'Think like this. Can't you see yourself up there? Up in the clouds somewhere like some kind of bird?'
'If God wanted people to fly, he would have given us wings on our backs.'
'You're right, Lili, you're right. But look what he gave us instead. He gave us reasons to want to fly. He gave us the air, the birds, our son.'
'I don't understand you,' she said.
'Our son, your son, you do not want him cleaning latrines.'
'He can do other things.'
'Me too. I can do other things too.'
A loud scream came from the corner where the boy was sleeping. Lili and Guy rushed to him and tried to wake him. The boy was trembling when he opened his eyes.
'What is the matter?' Guy asked.
'I cannot remember my lines,' the boy said.
Lili tried to string together what she could remember of her son's lines. The words slowly came back to the boy. By the time he fell back to sleep, it was almost dawn.
The light was slowly coming up behind the trees. Lili could hear the whispers of the market women, their hisses and swearing as their sandals dug into the sharp-edged rocks on the road.
She turned her back to her husband as she slipped out of her nightgown, quickly putting on her day clothes.
'Imagine this,' Guy said from the mat on the floor. 'I have never really seen your entire body in broad daylight.'
Lili shut the door behind her, making her way out to the yard. The empty gasoline containers rested easily on her head as she walked a few miles to the public water fountains. It was harder to keep them steady when the containers were full. The water splashed all over her blouse and rippled down her back.
The sky was blue as it was most mornings, a dark indigo-shaded turquoise that would get lighter when the sun was fully risen.
Guy and the boy were standing in the yard waiting for her when she got back.
'You did not get much sleep, my handsome boy,' she said, running her wet fingers over the boy's face.
'He'll be late for school if we do not go right now,' Guy said. 'I want to drop him off before I start work.'
'Do we remember our lines this morning?' Lili asked, tucking the boy's shirt down deep into his short pants.
'We just recited them,' Guy said. 'Even I know them now.'
Lili watched them walk down the footpath, her eyes following them until they disappeared.
As soon as they were out of sight, she poured the water she had fetched into a large calabash, letting it stand beside the house.
She went back into the room and slipped into a dry blouse. It was never too early to start looking around, to scrape together that night's meal.
'Listen to what happened again today,' Lili said when Guy walked through the door that afternoon.
Guy blotted his face with a dust rag as he prepared to hear the news. After the day he'd had at the factory, he wanted to sit under a tree and have a leisurely smoke, but he did not want to set a bad example for his son by indulging his very small pleasures.
'You tell him, son,' Lili urged the boy, who was quietly sitting in a corner, reading.
'I've got more lines,' the boy announced, springing up to his feet. 'Papy, do you want to hear them?'
'They are giving him more things to say in the play,' Lili explained, 'because he did such a good job memorizing so fast.'
'My compliments, son. Do you have your new lines memorized too?' Guy asked.
'Why don't you recite your new lines for your father?' Lili said.
The boy walked to the middle of the room and prepared to recite. He cleared his throat, raising his eyes towards the ceiling.
'I see your new lines have as much drama as the old ones,' Guy said. He wiped a tear away, walked over to the chair, and took the boy in his arms. He pressed the boy's body against his chest before lowering him to the ground.
'Your new lines are wonderful, son. They're every bit as affecting as the old.' He tapped the boy's shoulder and walked out of the house.
'What's the matter with Papy?' the boy asked as the door slammed shut behind Guy.
'His heart hurts,' Lili said.
After supper, Lili took her son to the field where she knew her husband would be. While the boy ran around, she found her husband sitting in his favorite spot behind the sugar mill.
'Nothing, Lili,' he said. 'Ask me nothing about this day that I have had.'
She sat down on the grass next to him, for once feeling the sharp edges of the grass blades against her ankles.
'You're really good with that boy,' he said, drawing circles with his smallest finger on her elbow. 'You will make a performer of him. I know you will. You can see the best in that whole situation. It's because you have those stars in your eyes. That's the first thing I noticed about you when I met you. It was your eyes, Lili, so dark and deep. They drew me like danger draws a fool.'
He turned over on the grass so that he was staring directly at the moon up in the sky. She could tell that he was also watching the hot-air balloon behind the sugar mill fence out of the corner of his eye.
'Sometimes I know you want to believe in me,' he said. 'I know you're wishing things for me. You want me to work at the mill. You want me to get a pretty house for us. I know you want these things too, but mostly you want me to feel like a man. That's why you're not one to worry about, Lili. I know you can take things as they come.'
'I don't like it when you talk this way,' she said.
'Listen to this, Lili. I want to tell you a secret. Some-times, I just want to take that big balloon and ride it up in the air. I'd like to sail off somewhere and keep floating until I got to a really nice place with a nice plot of land where I could be something new. I'd build my own house, keep my own garden. Just
'I want you to stay away from there.'
'I know you don't think I should take it. That can't keep me from wanting.'
'You could be injured. Do you ever think about that?'
'Don't you ever want to be something new?'
'I don't like it,' she said.
'Please don't get angry with me,' he said, his voice straining almost like the boy's.
'If you were to take that balloon and fly away, would you take me and the boy?'
'First you don't want me to take it and now you want to go?'
'I just want to know that when you dream, me and the boy, we're always in your dreams.'
He leaned his head on her shoulders and drifted off to sleep. Her back ached as she sat there with his face pressed against her collar bone. He drooled and the saliva dripped down to her breasts, soaking her frayed polyester bra. She listened to the crickets while watching her son play, muttering his lines to himself as he went in a circle around the field. The moon was glowing above their heads. Winking at them, as Guy liked to say, on its way to brighter shores.
Opening his eyes, Guy asked her, 'How do you think a man is judged after he's gone?
How did he expect her to answer something like that?
'People don't eat riches,' she said. 'They eat what it can buy.'
'What does that mean, Lili? Don't talk to me in parables. Talk to me honestly.'
