Some Short and Micro Fictions

A School Shooting
In the 1960s, many things happened along the railway and train stops at the villages of Santa Maria and San Diablo. These small communities on the island of Purgadad were always in the newspapers.
They had produced two prime ministers – one from Santa Maria and the other from San Diablo (though his father was originally from Santa Maria), and the wealthiest drug dealer in the country who helped maintain the school in San Diablo for years. There was also this man who once husked six coconuts with his teeth in under three minutes – a story that appeared in the “features” section of the Daily Maily.
Overseas travellers used to visit and address villagers in Spanish thinking that because of the names of the towns, the people there spoke more than just English or their confusing Spanglish creole.
There was a statue of somebody important in Santa Maria and the words on the plaque under it were Spanish words. Nobody understood any of it unless they had been told at school. This was a Caribbean island, after all – a former British colony. The people sang noisy, monotonous Christmas songs with strange words and had a lot of fun doing so. Visitors never understood why.
To this day tourists joke about this in their reviews. UK journalist, Harold Wilberforce also quipped that the local creole sounded more like the language of indigenous South American highland people.
“They should do their own dictionary … ha, ha, ha,” he said in one review.
But these villages, less than a kilometre from each other, were the kinds of places where lots of life, hating and loving took place. They were real places People lived and died there.
For example, Paul and Cristina would dream about each other at night. Paul had sexy dreams. Cristina dreamt of holidays in New York - big paper bags with thin straps that made her limp under the weight of a day’s shopping.
They had dreams about one another despite the fact that they saw each other every day at the train stop or at the market on Saturdays where reality was hot and sweaty and sometimes full of hunger.
Paul’s father, Duncan, was the man who blew whistles and closed the railway gates in Santa Maria – shooing goats and chicken away as the non-stop passed. The rattling of the rails, Paul thought, always sounded like gunshots.
As a younger child, he would race the trains in the deep drain that ran alongside the tracks shouting: “Pow. Pow. Pow!” Then his father would suddenly appear and hold him by the ear and drag him home as the train disappeared smokily.
On less noisy days, the train engines sounded like Paul’s mother at the laundry sink outside – “scrub, scrub, scrub” – sometimes slow and deliberate. Sometimes fast and urgent before the rain came, however clear the sky appeared.
Paul and Cristina attended a small red-brick school in San Diablo – one train stop away. It was run by Presbyterian missionaries. School principal, Rev. Sam, was a tall, white man who spoke as if each word was an entire sentence with a full stop at the end. His wife once left on vacation in Canada and never returned. Maybe that was why, at least so everybody thought, he rarely smiled. Except when Cristina’s mother turned up for PTA meetings.
There was the time two fugitive brothers ran into the San Diablo school compound and asked Rev. Sam for safe refuge. Paul and Cristina were in different classes, Paul was eleven and Cristina, ten, at the time. They often listened for and heard each other’s voices when they answered questions in class or asked to go to the pit latrine outside.
The principal knew the parents of the boys who had escaped the station lockup. Their parents - Kevin and Maria - were also once his students. The boys had been accused of robbing and beating a woman everyone called Ma Baker – because on special occasions she sold the best bread and cakes.
She lived alone in a small shack in San Diablo. Nobody quite knew her story. She appeared to be older than the oldest residents who remembered her moving in on her own years and years ago. She had no known friends but said “hello” and “good day” to the young ladies at the supermarket and was polite when people went to get their bread and cakes.
Some swore that at night she grew the hoofs of a cow and flew – sinking sharp teeth into animals cruelly left grazing in the dark. Others claimed she was a wealthy widow who kept her riches under her mattress. There were at least three huge locks on the only door in the small, modest, but tidy structure. There were latches inside and outside for them. She was out when the locks hung outside.
But now, she was in hospital. They had hit her in the head and split it open. The hospital people had her registered as “Ms Baker. Age unknown. Address: Shack near San Diablo Cemetery.” The doctors did not think she would make it. 
So, the police went looking for the boys – Neil and Hector. They were seen running away from Ma Baker’s shack that night.
 
When the boys ran into the school, the police arrived quickly and noisily in three battered vehicles at about nine, in the middle of Arithmetic and English classes. Paul had just made it back from the latrine. The cockroaches had made him want to puke and there were pee stains on his short khaki pants.
One police car had a huge megaphone installed on its hood. “Come out with your hands up!” the corporal screamed from the street. Even as he said so, about six others crouched behind the cars with long guns. The officers were in grey uniforms and wore caps with plastic brims that shone in the sun. Clem had a play replica he got for Christmas. It was almost the same, except his was blue and the officers’ was black.
The children were called away from the ventilation bricks. Teachers cowered under their desks and asked their students to keep quiet.
“Pow. Pow. Pow!” went the guns even as the fugitives emerged with their hands up from Rev. Sam’s tiny office where trophies from spelling contests and school sports were stored.
The 16-year-old was shot in the head and fell backwards. Paul’s cousin from San Diablo, Carlos, still talks about the sound of the boy’s head striking the cold, jagged concrete. “Like a dried coconut.”
This was exactly where, at recess, the boys usually put coconut shells or broken bricks to designate football goals. After the shooting, the football games there ended for almost a month before they resumed in the fading stains that marked where the body lay.
The bigger boy, who was eighteen, was shot in the legs and lay crumpled on the ground, groaning and bleeding. Bleeding even more than he was groaning. It was the guttural groan of the dying. He died later at the hospital.
Carlos was looking through the ventilation bricks at the time. He said he saw enough blood flow from Neil’s body to fill two buckets. He never knew blood could be so thick and dark or that there was so much of it inside a body.
Kamla, one of the bigger students, was quoted in the newspaper the following morning. They used her picture. Everybody bought a newspaper. Kamla’s parents kept a clipping.
Snot was running down onto her lips and her hair was partially covering eyes in the picture. She still hears the shots. “Pow. Pow. Pow!”
Through the bricks she had seen when they came out of the building. It looked like a Western movie, minus the horses and retreating Indians. The younger boy, Hector, appeared to be crying and speaking low. When the first bullet struck his face, his tears looked like splattering rain against the school walls.
It was the time of year for mangoes. So, yes, the smell of mangoes still reminds everyone who was there that day of bullets, concrete and oozing blood.
Paul
“Come out with your hands up!” Paul would shout as the trains passed. “Pow. Pow. Pow.” No blood. But bullets. Lots of them.
When the trains passed, Paul’s house shook. He was born one dark morning on the wooden floor. He knew each rotting plank and negotiated them expertly. Toes and bare soles knew the drill. Hit a broken board and the splinters take days to get out.
As he ran to shoot at the passing trains, his father would wave his railway flag with authority and blow his whistle to signal that it was safe to cross the tracks. Sometimes there was nothing and no one to pass. At other times, a truck with sugarcane workers in the tray smoking cigarettes or a coconut cart drawn by some underfed, overworked donkey or mule.
The morning Paul was born, the neighbour's wife brought a bucket of water, a pair of scissors and an old bedsheet.
He once warned his mother that the house could fall in the night while the non-stop passed. Yet, it was in the middle of a silent night, little Daren came. The neighbour’s wife was there again with a bucket, a pair of scissors and an old towel.
The non-stop clackety-clacked at about eight at night – much faster than those that stopped for the rolling tide of impatient passengers. Then all went still until six the following morning.
Paul and Daren and the other boys used to flatten bottle caps on the line. They made a toy with flattened caps and rubber bands that once cut Prince across the nose. The ensuing whippings were intense.
The scar has stayed all these years. Prince's father, Rajin, was the neighbourhood drunk. He limped badly and had lost two front teeth in a fight.
One eye stayed shut years after he fell drunkenly and awkwardly on the track, puking blood and rum.
He had gone, knife in hand for Prem, his longstanding drinking pal. The boys ran and ran. Paul’s father threw rocks at Rajin and shouted: “The police will get you. The police will get you.”
That afternoon, the young boys in the village smoked Rajin’s cigarettes that remained at the side of the tracks after the fall and played cards in the drain alongside the rails.
After the bigger boys were shot in San Diablo, the parents asked the children to stay inside. “Dust your shoes before coming in,” Paul’s mother would say. “Pow, pow, pow,” Paul would mutter under his breath. He preferred shooting trains on the track.
Cristina
Cristina’s parents had broken up when she was a baby. She lived with her Catholic mother in a small house about 200 metres from the railway crossing and from where Paul shot trains.
Her mother, Althea, was voted secretary of the school PTA. She went to meetings almost every week. Rev. Sam often invited her to his place for afternoon tea to discuss school business. On other occasions, he came over and did “grace before meals.”
“You can be a teacher when you leave school,” he used to tell Cristina. “Or you can marry some lucky man and travel the world.”
Cristina wanted to be an airline flight attendant and to wear lipstick at work every day. She wanted to go shopping in New York, or sip mojitos on a Cuban beach. Paul often told her that if they ever got married, he would go with her to those places.
There was one guy from San Diablo who became an airline pilot. He visited the house regularly and brought things for Cristina’s mother. He would talk about his trips to different countries and the colour televisions in his hotel rooms.
Sometimes when he visited, he would stay really late – past the time Cristina was sent to bed so she would awake early for school. From her bed she heard the giggling and the tumbling of furniture.
Her life would change one day in a school yard.
Paul and Cristina
Paul and Cristina never fully recovered from the shooting. Cousin Carlos started talking to himself in class and threw a book at Rev. Sam one day. He was expelled and never returned to school. His parents sent him to learn how to fix cars. He became really good at it but lost a stable job at a big garage near the city after he threw a spanner at his boss who needed a dozen stitches.
Paul never knew anybody who was “mad” before. He had to avoid Carlos on the railway because he threw stones at people when they passed. They had to stop playing shooting games because Carlos would have all the boys running for cover. He sometimes made “bullets” the size of tennis balls with cow dung. They made quite a mark when they hit the boys.
Paul had a huge red mark on his back from one strike. One day while they were discovering love, Cristina asked him if another girl had done that to him. They argued and Cristina stopped seeing him for a few weeks.
Cristina had a baby sister to take care of because her mother got a job near the city. At secondary school she was really good at languages, Spanish and French. She once wrote an essay in Spanish about the man who was made into a statue in Santa Maria.
It turns out that his name was Don Quixote de Cervantes who became a hero after he resisted the onslaught of rebel slaves. The statue stands where, according to Cristina’s essay, he raised half a dozen heads high and declared himself “El Rey de Santa Maria.”
She and Paul still met often at the railway station, though less frequently. Duncan, Paul’s father, had died from a scorpion sting, and a new station master was hired the following day. He prohibited games on the tracks and would be cruel on animals straying onto them.
Cristina suspected she was pregnant. At 16, they would not allow her back at school if they knew. When she told Paul, he accused her of fooling around with Carlos. They broke up.
Paul was listening out for the non-stop at eight when Daren came running in with the news. It was Cristina. She had found the .38 her mother kept in the cupboard. All it took was a single shot.
END

July 16, 2022

The Long Sandy Beach

There’s a long, sandy beach on the east coast of the island. On bright, sunny days without a cloud in the sky, you saw nothing. Nothing but an angry ocean smothered and tamed by an empty horizon.

Sure, there was always some uncle or old, unshaven guy who saw something: Fish seeking food. Birds they knew by species. The occasional fishing boat captained by someone they claimed to know. Mullets skimming rolling waves.

“Look at that!” they’d shout. And you’d feign surprise and, sometimes, frenzied excitement.

She caught me staring at her across the rotting, horizontal wooden planks that separated holidaying families. Every night, there was loud music, noisy card games, and teen laughter. She was leaning on the sandy rails looking out at the horizon and slapping the mosquitoes away. Then the moon’s light in our eyes met for a split second.

Everybody knew my father and my father knew everybody. Eventually, I thought, that girl and I would be seated across the table at a card game, and I would get to see her up close.

We would stare shyly at each other and look away quickly. There would be this song on the cackling radio, and we’d be mouthing the words behind the cards.

However, though the mothers greeted each other across the way. That was all. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. The fathers waved politely and went their separate ways.

At dawn, on the day we planned to leave - while the men remained in drunken sleep and the mothers prepared breakfast - my brothers and I went in search of crabs on the banks of the nearby lagoon for the last time. No crabs, but we skimmed smooth stones across the water and peed on a dead fish.

Then, hungrily, we began racing back to the beach house. She was standing on the shore throwing baby coconuts at a log that had washed ashore overnight. I stopped running. The others went their way.

I turned my back to her, picked up a stick and started writing my name in the sand: C-A-R-L-O-S – all caps to cheat the lower-case curves that cost me marks in English class.

Twice the water came in and ruined everything. Both times I retreated; safe from the waves, but just enough to still capture the firm, smooth damp of the sand.

Every now and then, I’d raised my head, hoping I’d catch her looking. There she was - bent over, stick in hand, scribbling on the sand.

Then a giant wave came in, screeched to a halt near to my name, but wiped her art away. I chuckled when I saw her using the stick like a sword on the retreating tide.

Had my mother not summoned everyone to breakfast, I might have walked right over and said: “Good morning, sorry about that wave. My name is Carlos.” But I had to go.

As I made my way back to the house, I looked back and saw that she was walking slowly over to where I’d been writing.

I returned with urgency to the receding tide after breakfast. Gone were the churning waves. On the shore, now where the sand was loose and wild, remained a faint ‘CARLOS.’

Lower down, what looked like the name ‘wendy’ – all lowercase; letters joined by tidy schoolgirl loops. Between both names was a narrow line that touched the ‘y’ and the ‘C.’ In the middle, a heart pierced by a crooked arrow with uneven points.

Their cars were moving out. My mother was waving impatiently from the house. My brothers were sent to summon me: “Hurry up. Let’s go!” The neighbours had already left.

The next time I saw her was many years later at a supermarket. I remembered her. She didn’t remember me. There was no moonlight in her eyes. I said ‘hello’ to the little boy pushing her cart. He waved. I nodded and moved along.

By then, I had long returned to that very shore. The beach had narrowed to a footpath and the houses were dilapidated and unoccupied.

On the horizon was a fishing boat that disappeared behind the waves before surfacing urgently for air every few seconds. That would be Sonny and his boys. A white egret settled on a fallen coconut tree on the shore. Mullets jumped and played suicidally near the shore.

These days on the east coast of this island, it’s possible to see everything.

April 25, 2022

 

Clint

His name was Paul and he lived three houses down, so we called him “Clint”. In those days, we called each other any old shit.

He was tall and thin and wore glasses from the age of 7. When he ate mangoes there was always evidence left on his chin, neck, and elbows.

One time Clint’s father put him on the gravel and made him hold a brick above his head in the midday sun because there were mango stains on his new shirt.

When he cried that day, we all swore he was actually laughing. When Clint laughed, you see, he always sounded as if he was coughing. And when he cried, he sounded as if he was laughing … in a coughing kind of way.

As he cried/coughed/laughed that afternoon, his mother, Miss Greta, thought the kneeling in the sun was ruining Clint’s lungs, so she shouted at Mr Randolph at the top of her voice: “Clint has gravel in his lungs!”

Mr Randolph chuckled and went outside with a faux leather belt he wore every time he had to take the bus to go into the city. When he did, Clint used to say his father had “business” to do.

On those occasions, Mr Randolph would shower longer than usual – we knew because he could be heard singing ‘My Way’ all the way from there. ‘My Way’ was his shower song. When he was drunk he sang ‘Three Little Birds.’

Then he would dab Old Spice on his neck, run a comb through his slicked-down dark hair at least 1,000 times, put on his finely-ironed khakis and white cotton shirt, sit on the floor to tie the laces on a proud pair of shiny brown leather shoes, and get up to thread this very belt through a dozen loops.

He used to polish that belt. There was a shiny, silver buckle with his initials ‘RW’ engraved on it. He used Silvo on it. When he hit Clint with the belt, he sometimes used the buckle.

We once asked Clint to turn around, so we could see if the initials on the buckle remained as a reverse image on his thin, lotta-spotted skin. We never saw it. But there were scars. Lots of them. Sometimes, they oozed pus and blood

One day, during the hot, dry season, we heard Mr Randolph and Miss Greta arguing and using cusswords. Miss Greta only rarely used them. But this time she was using more of them than Mr Randolph.

There was the sound of cussing, furniture, pots, pans and a single loud ‘bang!’ Then silence.

Clint came running naked down the street. His head swinging wildly from side to side. Glasses hanging from one ear. Arms pumping as if in need of flight. Taut, dry lips framing a full row of stained teeth. His bare feet gripped the asphalt arrhythmically as he ran past us. He ran and he ran, and he ran. Coughing.

April 15, 2022