The Girl With the Golden Shoes by Colin Channer Read Free Book Online Page B

which at certain points would form a roof of shade.
    Later, after she’d noticed that the goats were coming down the mountain in a heavy stream—groups of ten and twelve—she came upon a clump of leaning huts. To her mind they were the poorest homes she’d ever seen. They were made of cracked, ill-fitting timbers that had not been planed, and between some of the timbers there were spaces large enough to slip a hand.
    The shaggy huts were built on stilts to keep them level. With their brown walls and dry roofs they looked like herds of animals reduced to skin and bone by drought. In their shadows lingered clouds of little children, their heads as round and dark as lice.
    As she looked, an old negrita standing in the shadow of a doorway wiped her hands against her dress, which was a flour sack, and asked her with a mouth that had collapsed against its gums, “You hungry, sweetheart? You want a little something?”
    And in a moment of illumination, Estrella knew that these were not the poorest homes she’d ever seen. Her people in the cove had homes like these.
    Looking at the dirt she hadn’t dusted from her clothes, her hands entangled in her fraying hair, feeling dust transforming into mud along her sweaty feet and shins, glancing as she passed the old negrita, Estrella held her basket and began to run again, her breathing dry and cracked with effort, like someone waking from nightmarish dreams.
    She was at a height now where the intermittent grunts and groans of vehicles on the main cross-island road began to filter through the net of soft translucent sounds that caught and held the chirrups of the woods.
    Her feet were budding with the early pain of blisters, whispered pangs that felt as if her soles were giving birth to cleats. Although the pain had not emerged completely, she began to hobble, balanced on the outer lines that marked the point at which her soles were fused against the uppers of her leather-colored feet.
    Eventually, Estrella came upon a bridge. It was old and white, with small columns at each end and parapets of stone. On approaching it, she saw a path that led into a bamboo grove and heard the sizzle of a stream. After taking minutes to decide, she headed down the path and inched her way toward the water, holding onto creaking stems to keep herself from falling, watching out for razor-pointed stumps.
    It was a narrow stream, thirty yards across, and she came out of the thick, steep-sided forest onto rugged grass that grew along the wide embankment.
    She sat against the edge of the embankment with her feet above the flow, and lay back in the furry hotness of the grass, the sun pressing on her like a boy who’d waited long for them to be alone.
    When she’d rested for a while, she stripped and lay there thinking, her body smooth as wood without the bark, then slipped into the olive stream.
    She cavorted with amphibian ease, turned on her back and stroked like a frog with her forceful legs, then twisted sharply in a shallow dive, head down, toes long, strong arms by her side, tadpoling over stones and grass along the muddy bed.
    In the middle of the stream there was a scattered line of oval rocks that had been sanded by erosion to an eggy whiteness, and she played at leaping on their warm, protruding tops although the landing sometimes stung her feet.
    After she’d played, she used a hunk of soap to wash her purple dress and underwear and laid them on the grass, then swam against the current to the point at which the river swung beneath an arch of overhanging trees and fell in baby steps.
    She sat against the broad, flat stone that she’d felt for with her hands beneath the flow, braced her feet against two upright ones, and let the falling water pound her neck and back. Although the stream was moving slowly and the drop was from a shallow height, the water had the power of a solid force, and as it hammered her, she felt old fears dispersing and the hairs that formed her brows untwining from their