Krik? Krak!

'A man is judged by his deeds,' she said. 'The boy never goes to bed hungry. For as long as he's been with us, he's always been fed.'

Just as if he had heard himself mentioned, the boy came dashing from the other side of the field, crashing in a heap on top of his parents.

'My new lines,' he said. 'I have forgotten my new lines.'

'Is this how you will be the day of this play, son?' Guy asked. 'When people give you big responsibilities, you have to try to live up to them.'

The boy had relearned his new lines by the time they went to bed.

That night, Guy watched his wife very closely as she undressed for bed.

'I would like to be the one to rub that piece of lemon on your knees tonight,' he said.

She handed him the half lemon, then raised her skirt above her knees.

Her body began to tremble as he rubbed his fingers over her skin.

'You know that question I asked you before,' he said, 'how a man is remembered after he's gone? I know the answer now. I know because I remember my father, who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man that I would never want to be.'

Lili got up with the break of dawn the next day. The light came up quickly above the trees. Lili greeted some of the market women as they walked together to the public water fountain.

On her way back, the sun had already melted a few gray clouds. She found the boy standing alone in the yard with a terrified expression on his face, the old withered mushrooms uprooted at his feet. He ran up to meet her, nearly knocking her off balance.

'What happened?' she asked. 'Have you forgotten your lines?'

The boy was breathing so heavily that his lips could not form a single word.

'What is it?' Lili asked, almost shaking him with anxiety.

'It's Papa,' he said finally, raising a stiff finger in the air.

The boy covered his face as his mother looked up at the sky. A rainbow-colored balloon was floating aimlessly above their heads.

'It's Papa,' the boy said. 'He is in it.'

She wanted to look down at her son and tell him that it wasn't his father, but she immediately recognized the spindly arms, in a bright flowered shirt that she had made, gripping the cables.

From the field behind the sugar mill a group of workers were watching the balloon floating iii the air. Many were clapping and cheering, calling out Guy's name. A few of the women were waving their head rags at the sky, shouting, 'Go! Beautiful, go!'

Lili edged her way to the front of the crowd. Every-one was waiting, watching the balloon drift higher up into the clouds.

'He seems to be right over our heads,' said the factory foreman, a short slender mulatto with large buckteeth.

Just then, Lili noticed young Assad, his thick black hair sticking to the beads of sweat on his forehead. His face had the crumpled expression of disrupted sleep.

'He's further away than he seems,' said young Assad. 'I still don't understand. How did he get up there? You need a whole crew to fly these things.'

'I don't know,' the foreman said. 'One of my work-ers just came in saying there was a man flying above the factory.'

'But how the hell did he start it?' Young Assad was perplexed.

'He just did it,' the foreman said.

'Look, he's trying to get out!' someone hollered.

A chorus of screams broke out among the workers.

The boy was looking up, trying to see if his father was really trying to jump out of the balloon. Guy was climbing over the side of the basket. Lili pressed her son's face into her skirt.

Within seconds, Guy was in the air hurtling down towards the crowd. Lili held her breath as she watched him fall. He crashed not far from where Lili and the boy were standing, his blood immediately soaking the landing spot.

The balloon kept floating free, drifting on its way to brighter shores. Young Assad rushed towards the body. He dropped to his knees and checked the wrist for a pulse, then dropped the arm back to the ground.

'It's over!' The foreman ordered the workers back to work.

Lili tried to keep her son's head pressed against her skirt as she moved closer to the body. The boy yanked himself away and raced to the edge of the field where his father's body was lying on the grass. He reached the body as young Assad still knelt examining the corpse. Lili rushed after him.

'He is mine,' she said to young Assad. 'He is my family. He belongs to me.'

Young Assad got up and raised his head to search the sky for his aimless balloon, trying to guess where it would land. He took one last glance at Guy's bloody corpse, then raced to his car and sped away.

The foreman and another worker carried a cot and blanket from the factory.

Little Guy was breathing quickly as he looked at his father's body on the ground. While the foreman draped a sheet over Guy's corpse, his son began to recite the lines from his play.

'A wall of fire is rising and in the ashes, I see the bones of my people. Not only those people whose dark hollow faces I see daily in the fields, but all those souls who have gone ahead to haunt my dreams. At night I relive once more the last caress-es from the hand of a loving father, a valiant love, a beloved friend.'

'Let me look at him one last time,' Lili said, pulling back the sheet.

She leaned in very close to get a better look at Guy's face. There was little left of that countenance that she had loved so much. Those lips that curled when he was teasing her. That large flat nose that felt like a feather when rubbed against hers. And those eyes, those night-colored eyes. Though clouded with blood, Guy's eyes were still bulging open. Lili was searching for some kind of sign-a blink, a smile, a wink-something that would remind her of the man that she had married.

'His eyes aren't closed,' the foreman said to Lili. 'Do you want to close them, or should I?'

The boy continued reciting his lines, his voice rising to a man's grieving roar. He kept his eyes closed, his fists balled at his side as he continued with his new-est lines.

'There is so much sadness in the faces of my people. I have called on their gods, now I call on our gods. I call on our young. I call on our old. I call on our mighty and the weak. I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die.'

'Do you want to close the eyes?' the foreman repeat-ed impatiently?

'No, leave them open,' Lili said. 'My husband, he likes to look at the sky.'

night women

I cringe from the heat of the night on my face. I feel as bare as open flesh. Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years that I have lived. The night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend on it.

Shadows shrink and spread over the lace curtain as my son slips into bed. I watch as he stretches from a little boy into the broom-size of a man, his height mounting the innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds.

For a brief second, I almost mistake him for the ghost of his father, an old lover who disappeared with the night's shadows a long time ago. My son's bed stays nestled against the corner, far from the peeking jalousies. I watch as he digs furrows in the pillow with his head. He shifts his small body carefully so as not to crease his Sun- day clothes. He wraps my long blood-red scarf around his neck, the one I wear myself during the day to tempt my