Excerpt: Soucouyant

In the morning, I walk in on a young woman sitting with Mother at the kitchen table and reading a book. She has hair of wild bronze, frizzy mixed-girl hair barely kept in check by an elastic, and she is wearing the white two-pocketed shirt that Mother used to make me put on for special occasions. She has apparently set food in front of my mother, cornmeal porridge with sugar and vanilla essence beaten in. A pot of tea so strong that it seems to stain the cups and corrode the spoons. Seeing me, she stands abruptly, her hand darting involuntarily to a mark on her neck. For the shortest while, she reads my face and body before dropping her hand and sitting back down.

‘I’m her son,’ I say.

She picks up an eating spoon to offer some of the porridge to Mother, who purses her lips but otherwise doesn’t move her face. The book is now splayed cover up on the table. The Diatonic Mode in Modern Music, the title reads. The mark on her neck is red. A puzzle against the light brown of her skin, the sharpness of her collarbone. A birthmark most likely.

‘Are you a nurse?’ I ask. ‘I’m just visiting. I won’t get in your way.’

‘How considerate of you,’ she replies.

And then ignores me, though her eyes look like they’re thinking far beyond her continued attempts to feed Mother. I nod and leave quietly, spending most of the morning and afternoon in my room and staying clear.

In the evening, I’m alone in the sitting room when I hear from above the sounds of a faucet squeaking open and the deepening rush of water in the bathroom tub. I hear two voices and muffled splashes, then the young woman singing and Mother joining in without hesitation or flaw. I want to hear more of this singing and to know how Mother can manage to carry any song at all in her condition. I wait for the bath noises to stop and the drain to stop sucking, but I walk upstairs and into Mother’s room before it’s at all safe to do so. Mother is topless and facing me, and the young woman is standing behind her, giving her a massage. Mother’s eyes are closed and she is still humming, her voice grating as the young woman kneads into the flesh hidden from my sight. The glossy wrinkles on Mother’s upper shoulders and neck, the portents of her body’s true damage. There’s an oily thickness in the air and on my tongue, and the nakedness and intimacy humiliates me somehow. I turn to leave but not before the young woman catches my discomfort and smiles wickedly.

I hear it that night. unmistakable this time, the young woman in the attic above. The creak of her movements.

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Excerpted from Soucouyant by David Chariandy. Copyright 2007 by David Chariandy. Excerpted with permission from Arsenal Pulp Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.