The pang of hunger is bitter, sharp, hot – familiar even. I don’t sleep. My feet and right hip ache from carrying the child up and down the sidewalks of this unforgiving city – this city that was supposed to take me within its bosom, cradle and rear me until I became its fully grown citizen. Imelba from down the hall has showed me her claim to this place – a card bearing a melancholy photograph of her, her name and some random numbers. It is the word PERMANENT that I notice most.
There is no need for the Creole translation of the English word I’ve spent my whole life running from. Taking with me what little I have to this village and that valley in my native country. Escaping the sleepless ones, the curious ones, the accusatory ones whose only evidence was the dawning sun and crowing rooster greeting their lifeless infant. In rural Haiti where hospitals are like the mountains beyond the mountains, and herbalists are a mix of scientific superstition, my sudden relocation from wherever I came to such a remote and…show more content… That would only remind me of the months I spent on one of the bateyes, a cane field and sugar factory town in the Dominican Republic. It was not the promise of work in the more stable country that enticed me, but the many new cursed souls born to bodies with hungry mouths and weary, overworked mothers and bandit fathers who shirk blame like thieves in a crowded Port-au-Prince outdoor market. In the batey, death of an infant is a guilt-laden reprieve. With my smooth Spanish words rolling off my tongue, I would not want Imelba to know that the batey had not sufficed and with my aversion to permanence, I made my way to the wealthy parts of Santo Domingo and Santiago to satiate my hunger with the more European stock of new souls. I didn’t know then that with each soul gone missing in the night, one innocuous Haitian immigrant woman paid the heavy
