Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

a few feet ahead of us, the crowd making room for her as she began to twirl and laugh and roll her hips. She splashed the liquid on her chest, poured it over her hands, rubbed it into her face. Someone handed her a long red pepper, and she took that, too, stuffing it into her left nostril. Another went in her ear, where it promptly fell out and onto the ground.

“That woman is ridden by a gede. The spirits found her, and she is their horse. They will move through her body. The dead are cold, but we can warm them up. He needs piman to warm him up.”

The woman began to hunch down lower, to sing and to dance faster. A few people in the crowd joined her, others laughed, and some began singing another song altogether. Above us, the sun hung low in the sky, and I could see, from the cemetery gate, the harbor with the light shining bright over it, the sea turned to waves of white light in the dusk.

I had thought when I came here, I would be able to become a new person. That I would become someone for whom it did not matter that I had failed my mother. And, I supposed, that had happened. I became a wife and a sister and a daughter to people who could not see me. But was that any better than what I had been at home, beside my mother? I thought now, It is useless. I had thought then, It is lost.

I looked at the crowd rejoicing in the graves. The man closest to me pulled a femur bone from on top of one of the tombs and waved it in the air in slow circles. A few people walked with goats on leads or held in their arms. The sound of laughter kept up all around me. It had gone from a shock to a comfort to something that warmed me on the inside, that made my blood beat, that at least told me I was alive.

Ti Me had given up her role as nurse to me and was now standing by herself, watching the men and women sing. Sometimes, she sang along loudly; other times, she kept beat with hand claps.

Perhaps, I thought, I was destined to always be a child; perhaps it was silly to try to be otherwise. I thought of the life that lay ahead of me, a life of doing what my husband whispered to me late at night, of standing beside a Christian madwoman every day in church and pretending that her pronouncements were sane, of sitting across from a smelly old bishop who looked at me as the Whore of Babylon and had not spoken more than twenty words to me since I arrived. I thought of dying here, in this land, never seeing my mother’s face again. I felt it, suddenly, in my chest: I need her.

I began to laugh. It did not start as a giggle. It was horrible. My stomach ached with it, my lips hurt from peeling back, and my bones were shaking. I was laughing so hard I could not catch my breath. My smile widened and widened until my eyes were narrowed and I felt the tiny, hot burst of tears at the corners of my eyes. The strangest thing was that I could not hear myself. I could feel the laughter bang in my throat, but in my ears was only the roar of the people around me.

Ti Me turned to look at me—both shocked and amused. “It’s too much for Mamselle,” she said.

“No,” I gasped when I was able. “We stay.” Even in my hysteria, I could see the skepticism on her face. But I wanted to do at least one part of this right.

I sat down on the dirt, against one of the tombs. Ti Me, still looking anxious, stood beside me for a bit.

She knelt down. “Do you want to know what he said at the gate?”

“Who?”

“Papa Gede. He knows everything. He knows who will die and who will be born. He said you are now with child—two, he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking. He likes to make jokes. Rude ones, especially about pretty young women,” she said. “But I think—”

I began to laugh harder. I pressed my back into the tomb and rolled my neck. I could not say then if I wanted release from the moment or to be held in it forever. I was never good at deciding a side.

“No, mamselle, don’t do that!” Ti Me put her hands behind my head, trying to still me. She brushed the dust out of my hair.

“If I am … If I am … If I am,” I gasped, “so be it.”

“Mamselle, you will hurt yourself.”

“I have failed as a daughter, and I do not like being a wife. Perhaps I can be a mother,” I said, and then I began to laugh even harder, until Ti Me raised me up by the elbows, dusted off my church dress, and walked me, very carefully, out of the graveyard and back to my husband’s house.

By the time we arrived, I had quieted down some. I could feel myself hiccoughing, the flutter in my diaphragm. I did not think what Ti Me and that man, whoever he had been, what they said about me—I did not believe it could be true. But by then, Ti Me was convinced. She had me lie down in my bedroom, checked the shutters to make sure they were closed against the street, and set a tincture of ginger leaves and aloe at my bedside, so bitter it made me wince.

The house was empty except for the two of us. I could hear the whisper of the bottoms of Ti Me’s feet as she walked from my room, down the hall, and out to the yard. She had told me she would go to find Emmanuel, but I