Dancing with a Ball of Light

Dabadie, Trinidad - Second Place, Short Fiction

For David of Subero Street

There is a pattern of light that comes when you least expect it. You lie in bed, just opening or closing your eyes. You move around the room, clean these days—you have decided your heart’s clutter is enough. Kiss-ki-dee! calls the bird of your childhood window. Kiss-ki-dee! sings the bird for whom here is home. You have returned to these sounds. You have returned to a coconut tree like the one in dreams of this island, forever batting yellow lashes at the red and busy earth.

Outside live stray dogs with insistent voices and fragile eyes. A twisted kite hangs on by the skin of its teeth to a phone line that drags a smile across the sky. Mangoes fall green and hard as the rocks that children throw at birds and other living things. Shameless orchids expose their private parts to drains full of nascent mosquitoes and the fading expectation of water remembering rivers, waiting for rain.

And then the light—coming straight, it seems, out of God’s mind, dividing my bed into intricate bars of gold, chasing broken strings of ants across their concrete universe, pressing itself up against these wooden walls, creating deceptive apertures, drenching me in an ever shifting montage of dreams and a secret heart’s joy. To think that I might have missed it if I had kept my eyes closed too long. Freely I receive the benediction that has traveled so far to meet me. Which of us would travel so far just to be for the space of a few breaths—for nothing more or less than to dance in the complete stillness before an audience of one?

He stand up there posing on the side of the road with the brand new football under his arm. Every evening he there in the same pose, on the same spot, liking himself, leaning back against the railing on his elbows and one bent blue-jeaned leg. Some days he wear a cap saying I Heart New York, in scarlet ibis red to match his jacket and belt and sneakers, the brim pulled down and to one side, conspiring with his sunglasses to guard the secrets of his face. Half past five, by the clock, you could find him prop up against those iron bars chipped like teeth, looking oblivious to the cars streaking past like gassy hissing whistling tooting tin men. He pose up now with his brand new ball, waiting to impress the fellas collecting in the Arima savannah for the evening game. Sanjit and Cheng, Abdul and Jackson, Tito and Freddo and Junior, renaming themselves for all the disasters of the ’80s—Bhopal, Tiananmen, Gaza, El Niño, Exxon, IMF, and ColeWar. The whole side had to change their name from Challengers after the space shuttle crash. They test out different names: the Hurricanes (that too badlucky), Red Army (not all a we here is communis), Zimbabwe (that too racial), Revolutionaries (nah, it too heavy), everyone finally settling on Shades’s offering of “the Independents,” because after all, he is their leader. He is the one who stands waiting for them to come and play the evening game. He is the one lean up there with the new ball, looking like he don’t care, waiting to hear their You is the real man, Shades! to feel their respect, and to share in the joy as they test out what this ball could really do.

Kick man! Kick the ball! Melt the numbness inside we chest like sno-cones in this ravenous sun. Bare feet meet coconut husks’s brown, peeling hairs. Is a ball drop for free by coconut trees with bent backs, too tired to hold up dry fruit. Is all we could afford, but don’t worry, this weighty hardness is nothing to our bare feet. We dare gravity. Oppose we nah and see if we don’t send these hollow dreams right back in your face. Laugh, spit, and sweat. We laugh, we curse in the sun...