had zone out, still tired, exhausted really, since the assault weeks earlier, but the short policeman’s words dug their way into my thoughts and brought me back.

“That girl in the car, she a suh? She funny?” he said. I rubbed my eyes and looked. All the police officers, including Officer Smith, were looking at me.

My face grew hot again. I clenched my fists so hard, my knuckles hurt. “I am not a sodomite,” I grumbled real low. For starters, sodomy refers to anal sex, so technically girls loving girls was not sodomy. But I knew in his mind, like on most of the island, definitions didn’t matter: anyone identifying with LGTBQ was sick ... or what people refer to as funny. I wanted to yell at that fat dumplin’ of an officer to shoot me with his gun, that it would be less painful than the sting of his words. I tried to stare him down but the windows were tinted dark so he likely couldn’t see me. He and the other officers turned their backs. I strained to hear what he said next. I picked out some sentences. “Like why are we wasting our time with that funny girl,” he said. He was wagging a chubby finger at me.

I slipped down into the torn upholstered seat of the Toyota Corolla. I kept chewing the inside of my mouth, this time to stop myself from crying. I closed my eyes again, focused on my breathing, and suddenly I remembered this woman I had met in the bush back when I was maybe eight. It was the very first time I’d gone into the bush — a bush that looked a lot like this place here but thicker, going on for miles and miles, moving into slow lurching mountains and gurgling streams. Daddy had quit teaching and was working as an insurance agent. He had this idea to move away from selling in the coastal cities where all the other insurance agents were tripping over each other, and sell life insurance to the people who dwelled deep in the middle of our island. The only way through the forests of palm and cedar trees was, in spots, by dirt paths. Daddy’s bosses thought he was crazy, saying those inland people didn’t trust governments or banks and likely didn’t believe in insurance and wouldn’t buy any policies. But somehow Daddy proved those bosses wrong. The people wanted life insurance; they wanted to have some security in case they got ill, and Daddy cornered the market all to himself.

I walked around as Daddy talked to his clients. In this one little compound of unpainted wood houses, I found myself skirting chickens and stray dogs. There was a broken-down rusted car. I peeked inside. It was home to a litter of kittens. When I looked up, coming up from a river was a woman. She moved until she was standing in front of me. My body became rigid, and I felt like I should scream. She put a finger to her lips and whispered for me to shush.

“Are you the Riva Mumma?” I asked, thinking of the stories Auntie Nora told about the lady spirit who, from the waist down, was a mermaid, and that some say guarded the treasure of the Spanish conquistadors. The River Mumma protects the waters, Granny Vernice, Mommy’s mommy had once explained. All the things in the river, from the crocodiles to the fish, are her children. Without water there is no life and the River Mumma is a protector of life.

The lady in front of me wore a long white dress, so I couldn’t tell if half of her was fish, and a white scarf tied around her fore- head. There wasn’t a hint of water or wet sand on her clothes. The woman’s pupils were blue-white, covered in some film that made her not seem to be able to see. But while her eyes didn’t appear to work, I sensed she saw everything. Her face was like a zillion years old, lined in wrinkles, deep like the cracks in a dried -up river bed. I blinked to make sure I was seeing right. When I opened my eyes, the woman looked like my mother. I was about to run into her arms when her facial features morphed into a beautiful young woman. And then she returned to being old again.

She spoke. “You child, yuh goin’ far.” Her voice was crackly, like her insides were full of water.

“That’s what my Mommy seh,” I said nervously. “Mi Mommy seh I going travel di world.”

The woman in white smelled like roses at dawn when their scent is the strongest. She moved in even closer to me and whispered in my ear. “It will be hard what you have to do,” she said. “You will change how people look at things.”

“How?” I asked nervously.

The woman stepped back and smiled. Changing the subject, she said to me: “In our storytelling, we weave our moments together like our grandmothers crochet a tablecloth. Our minds step forward and then gently move back, until we draw a perfect circle. When it is your time, you will tell such a circle.”