Rain
Rain Aunt Frances taught me how to rescue drowning men. All shivering from rum cocktails, she entered the pool with her rubber daisies cap, let her gawky body go limp. I hooked her under the chin and struggled with my catch to the nearest shore. “Sometimes drowning men will fight, and you have to knock them out!” she said coming out of the water to get another drink. Sundays, kites were the kaleidoscopic stars of the afternoon skies. They plunged like red-tailed comets into distant treetops, to be seen hanging near ripening mangos, the moist wind flapping through their loose discolored teeth. Rain fell all at once. A trap opened in the sky’s floor, poured its content in one throw over us black people caught in dusk’s net. Rain ripped the soil, poured gifts into the swollen river, stolen gifts, skinned gifts—Aramis’s pig and Grasilya’s three-year-old, last seen playing in the cornfield by the ravine. Rain drummed on the metal roof over my pink bedroom where termites by the hundreds lost their oblong wings and wormed to their death along the cracks of the old wooden floor. Beetles attracted by the gas lamp knocked and grilled their brown breasts over its luminous ramparts. I heard them buzzing long after I blew the lights out— rain still falling—in their efforts to lift from their backs, swirling dervishes until silence overtook them, from which a dust rag would wipe them off early next morning. ...
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