Jaguar Read Free

bending over, even for ritual, was impossible, so they let Afriqua Lee come to the streamside early. The baby was due tonight, with the moon.
    “Prikasha,” her mother said. “Bad luck. Prikasha and mirame.”
    Her mother let her scrub clothes across the face of her favorite flat rock, a white one. Beside her, draped across the bank, a man’s shirt, pants and socks dried in the unforgiving sun. They had belonged to her father. Something had happened to him to make the whole kumpania sad, and her mother said he was gone to the highlands forever.
    Afriqua Lee pushed her thick black hair out of her eyes and wished that she’d tied it back like Old Cristina had told her.
    “Mama? What’s ‘mirame?’“
    “Unclean. The way that blonde gaji stepped over the shadow of your uncle in the city.”
    Her mother pulled out her blouse and spat on one of her breasts when she said, “gaji.” This was her greatest display of disgust.
    “That outsider woman will be bad luck for your uncle, for the familiyi, for the kumpania and probably even bad luck for the gaji. Bah. A woman should know better than to lift her skirts over a man.”
    Again she spat, this time into the stream. Afriqua Lee shook out one of her mother’s red and blue dresses, the one with the quetzal birds in the hem, and handed it back to her. A few big splatters of rain battered the leaves, then quit. Then their little stream moved.
    Afriqua Lee pushed out her hands to catch her balance and fell face-first into the shallows. Her wrist hurt but she had to push her face out of the water that slammed up her nose and gagged her.
    She tried to stand and fell again, this time across the white rock of the streambed, which was empty of its stream, and crumbling. She heard her mother’s heavy grunt as she hit the rocks beside her.
    In that instant the streambed beneath them ripped open lengthwise, and Afriqua Lee hung on to keep from falling through. The smooth wet rocks slid out of her grip and the sides caved in towards her faster than she could scramble out.
    “Mama!”
    She slipped halfway over the lip of the ravine and stopped in a heartbeat. When she looked down, she didn’t see more rock and mud. When she looked down, she saw a face.
    Looking back at her in the sudden silence was a dark-haired, brown-eyed girl. Behind the girl, spread out in white trays, lay a feast of meats and greens.
    “Afriqua Lee!”
    Someone grabbed her wrist and pulled her back over the lip of the terrible hole.
    “Afriqua Lee!”
    Old Cristina, had her wrist and yanked her to safety, away from the brown-eyed girl and the incredible feast at the bottom of the world.
    “Your mother . . . ,” Cristina gasped, “she’s hurt. Are you all right, girl?”
    “Yes, Romni. . . .”
    Afriqua Lee saw her mother across the rip in the earth’s hide, across what used to be the creek bed that had torn apart clear to the skirt of the sky.
    She remembered thinking that none of this could be so.
    Mama!
    A scream snapped Afriqua Lee back to the present. Her mother screamed again, and it ended in the kind of frightened cry she’d never heard in a grownup before.
    Her mother’s left arm twisted around behind her, the elbow bent backwards. Something pink, like a piece of kindling, poked through a bloody slit. She lay on her back, half covered with wet stones. Her belly rose and fell quickly, and convulsed even after she coughed.
    “Holy Martyr,” Cristina whispered, and made the sign of the noose behind her back with her thumb and forefinger. That was when Afriqua Lee became afraid. Old Cristina didn’t swear lightly, and the girl had never seen her making the sign of the noose. That was something for the other old women, the ignorant ones, or for the men who blamed luck for what Cristina called lazy bones.
    “Jump to your mother and turn her on her side,” the old woman said. “I’ll get help. We don’t want her stuck there if the water comes back.”
    Afriqua Lee closed her eyes, breathed