Jaguar Read Free Page A

hard a couple of times, and made the jump. She cradled her mother’s head in her arms. Her mother breathed very fast, and though she was dark-skinned, like Afriqua Lee, her lips seemed unnaturally pale. Afriqua Lee got her hands under her mother’s shoulders to turn her, and her mother cried out in pain. Blood crept out the crevasses of the streambed beneath her feet.
    “They’re coming,” she told her mother. “Romni Cristina is getting help from the men.”
    Getting help from the men.
    To ask help of a man was to incur a debt to a man, and no woman of the Roam would allow such a thing, this the girl well knew.
    Poor Mama , she thought, she must be hurt so bad . . . .
    She stroked her mother’s hair back from her forehead and her hand came back bloody. She had nowhere else to wipe her hand so she used her skirt. Shouts now from the camp, and cries of pain from there, too. She glanced up, towards the camp, and saw the first of the wings hatch out of the old streambed.
    Each creature crawled to a rock, stretched out its set of long, delicate wings and walked in a circle until it dried. Then they all rattled skyward and settled into the bushes and trees. By the time the wide-eyed men arrived to carry her mother back to camp, Afriqua Lee could see very little green in the trees. The whole landscape was a seethe of bronze. Though the bugs didn’t attack her, something about the sound that the mass of them made frightened her more than the earthquake and the rip in the earth.
    The wide-eyed men swatted the bugs and cursed them. Hundreds of bugs died under their feet by the time they made the trek from streambed to camp. The camp, too, swarmed with bugs. People struggled to right their tipped vans or their collapsed trailers. Martin had been building the stake-down bonfire and fell into it. Hysteria in the camp already shifted its focus to the bugs.
    “The Romni Bari’s tent,” one of the men carrying her mother grunted. “The women can care for her there.”
    None of them had spoken after seeing her mother, and Afriqua knew this was a very bad sign. Old Cristina held open the door herself, and brushed everyone who entered with cedar branches. The bugs grabbed onto the branches and Afriqua Lee saw them eat the greenery as fast as their strange mouths could work.
    Like every mobile residence of the Roam, the old woman’s van was called a tent. Cristina’s was the biggest van, fitted with the glittery electronics that was testimony to her people’s genius, guardian of their wanderings through these dangerous times.
    A dozen guests could sleep comfortably in the Romni Bari’s tent, though these days it was home to only three—Cristina, Delphi and her daughter, Afriqua Lee. Only the single men of the Roam still slept in real tents, like the old days, and this only if they were still unmarried at eighteen.
    “Show Martita the coffee-maker, girl,” Old Cristina said, and closed off the bedroom where they had taken her mother.
    “The women will care for your mama,” little Martita said. “You and I must make coffee and pray.”
    Martita, at forty, stood only a head taller than Afriqua Lee, and the girl, like others of the Roam, thought of her as a child, or as a doll that walked and talked. She pulled a step-stool up to the counter as the men clumped to the door.
    “Jaguar priests aren’t curse enough,” one of them grumbled.
    “Now we have these damned bugs. City supplies will be wiped out, they won’t have nothing to trade us. . . .”
    “Maybe we can start a burn, between the stream and the bluff. . . .”
    “Look,” said another, “Rachel’s goats eat them. . . .”
    But it wasn’t true. The goats only ate the brittle wings. They left the bug bodies writhing to death on the ground. The five goats, pets of the crazy woman, jumped and frisked around the camp, trying to shake off the crawly things.
    Her mother shrieked from behind the door, then shrieked again, weaker. Little Martita guided Afriqua Lee