How to Escape From a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique Read Free Book Online

symbol. She didn’t know that when you don’t eat or drink for a whole day you forget to be hungry. That hunger doesn’t matter. Only thirst. It rained the morning of the second day; this is the Caribbean after all. She tilted her head back and kept walking. The worn makeup streaking down her face, then off her face completely. She realized, once the rain had stopped, that her face hadn’t been so clean since she was seven years old.
    A full day on the Bridge. Not on the land, not in the sky, not in the water. She saw the sun set and then rise on this limbo life. Between the night of the second day and the morning of the third she could see the other side of the bridge. The land of the other island just there past the length of her tongue. The thirst for it like, I don’t know, like mother love. Scratching at the back of her throat. There was a black sack figure crossing the bridge too. There were two figures in a boat just below. It was late, dark. The moon was high and crescented. She wanted to be on top of that moon. She wanted it at her feet—like a boat to get her across anything. She was such a frigging drama queen. She couldn’t know what she had in common with these three figures. But she felt she had to choose one set or the other. The weight of her absent crown solid on her head. She knew that if Juan Diego was with her he would hold her up with his two hands like the angel he was until she became something holy, something to make these lands pure and able. His Guadeloupe.
    Anyway. She walked toward the figure on the bridge, but the black-sack woman actually seemed to move farther away, climbing the railing away from her. Perhaps Guadeloupe looked a little off, mad you know, a beauty queen in sneakers, hair looking like crap because of the rain and the ragged days of walking. Guadeloupe looked down where the woman was looking and saw the moon below, at her feet. Saw the little brown boy in the boat stand up to hold her. She felt the tingle of the glow. The halo covered her entire body. Not like a tiara; not even like a crown they gave the boys who won for Mister this or King that. The halo coming from her very bones and protecting her. She was pure. She could save lands. She was the most pure and the most good. A human bridge.
    The other woman on the bridge looked now like a huge black crane steadying itself for flight. Guadeloupe, this mixed-up girl who was just getting to know herself, watched on in her new state of grace, and the lovely crane leapt into the air, with its wings wide and open to the wind. Guadeloupe pressed her hands together so gently that her pinkies crossed and missed each other—she felt something glorious come from her and go out into the world. And, I kid you not, that was when the miracle of miracles happened. The bridge began to crumble. She was not afraid as the air opened and took her in.

STREET MAN

    Let me tell you how I meet this sweet thing. It’s Christmas time so the place fill up with people from the ships and the resorts. She walk into the Sun Shack like she one of them tourist. She even talk all Yankee. I don’t really bother with she because I don’t want to be all Stella get her groove. I let the white lady help she. But Yolanda walk over to me on her own and then her voice change up and she sound like any island girl all the sudden. She want to know about the Maui Jims behind me, so I take them out for her and tell her she look sweet when they on her face. She don’t buy a piece of shades but she leave me her number and I don’t even self pretend to not watch her ass as she leave.
    For two weeks we spend some big amount of time together every day. Sometimes I just drive my four-runner to her house on my lunch break and park in the middle of the street. I tell her jokes about the red-faced tourists who come into the shop—how the women does tell me my accent don’t even sound like English, but some exotic native language. How the man them does lean in and ask me