#shorstories

"That's all?" Asked the boy. His eyes brimmed with depression. 

"Yes, that’s all I could get." Replied the girl. 

"Really?" He claimed with disbelief, hoping she would laugh and say it was all a joke. 

"Yes, they wouldn't give more in the market," she answered extending her robotic arm to take the bag and looked at the food the Occisors, the plague's exterminators and the new world's bringers,  have rendered a few minutes before, at the fortnight hecatomb. 

"What are we gonna do with that?" The boy denied with his head. 

The girl looked inside the bag, there were three apples, one fish and three cups of flour. They could fractionate the animal and eat it in four different meals, they could make one bread out of the flour and eat the fruits when everything else has been consumed. 

"Don't worry, we have enough for a week and then… " The girl stopped talking, the boy looked at her and their gaze found each other. 

"Yeah," he said" we will survive out of these." She assented and then he turned around and went deeper in the cave to the room they had built long ago. 

The girl surveyed her body. She had no feet, but instead two metallic prosthesis were attached to her flesh. She neither had hands nor forearms and one ear was missing. She denied with her head, looked up at the cave and started walking further in the darkness thinking which limb she would have to give next. 

Imagine going on a roadtrip with your friends. Loud laughters and funny stories filling inside the car. Everyone was so happy and excited about the trip. Feeling the euphoria as you watch your friends goof around. Then, this specific song started to play. Everything quiet down, no longer hearing the very loud laughters and shaggy dog stories. You look out the window and noticed the beauty of nature that took your breath away. Trees so green and sky so blue. People taking pictures, some were just talking, and you can clearly see the happiness radiating off them as they smile and look at eachother. You look behind you and saw some of your friends already asleep, others just minding their own business, lost in their own thoughts, some were leaning in others shoulder. You smiled at yourself as you look at them. After all these years, all of you were still close as ever, as if nothing ever changed, as if fighting had never happened before. You lean back to your seat, ready to take a nap. As you close your eyes, you then thought about how lucky you are of having them in your life, how they always got your back and for trusting you. ‘Thank you for being in my life.’

— — — —

The setting sun casts warm rays of desert heat into my eyes

And dries away the icy tears

For that instant the winter is lifted from the earth’s shoulders

And July lives eternally

 The cool shroud of December now hugs me close

And the moon like a glacier in the dusken sky, dark blue like Arctic waters

Casts the shadows of the trees onto the ground

I lift my head and breathe in the clean, cool air of an earth being reborn

 It carves into my lungs, and I breathe out the darkness

The sparks leave trails of incandescent orange in the black smoke

As they leave my mouth

And I am reborn in the December shadows

I am eternal

In Ayiti’s  Cité Klere-Klere is where you and your sisters will find les Mango Nwa.  Literally  black-flesh mangoes growing downwards past the crumbling slabs of cement, past the shears of blood-stained glass, past what your father`s ancestors used to call soil (soul?)  and blossoming by some dark miracle in the buried skulls of the Dessous-Nu. You will know them by their roots. At the surface, these same finger-like roots claw at the sediment heavy fog and rigidly gesture profanities to the sun-killers of past days.

When you reach Cité Klere-Klere or whatever is left of it,  take a moment.  Stand there in the debris and touch the cold skeleton army of lamp posts that once made the city the heart of the Caribbean.  Taste the steel, press your tongue against its frame till your saliva is saturated by its grime.  What does it taste like?  Foreign aid?   Innovation?  Salvation? Old shit, perhaps.

Make sure, great-grandmother, that you cry deep astro black tears…and when the moment of mourning is fleeting and the surface still damp , you grab your sisters and start digging. You dig like you  truly are the first and last line of defense for The Rebirth.

That night, I promise, you will understand why I sent you forward to the Cité.  Why I asked that you bring your sisters.  Why I asked that together you harvest every last mango nwa in Cité Klere-klere and throw them deep into the acrid cesspool that is zone C3 of the Sans-Poisson Sea.  That would put the odds in our favour.