her legs.
'You're not one to worry, Lili,' he said. 'You're not afraid of the frogs, lizards, or snakes that could be hid-ing in this grass?'
'I am here with my husband,' she said. 'You are here to protect me if anything happens.'
Guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a lighter and a crumpled piece of paper. He lit the paper until it burned to an ashy film. The burning paper float-ed in the night breeze for a while, landing in fragments on the grass.
'Did you see that, Lili?' Guy asked with a flame in his eyes brighter than the lighter s. 'Did you see how the paper floated when it was burned? This is how that balloon flies.'
'What did you mean by saying that you could make it fly?' Lili asked.
'You already know all my secrets,' Guy said as the boy came charging towards them.
'Papa, could you play
Lili lay peacefully on the grass as her son and husband played hide-and-seek. Guy kept hiding and his son kept finding him as each time Guy made it easier for the boy.
'We rest now.' Guy was becoming breathless.
The stars were circling the peaks of the mountains, dipping into the cane fields belonging to the sugar mill. As Guy caught his breath, the boy raced around the fence, running as fast as he could to purposely make himself dizzy.
'Listen to what happened today,' Guy whispered softly in Lili's ear.
'I heard you say that when you walked in the house tonight,' Lili said. 'With the boy's play, I forgot to ask you.'
The boy sneaked up behind them, his face lit up, though his brain was spinning. He wrapped his arms around both their necks.
'We will go back home soon,' Lili said.
'Can I recite my lines?' asked the boy.
'We have heard them,' Guy said. 'Don't tire your lips.'
The boy mumbled something under his breath. Guy grabbed his ear and twirled it until it was a tiny ball in his hand. The boy's face contorted with agony as Guy made him kneel in the deep grass in punishment.
Lili looked tortured as she watched the boy squirming in the grass, obviously terrified of the crickets, lizards, and small snakes that might be there.
'Perhaps we should take him home to bed,' she said.
'He will never learn,' Guy said, 'if I say one thing and you say another.'
Guy got up and angrily started walking home. Lili walked over, took her son's hand, and raised him from his knees.
'You know you must not mumble,' she said.
'I was saying my lines,' the boy said.
'Next time say them loud,' Lili said, 'so he knows what is coming out of your mouth.'
That night Lili could hear her son muttering his lines as he tucked himself in his corner of the room and drifted off to sleep. The boy still had the book with his monologue in it clasped under his arm as he slept.
Guy stayed outside in front of the shack as Lili undressed for bed. She loosened the ribbon that held the old light blue cotton skirt around her waist and let it drop past her knees. She grabbed half a lemon that she kept in the corner by the folded mat that she and Guy unrolled to sleep on every night. Lili let her blouse drop to the floor as she smoothed the lemon over her ashen legs.
Guy came in just at that moment and saw her bare chest by the light of the smaller castor oil lamp that they used for the later hours of the night. Her skin had coarsened a bit over the years, he thought. Her breasts now drooped from having nursed their son for two years after he was born. It was now easier for him to imagine their son's lips around those breasts than to imagine his anywhere near them.
He turned his face away as she fumbled for her night-gown. He helped her open the mat, tucking the blanket edges underneath.
Fully clothed, Guy dropped onto the mat next to her. He laid his head on her chest, rubbing the spiky edges of his hair against her nipples.
'What was it that happened today?' Lili asked, running her fingers along Guy's hairline, an angular hair-line, almost like a triangle, in the middle of his forehead. She nearly didn't marry him because it was said that people with angular hairlines often have very troubled lives.
'I got a few hours' work for tomorrow at the sugar mill,' Guy said. 'That's what happened today.'
'It was such a long time coming,' Lili said.
It was almost six months since the last time Guy had gotten work there. The jobs at the sugar mill were few and far between. The people who had them never left, or when they did they would pass the job on to another family member who was already waiting on line.
Guy did not seem overjoyed about the one day's work.
'I wish I had paid more attention when you came in with the news,' Lili said. 'I was just so happy about the boy.'
'I was born in the shadow of that sugar mill,' Guy said. 'Probably the first thing my mother gave me to drink as a baby was some sweet water tea from the pulp of the sugarcane. If anyone deserves to work there, I should.'
'What will you be doing for your day's work?'
'Would you really like to know?'
'There is never any shame in honest work,' she said.
'They want me to scrub the latrines.'
'It's honest work,' Lili said, trying to console him.
'I am still number seventy-eight on the permanent hire list,' he said. 'I was thinking of putting the boy on the list now, so maybe by the time he becomes a man he can be up for a job.'
Lili's body jerked forward, rising straight up in the air. Guy's head dropped with a loud thump onto the mat.
'I don't want him on that list,' she said. 'For a young boy to be on any list like that might influence his destiny. I don't want him on the list.'
'Look at me,' Guy said. 'If my father had worked there, if he had me on the list, don't you think I would be working?'
'If you have any regard for me,' she said, 'you will not put him on the list.'
She groped for her husband's chest in the dark and laid her head on it. She could hear his heart beating loudly as though it were pumping double, triple its normal rate.
'You won't put the boy on any lists, will you?' she implored.
'Please, Lili, no more about the boy. He will not go on the list.'
'Thank you.'
'Tonight I was looking at that balloon in the yard behind the sugar mill,' he said. 'I have been watching it real close.'
'I know.'
'I have seen the man who owns it,' he said. 'I've seen him get in it and put it in the sky and go up there like it was some kind of kite and he was the kite master. I see the men who run after it trying to figure out where it will land. Once I was there and I was one of those men who were running and I actually guessed correctly. I picked a spot in the sugarcane fields. I picked the spot from a distance and it actually landed there.'
'Let me say something to you, Guy-
'Pretend that this is the time of miracles and we believed in them. I watched the owner for a long time, and I think I can fly that balloon. The first time I saw him do it, it looked like a miracle, but the more and more I saw it, the more ordinary it became.'
'You're probably intelligent enough to do it,' she said.
'I am intelligent enough to do it. You're right to say that I can.'
'Don't you think about hurting yourself?'
