Iron Balloons (29 page)
Authors: Colin Channer
But he knows it is she. Years later, beyond forty, beyond fifty. He has lived to see her and he recognizes her.
He catches her eyes. They brighten. He waves and lifts the bag up to her. The brown bag weighted with his offering.
The last fifty yards fill his head with the pounding of blood, the wheeze of his chest, the grunt of each effort to move, to reach her.
He feels love seeing her there, feels tenderness for the woman who smiles at him. When she speaks, the rich earthiness of piedmont soil falls from her lips. Her voice carries him to swamps that seem to belong to another country—somewhere hot and dense, somewhere gummy with its humidity. The trees there are alien things, grotesque, bearded, dark green trees that give off smells as intoxicating as liquor.
He lays the bag in her lap, and she opens it while looking at him.
“Are you taking medication?” she asks, or seems to ask, but it is like wind. The voice does not stay long. It leaves her face, and her mouth does not move. She is smiling a simple closed-lip smile as the voice fades.
“You sure you alright?” the voice says.
He can see a tangerine-colored face looking back at him, but that too fades. Then it is Melanie sitting there patiently, her stomach distended, her dark mahogany arms roped with muscles, her hair dangling in long tight braids down her face, and her eyes glowing with recognition—those black eyes, those deep black eyes.
She bends over the bag and opens it slowly. Her hand reaches in and extracts the damp balls of rolled tamarind flesh spotted with the sparkle of brown sugar. She nibbles the fruit with her lips and holds her body as the flare shivers through her. She holds the sticky fruit out to him and he bites into the gummy flesh, the crunch of sugar against his teeth.
The music keeps coming back to him through the haze. What he wants is the woman who has left him. And maybe this is what love means: the capacity to imagine love far into the future. An impossible place where the paths are not charted and are cluttered with prickly bramble.
“It is my birthday,” he says to her.
“How old are you, baby?” she asks.
“Forty,” he says.
“Forty? But you died at thirty-six.” She is sucking the tamarind balls.
“No, I didn’t,” he says. “I …”
He cannot speak anymore. The music fills the room and then suddenly stops.
He wakes to hear the tape player clicking. The tape has stuck. He is forty. He is not thirty-six.
He reaches to touch her. She is not there. She has gone.
He sits up and stares at the walls—the newspapers. He feels the dust under his feet. He is not dead. He is forty. It occurs to him that were he to stand, were he to walk to the door, were he to step into the streets, were he to travel the miles, he would come to this swampland and find something like love. And he will find a new name, and perhaps he will work out another dream, another legend of love. It comes to him quietly like a memory.
He stands.
The room spins slowly. He takes a step forward and feels the lurching of his insides. The tape clicks on, the sound growing louder until it fills the room with its echoing.
A
LWIN
B
ULLY
began writing poetry, plays, and short stories in his homeland of Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean. He is a graphic artist, set and costume designer, theater director, and composer. A graduate of the University of the West Indies, he now lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he manages the UNESCO regional program for culture. He is a student in the Calabash Writer’s Workshop.
C
OLIN
C
HANNER
is an assistant professor of English and the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of two novels, a novella, and a collection of stories. His first novel,
Waiting in Vain
(One World/Ballantine), was selected as a 1998 Critic’s Choice by the
Washington Post Book World.
His most recent work is the story collection
Passing Through
(One World/Ballantine, 2004), which Junot Díaz described as “a splendid collection by one of the Caribbean Diaspora’s finest writers.” Channer is the Houston International Festival’s first Artistic Director for Literature and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literacy Festival Trust. For more info visit
colinchanner.com
.
K
WAME
D
AWES
is an award-winning Ghanian-born Jamaican author of twenty books of poetry, plays, nonfiction, and fiction. He teaches at the University of South Carolina, where he is Distinguished Poet in Residence and Director of both the USC Arts Institute and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Dawes is the programmer for the Calabash International Literary Festival.
M
ARLON
J
AMES
was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. He graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1991 with a degree in Literature. His debut novel,
John Crow’s Devil,
was an Editor’s Choice in the
New York Times Book Review
and a finalist for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize. He lives in Kingston.
K
AYLIE
J
ONES
was born in Paris, France. She is the author of five novels, including
Speak Now, Celeste Ascending,
and
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
, which was released as a Merchant Ivory film in 1998. Jones has been a Writer in Residence in the New York City public schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She teaches at Wilkes University’s Masters Program in Professional Writing, and chairs the $10,000 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship. She has led Calabash Writer’s Workshops, and she read from her own work at the Calabash Literary Festival in 2004. Jones lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. “The Anger Meridian” is an excerpt from her next novel.
K
ONRAD
K
IRLEW
was born in the parish of Trelawny in Jamaica, and lived in the United States for twenty-five years. He now resides and practices radiology in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He was a student in the first Calabash Fiction Workshop.
S
HARON
L
EACH
was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where she lives and works as a columnist and freelance feature writer for the
Jamaica Observer
. She has been anthologized in
Kunapipi,
the
Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
the
Jamaica Journal,
and
Blue Latitudes: An Anthology of Caribbean Women Fiction Writers.
Her essays have also appeared in Air Jamaica’s
Skywritings
magazine and the
Caribbean Voice
newspaper. She was one of the first beneficiaries of a scholarship to the Calabash Writer’s Workshop in 2003.
E
LIZABETH
N
UNEZ
was born in Trinidad. She is the author of six novels, including
Prospero’s Daughter, Grace,
and
Bruised Hibiscus;
and is the coeditor, along with Jennifer Sparrow, of
Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad.
A former fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell writers’ colonies, and cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference, she is the Executive Producer of the PBS television series
Black Writers in America
. Ms. Nunez has led Calabash Writer’s Workshops, and she performed her own work at the Calabash Literary Festival in 2002.
G
EOFFREY
P
HILP
,
author of the novel,
Benjamin, My Son,
was born in Kingston, Jamaica and has worked with the Calabash Literary Festival since its inception conducting poetry workshops. His poems and short stories have appeared in
Small Axe, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories,
and
The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.
He lives in Miami, Florida.
A
-D
Z
IKO
S
IMBA
is an award-winning poet and short story writer whose work has appeared in a number of anthologies. Born in England to a Jamaican mother and Nigerian father, she has lived in the Caribbean since 1992 and currently resides in St. Mary, Jamaica. She was a student in the first Calabash Writer’s Workshop, and performed poetry at the Calabash Literary Festival in 2003.
R
UDOLPH
W
ALLACE
studied Economics at the University of the West Indies and earned an MBA from the University of Toronto. He has written for radio, television, and the Jamaican theater for over twenty-five years. His stories have won gold and silver medals in the annual Creative Writing Competition sponsored by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. He was awarded a scholarship to the Calabash Writer’s Workshop in 2002, and was a featured author at Calabash Literary Festival in 2004.