Written by Jamaican writer Summer Eldemire and originally published in PREE, “Category Six” takes its name from a storm that exceeds all known categories – a fitting metaphor for the love story at its center and the Island that shapes it. Told in a voice rich in vernacular rhythm, the story plays with contradiction and teeters between myth and memory, the divine and the mundane. What lingers is not just the scale of emotion, but the intimacy of its telling, and how love and loss spiral around each other under the pressure of a place where the veil to the other side is always thin.

– Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

A soft Bumbooooclaattttt slipped from Jah’s lips.

And so, the Island was born.

Jah had been painting the earth into existence all day, paintbrush in one hand, fat spliff in her lip corner. That night, the heat was more oppressive than a colonizer. So she turned up the Lasko Fan. Opened the window to catch the non-existent breeze. As she was putting the finishing touches on the Caribbean, a big dutty bush mosquito flew in the window. Hungry after an afternoon of love-making with his matey, he sank his fangs into Jah’s sweet little ankle.

The bite was so hot that Jah couldn’t hold in the bumboclaattt that slipped out of her mouth, the spliff tumbling from her lips with it. It landed on the Island, her favorite creation. For the splittest of seconds. But it was long enough. The burn mark left the veil to the other side thin.

The Island is a place where Jah’s whispers come through more strongly. It’s why Greatness flowed from the people of the Island like a buss pipe. Open our mouths to sing and out comes the truth. Put our feet to track and they grow wings. Meaning of life in our hips when we dance. Why we never became acquainted with second place. Why the whole world stopped what they were doing to watch us, picking their jaws up off the floor on the way out.

The Island seemed to forget that it is not easy for a human body to constantly be exposed to whispers of God. And here where the veil is thin it is turned up a few notches. Until it vibrates like a speaker at 3 am at a Nipples Tuesdays street dance. It is why we are all mad on the Island. Some more than others, but no one was untouched. Because no matter how you cover your ears, how far you run, how loud you turn the music, you cannot drown it out.

CATEGORY SIX

From the outside it made no sense how these two ended up together. Her: quiet, contained, shy. Him: loud, unruly, magnetic. But if you had seen how they found each other. How they grabbed out into the pitch black of a bush night and came up in each other’s arms. How perfectly they fit into the shapes of each other’s loneliness. You would see that they fit together like the last piece of a puzzle.

It was a summer in the ‘80s. Mummy was taking her exams at hospitality school in the big city, Daddy was on the south coast packing a container of ganja for the Florida Keys. She came home to Galtego Bay for the summer, needed a place to stay. Rented the back room of his mother’s house. She saw him sometimes, never said more than a hello. He would pull up in his sports car, hailing up every person in the complex and the one next door. Said he was like a category six hurricane every time he walked into a room. What she didn’t say was that she, a shy and sheltered girl, wanted to be hit by lightning.

Mummy wasn’t from a big name family, she came from the Island’s sliver of a middle class. Her parents managed a store downtown before her daddy drank it into the ground. She grew up in the bush, felt more comfortable with plants than people. Her older siblings were popular, forever en route to a function.  They knew she was different, that people thought she was strange. But she was their sister and they were protective. If she went along with them she was quiet, stuck to the shadows. It was easy to forget she was there. If you didn’t look closely you couldn’t see the fire inside her that blazed like bamboos during the dry season.

Daddy had a Last Name. His father was a Big Man in politics. First Minister of Industry, and briefly deputy prime minister when the former PM died in a mysterious boating accident. The Island had just gotten independence from the Motherland and it was collapsing. The only things booming were a civil war and the ganja trade. Daddy decided to forgo the family path and instead export thousands of pounds of marijuana to North America. His name was Abel, but they called him Ace.

The Island is a place where Jah’s voice slipped through easy easy. Both her blessings and her curses. The Island liked to talk to the Islanders. Some more than others.  Some days she would talk to them nice. The way the sweetness of rain on a zinc roof can caress an ear drum like fingers in panties. And some days she would vibrate at the exact pitch of a taxi man’s horn from morning until night until they felt to rip their heads off.

The Island spoke to Daddy, although he didn’t know what it was or who was speaking. He just knew that sometimes it felt like he had stuck his finger in an electric socket and couldn’t get it out. The Island talked to everyone in a different way. For Daddy the Island got inside him, overtook him, possessed him. Ran through him so strongly that the only thing he could do to make it shut up was to try and get as high as the energy that pulsed through him. It seemed to slip the Island’s mind that human bodies weren’t made to bear the constant whisperings of a God.

When the Island spoke, he sacrificed everything he could get his hands on to get it to stop. Poured white rum on it, snorted white powder into it, fed it women. He’d black out and wake up several days later the earth flattened, blackened, charred behind him thinking What have I done? But when the Island was quiet he would miss her. Would do anything to get her talking again. Sacrifice women, powder, rum. Wait for the whispers to begin.

He’d been doing good the year before he met Mummy. Started meetings, started praying. Tried to sit still when the Island started talking, tried not to miss her when she stopped. Put his demons in a straitjacket. Thought maybe they’d become accustomed to their new outfits. The Island laughed.

A couple weeks into the summer, Mummy saw him on the side of the road, trying to hitch a ride. Standing by the stop light next to the police station near the big mango tree. Didn’t occur to her that he’d just come out of the station, his bribe payments as routine as death and taxes.

He was going to the yacht club. She was coming back from the supermarket, bags filled with the exact same items she bought each week, to be prepared in the exact same way, consumed at the exact same time. She liked order, schedule. Her daddy had been his own kind of storm, a lingering tropical depression. He’d roll into the house, eyes filled with self-pity, smelling of white rum and other women. So, she hated chaos. Kept her life simple. Clean and organized to protect from it.

When Mummy was born, the Island had taken a layer of her skin. Peeling it off her like the papery outer layer of a garlic head. That’s why she was so sensitive, could hear the plants as they talked, the ocean as it whispered, her mother’s heartbreak in the other room. And her own feelings? Even the smallest ones felt like thunder. Threatened to blow her and her careful regime to bits.

So, she retreated, locked herself within herself. People and their feelings were volatile, unpredictable. They leaked out so carelessly. She never let anyone too close. Carried loneliness in her stomach like a gas cramp. As the years added up, her life had entombed her. And now here she was, rolling down her window and letting in some air.

Hey, you need a ride?  She squeaked, eyes looking down.

From you? Absolutely.  He smiled. One eye a little lazy. Kind eyes. Troubled eyes. Eyes that made you feel like he wasn’t just seeing you, he saw you.

She was driving a red mini VW at the time. Push started it each morning. The car was small to begin with and when he got in it condensed. Vacuumed them in. That’s the kind of space Ace took up. Brought so much energy with him he sucked the air right out of a room. She sat next to him pretending to breathe.

Ace was like a solar system that was imploding onto itself. Continuously and repeatedly. He moved his hands frantically when he spoke. Got right up in your face.  Smiling with his crazy eyes. Unpredictable. Made you nervous or excited and you couldn’t tell the difference. Like he was always about to take off.  That man could make a saint lose her mind and have her laughing while it happened. He changed the radio station manically, while telling her how to drive. I just met you, stop telling me how to drive!  She thought. But it wasn’t like that with Ace. You never just met him, he was someone you felt at home with after you said hello.

Car troubles? She asked.

All kinds of trouble.

Something like that.

She didn’t ask anymore. She had learnt from her Mummy not to ask questions she didn’t want the answer to.

Why don’t you come in for a second? Let me get you a thank you present.

She looked at the groceries melting in the island heat in the back. Thought about the perfect little meal she’d planned.

Alright.

TOUCH & DIE

Daddy wasn’t supposed to be able to have children. His body was destroyed from his 20-year drug habit. His constant sacrifices to the Island’s whisperings. Mummy wanted a baby badly. When she was nauseous for several weeks she became suspicious. She asked him to take her to the doctor. Said she had the stomach flu to not get his hopes up. She was in the bathroom so the nurse handed him the positive pregnancy result instead. He wept like she’d handed him a second chance.

They were living out in the bush, where Mummy had grown up. The drive to their house took 45 minutes during the months before an election; when the politicians broke out the mixed concrete to cement in votes. Took an hour and half once the rainy season had run its fingers through the last bits of asphalt. On one side a cliff face. On the other a 100-foot drop. Misjudge by a millimeter and you end up swallowed by the gully.

Mummy painted everything in the house in optimistic pastel colors. Until the cottage looked like the set of Willy Wonka. She padded it with random junk like the nest of a bird preparing for a storm.  Daddy put in a seven-foot-deep Scarface-type bathtub the size of a small swimming pool. Hung the serenity prayer in every room. Lord grant me the serenity to accept the thing I cannot change.

They said I was their miracle baby. Daddy rubbed her tummy, called me his “tweety bird.” Mummy was so happy. Every day she crawled further outside of the tomb within her. Abandoned her strict schedule. Ate ice cream and fruit salad all day long.

Daddy told Mummy he’d stopped the ganja business. And it was true that he had slowed down and picked up other jobs. An ex-girlfriend set him up working on movie sets. When Mummy was eight months pregnant, he got his biggest job yet. The script was ridiculous — about a group of Islanders who decided to compete in the Winter Olympics. But it was a three-month contract with a big big foreign production, with big big foreign money.

He woke up at three every morning. Drove his pickup down the one lane road into town. Picked up the food and then the ice needed to keep it cool in the Island heat. Drove another two hours. Every night, Mummy would pack his breakfast. Fill his water bottle. On the top it said “Ace craft service dude.” and below that “touch and die.”

One morning about halfway through the production he had to get up even earlier than usual. It was a big day on set, and he would need to get extra ice. Mummy didn’t wake up when he left. Daddy drove into town, picked up the two men who would be helping him. Picked up the ice, then the petty cash. It barely fit in the back of the pick-up truck he was driving.

The big big foreign production had given him a cell phone, which he was using to organize a shipment he was sending off from the South Coast that weekend. Wanted to make some extra cash for my arrival. The driver in front of him was driving like it was a Sunday. Ace was pulsating, the Island whispering in his ear. He wasn’t late exactly but needed to get movingmovingmoving.

He pressed the gas. Shot in front of the Sunday Driver. Didn’t see the truck coming. Then he did. Tried to correct. The block of ice swung in the opposite direction in the back of the pick-up, preventing him from correcting the turn. His pick-up slid straight under the truck. Sliced one of his feet off at the ankle. The other one crushed into pulp from the knee down. Money rained down around the carnage like a strip club, falling around the now blazing truck. Might have been money for his deal on the South Coast. Might have just been petty cash from the set.

A man called Lucky was driving a couple cars behind Daddy. Saw the accident, pushed himself to the front of the gathering crowd to see what had happened. The Island was small — they had gone to high school together. Saw Daddy’s foot still neatly encased in the sneaker lying in the middle of the road and collected it. It was still warm. The pick-up was like a metal spiderweb around the rest of Daddy’s body. Lucky managed to pull him out. Held him while he bled out at the knee. People started to collect like vultures. Darting in to try to pick up the cash that lay around the wreckage. Lucky fired two shots in the air, and the people backed off. Watching with hungry eyes for their moment.

There was only one ambulance on the west side of The Island. At that moment it was lying broken down somewhere near La Mar, its driver in the bed of his wife’s sister. Not that anyone bothered to try and contact him. Instead, Lucky put Daddy into his car. Drove him to the hospital in Galtego Bay. The one that Daddy’s daddy had proudly cut the ribbon for a few years earlier. That’s where Ace’s eyes closed for the last time.

The Island loved to chat to the Islanders. Some heard the whispers more often. She seemed to forget that humans can’t withstand the constant whisperings of a God. Some days she would talk to the Islanders nice. Like a Julie mango dripping down your chin. And some days she would take everything they had ever loved and burn it to the ground. Because who don’t hear must feel.

Those who live off the Island pretend death is something you can put a shopping complex over. That if you build enough artisanal cheese stores you can civilize yourself beyond the inevitable truth that our brains can splatter on the sidewalk in a couple of seconds if Jah so wishes. On the Island you are only ever a whisper away from the other side. And the Island never lets you forget it.

The Island gives out lovers, children, enemies and friends. She takes them away. She likes when her children laugh. She is indifferent when they cry. What looks like a bushfire to us is her clearing the fields for planting. And afterall she is a Caribbean mother. What you crying for? You want me to give you something to really cry about?

After Daddy died, Mummy tried to crawl back into herself. But once you let the hurricane in you are never the same. A few weeks later, I was born. When I opened my eyes, my mother shuddered. Ace’s eyes were in my head. That’s the thing about hurricanes. You never know when the next will hit. But you can be sure it’s coming.

“Category Six,” by Summer Eldemire and originally published in PREE which describes itself as “a unique online magazine for new contemporary writing from and about the Caribbean.”