Haiti Noir

Ever since then I’ve been living in agony, an agony I deliberately chose. I had to learn to accept the brutal and unexpected pain of separation. Every gesture has become an open wound that gets larger, adds onto the other wounds, accumulating like a blazing fire that can’t be put out. When I put her in Beatrice’s arms, she was so very attentive to the little “orphan.” I hugged the other baby and felt tears well up in my eyes, stinging my flesh. Hearing my daughter cry, knowing that the sound of my voice and the closeness of my body could calm her down, yet not budging, was agonizing. Letting Beatrice take care of her until her final departure, even more so.

I would have liked the process to go faster, the great-aunt to come over, sign the necessary papers, and leave with my daughter. That way I wouldn’t have her before my eyes every minute of the day, treating her like someone else’s child, watching her separating a bit more from me and turning to Beatrice, with the survival instinct natural to human beings.

There was no turning back now, and despite it all I did rejoice that my trick had succeeded. My daughter would have a much better life. She would have all the opportunities I didn’t dare dream of anymore. One day, I saw Beatrice looking at me while I was watching the child asleep in her cradle, with the other one’s daughter snuggled up against me. Did this childless widow understand my deception? Did she suspect that for once I had taken my destiny into my own hands, amending her aunt’s decision?

It’s too bad that, since then, every time my arms close around the one I kept, I can feel pieces of my heart disintegrating, then coming together again as I wait for the day that my daughter will leave me.

TWENTY DOLLARS BY MADISON SMARTT BELL

Morne du Cap

In the twilight of his last sliver of dream, Magloire saw VENDOLA, not as a single slip of green but all the bills fanned out in a diadem and glowing with an incandescent light, like a crown set on the head of Christ Resurrected. Indeed, the dollar bills crowned his own head but at the same time they appeared far away, so that he could not reach or grasp them. In this slippery zone between sleep and waking he often received counsel of his spirits, and now he believed that èzili Je Wouj was promising him he might conquer such a sum in the course of the day: twenty U.S. dollars-too small an amount to resolve his difficulties, thus not so large as to be unattainable.

He woke completely now, to cockcrow and the wispy sound of a palm leaf broom, sweeping the yard beyond the door. It was still almost completely dark. Anise’s sleeping breath flowed onto his forearm. She had turned toward him on the thin pallet where both of them slept. Were she awake she would not have done it. The whisper of air stirred something in him which he hurried to suppress, sitting up on the pallet and wiping his face with the back of his wrist. When he was a little younger, still in his teens, Magloire had been counseled by Doctor Oliver to wear a kapòt during all acts of love; such was the sort of foolishness that a well-meaning blan would conceive. He, Magloire, enjoyed only natural actions and undertook no actions that were not natural; therefore, he could seldom bring himself to wear a condom and by extension had not lain with his wife, as a man with a woman, for longer than two months. Besides, Anise would be irritable if he woke her now.

In a market basket near the door, draped with colored netting like a Christmas parcel, their son Léonty breathed easily in sleep. He was nearly two years old and had to curl his legs under him to fit into the basket, but he needed the protection of the net because mosquito bites had caused his fever; mosquitoes were still whining in the close humid air of the room, though the light was growing quickly. Magloire turned back the net for a moment to look at his son’s face. It seemed to him that the fever had passed, though he had not been able to find money to buy medicine.

In the yard outside the back door there was clean water in the white enamel bowl. Magloire used a little of it to wash and brush his teeth. The whispering of the broom had stopped and he straightened up to see his mother standing over a cluster of scrawny hens, holding a scant handful of cracked corn in one hand, irresolutely.