Bread, Meat, and Water

Stefan Bindley-Taylor

The head works funny these days, tilting toward sensations, yearnings, itches, inklings, everything in the body rearranging to lean into it soft and slow. I stand outside the house. From the street, I can hear one of the neighbors vomiting, the isolated din of a wretch, the wind up of pink sphincter muscles, the mismatched wet buffeting rhythm against porcelain whistling through the holes in their home. I prefer it here, for in the house, there is not much to do but think of the house. I know there is something to be done, but I am unsure of what it is and entirely sure that I will not be the one to do it. Capacity and will, forever my most imbalanced scale.

Why I talking to you like this? You was never one to be impressed by my education.

The breeze is nice, so I follow it into the yard.  I ever tell you about the time my uncle paraded around this yard? It had a big old mango tree back then, back before you made us pave it over to become modern people with rubbish, and car tire, and children’s tricycles. So anyway, this one time he parading around with a newspaper and a dog leash—though I don’t know where he get the leash from because we ain’t never had no dog because mommy get bit by a pot hound once as a child and that was that—and he running up and down and cussin’ a storm like he used to, whipping the leash against the side of the house and anyone that come close, so I sit a leash-length away from him for hours trying to talk him down, talking soft and quiet, like I applying for a job to be his nephew, and he holding up the newspaper and pointing at a headline that have nothing to do with any of us, and going on about politicians and people I’ve never heard of, pointing at words on the page that none of us can see, words that he sees, words arranged and printed in the boiling inkwell of his mind, and he berating me with all set of madness flying out him face, like he shoes have holes and they lead straight to hell and that lava just running through he body hot, hot, hot and I ask questions gentle and calm, but inside I burning and I waiting until he calms down to and go upstairs and cry. Just when I think I gone catch a break, mommy come out and he start screaming at mommy and next thing you know, my hand full of fabric and I can smell his teeth and I grabbing and shoving and shouting and I want to send him back down, down through that hole below him feet, so I shove him hard but then not too hard because I’m scared and because I am gentle and the world is rough and doesn’t need more violent men, but then who then will solve the problem of violent men? So I just holding he waist to keep him at a distance and he trying to put the dog leash on me with one hand and he screaming in my face, You know kind of man they have to send after me?, You know who I is? You know who di fuck is me? and here, I am tempted to say something silly like, in that moment I wasn’t sure I did, but I didn’t think that, I didn’t think anything at all, only that he was so small and his gaunt ribs were so slick with sweat and his shirtless skin so oiled up and soft that he feel like a child in my arms, like I could hold him close to my chest at an Old Year’s ball. Three days later, he bought me candy cigarettes I no longer cared for, and I sucked them solemnly, dutifully and when I went off to England for university that summer, he checked in on me more than anyone else in my family. 

The sound of vomit becomes too much to bear. I move to peek through the blinds, but even with the lights off, I’m ashamed to look closer because I know I left a few dishes in the sink, their wet edges glinting in the sun. Oh God! If they had told me what was going to happen, I would have at least cleaned the place nice. I already know them people whispering behind my back ‘bout how I never knew how to raise no household, and now they will feel they have proof.

That is life, yes. Blight.

The shadows in the kitchen stir as the wind moves the blinds. I remember I used to spend all day helping my mother season meat, watching as slender puddles of pink pooled into the grooves and dripped onto the floor. She would watch my little wormy fingers squishing up the garlic and the chadon beni against the pinky-grey flesh—I was gentle with it because the meat was cold and the texture unpleasant and I knew even then that it was something dead, something frightening, but my mother rough like hell, boy, and she would tell me to be rougher with it, It not going to cry. So I press a little harder and one day it did cry, big fat slobbery tears, running down over my hand, something inconsolable, something consistent. I say mommy, come look come look, the meat cryin! and she suck she teeth and mumble something about how much money them school fees is just for she child to think meat crying. When I get a little older, the doctors told her I had what was called an overactive imagination, more fees just for them to tell her that. Since then, I have wondered what it must be like to have an inactive imagination, a period of rest, lack of motion, orbit.

Now, I believe I have found it. Something sublime.

Ah, how the times change. How I tried to do something different with my own family. In this kitchen, where the space remained the same, but I had become the old and I had made the young. Do you remember? When our doux douxs were little, there was a period of about two years where every morning they would march into this kitchen, eyes wet with yampee, and I would hand them these porcelain plates that I was given by a family friend when her mother passed— I had a full set of those plates, beautiful plates, pale porcelain with lovely marlin-blue etchings of ivy curling along the edges, worn and cherished. Yes, do you remember them? You, who were there for some but not for most, master of bit and piece? French porcelain they called it, and I didn’t know what that meant since no one we knew had ever gone to France, but I believed it meant something grand and mysterious—and I would tell the children, bread-meat-water, for that’s how they should set the table, plate for bread on the left, plate for meat in the middle, water glass on the right. This is what they told me once in school before I ever had plates like that to actually set the table with. Now, mind you, as you know, we didn’t eat nothing fancy in those days, it was still just a piece of toast, some egg, a slice of ham if your church bursary was plump, and we didn’t have fancy cups to match so sometimes it was mug or Styrofoam or plastic glass, but that didn’t matter because the point was, I told them, if you set the plates right then whatever came your way—whether the plate is full or empty—you have something to catch it in or at least something pretty to look at, some nice porcelain to see your reflection in. So everyday, same time for those few years, I telling the children bread, meat, water, bread, meat, water until it become like one word, bread-meat-water, breadmeatwater, and they used to roll they eyes and say yes daddy, and I say you just saying yes daddy or you mean it, and they say yes daddy, and I used to pinch them and say you sound like little insects, and then I think maybe that’s just how all of nature is, that all the chirp chirp and kiskadee and croak croak I hear in the tall Trinidad bush outside is just one big chorus of nature’s children saying yes daddy, yes daddy, yes daddy, and—

Ah, but look! look! Like they heard me. Here they come now, my doux doux, my yes daddy darlings, my breadmeatwater babies, all dressed up in their nicest clothes grey and black, which is nice, but I always did love a bit of color, and of course Maestro forgot to iron his shirt and pants as always and the wrinkles seem to swallow him up whole and soon his skin going to be like that and then he’ll see why it’s nice to have clothes smooth, and Jeanine doesn’t look like herself she seems distracted like she keeping an eye on the door and there’s a little bubble of space around her and I just want to pinch and pop it and let her finally breath and taste life again, and Errol always trying to play man and like he want to hug the other two but don’t know how, and I wish I could just shove him over and press them all together, but the hands don’t hold these days, not even for my cherubs, bright and shiny and messy. They creak the door to the house open and the pressure in the air changes and the windows are being opened because it must smell in there, and I forget how I got here and all that is supposed to take place here tonight until I see that they crying hard, hard, hard, and I don’t know if they crying for me or for the life in front of them now, for the mess they find themselves in. I watch my children milling about the house, peeking into different rooms like they all haven’t seen it a million times before. I guess they feel it’s different now or maybe they just want to feel like that because their generation is always looking for symbols and answers in the big blank—a chair out of place, a hot breeze blowing cool, a moth with three wings.

It will be a while before they find peace.

I was going to tell you about those plates, those beautiful plates, but now that the children are here, just for tonight, I feel some ease, a little lightness, like I can drift a bit to other things, to other thoughts. Like how easy it is to follow them into the house, and how one of them has put on music downstairs, hymns, and how I can hear Errol at the top of the stairs humming to himself, but in a way devoid of melody, completely careening away from the key and timing of the music, and that makes me think he’s doing that for spite because remember when he was small and we (that was when you and I could still feel like a we indeed) took him to the parade by the Calypso tent, and he bug eye as the performers came out, rocking up and down like a wind-up doll and winding all the way home and wouldn’t stop singing those songs for two day, three day, four day, and I feel he sounded pretty good, so we clapping him up and calling him our little performer. Whole next year he begging us to let him sing in the competition, and we say ok fine, but the sponsor say he needs a suit and we don’t have a suit, so we piecemeal things and we get him a suit and it mismatched and raggamuffin but we didn’t mind and he was too happy to care—I still remember it too, baby blue on top with white ruffles, all layered and mix up together on the chest like someone cutting through a field of bougainvillea. So then he practicing all day every day by the standpipe on the road, and street cock crowing, and he have the neighborhood swooning and crooning because the show coming up and they proud of him, so they want to feel like if he win the whole street win. And we feel pressure now, so we put up a little money to get him some shoes to (mis)match the suit and the suit hanging slack on him, but he feeling like man so he puff he chest up to fill it out and leaving the mirror wet and streaked from how much he practicing in it every morning. And now the day of the show come and he close eyes and sing and he voice wobble a little, but he come back strong, and the judge come up and pat his shoulder and put in his hand a little medal and he open he eyes and look and he start to bawl—he get bronze. And he angry and cussing bronze, bronze, bronze, and how the people stupid so, like they never hear music before in they life—so I tried to cheer him up and tell him everybody have a place and a time and you still number one, right now you just number one at being number three! I joking and laughing but he wouldn't have it. He just bawl, lord, bawl, until the food come up. And I keep thinking what a shame to see that good good food up again and maybe at least, God willing, the ants and the birds and whatever will get a little piece of it again, helped on down by the hard work of little-boy teeth. But he blubbering and crying and it’s hard to know what to do. I want to tell him that the world is going to give him so much more to boo-hoo and wah-wah about and I won’t always be there to get the gloves and the soapy water and scrub it down for you and even the birds gonna get tired of eating your insides up all that sour and tang, so you might as well firm up now before it gets away from you. But I think of myself and my uncle and maybe I want to give him something different, something clean, to dilute the cup of myself in him, to keep it running until it flows clean and clear, until all the little tendrils of me were spilling out over the sides of the glass. So I let him get on with it and I sat and counted grass and rubbed his back.

Now, look at the big man, he wants to hum tunes as if he never had any melody in him at all. Like I never saw that melody grow in him, become a part of him. Like they forget that I have tilled soil, and my father till soil, and his father till soil on some continent I’ve never seen, and that I know when things are blooming, and I knew when my children were blooming because I learned early on that some things bloom best in the dark when no one is looking.

And look at the dark blooming now. The evening settles in quiet, and the opera-in-the-grass starts up, all them crickets with their yes daddys buzzing. I hear water running and I see Jeanine in the kitchen sighing, doing the dishes I left behind, and I want to weep from the shame. I see she shave all she hair off, and the veins bulging in the sides under her brown skin like worms in clay, and I want to say eh-heh, you look like me now fi true! and I want to laugh and laugh and laugh, and I wish she could hear me, because she look like she could use it, but I know it’s really me who could use it, so I come out of there to give her some space because I know that’s all she really want.

You remember, once, when she was young, she grew out that hair for a whole four years and it was a big, beautiful mane? I took her to Tobago for a weekend because you had a big church event that you needed Maestro and Errol to help you prepare for, it was just the two of we there on the island in a nice, nice house, owned by some German family or such, and we spent a whole day in the lil’ pool they had in the backyard, ankle deep in the clear, mineraled water, and she ask daddy can you braid hair and I lie and say yes because she at the age where I feel it’s important she think daddy can do everything. Jeanine was always pretty you know, very, very pretty, and sometimes I used to think it strange when men said that about their children, until I saw it myself, the kind of beauty so beyond you that you feel nothing about it, only fear, fear of what the world does to it, the ugly world descending all at once from every corner and crevice, and I thought maybe if I can be the one to help she feel pretty then it wouldn’t be so scary. So me and my bald-head self fumbling and pulling and trying to weave her hair together in pretty pattern like I see on the TV, and I know she scalp soft, so I trying to be easy with it but I not getting anywhere at all. Whole time I trying to hold her between my knees, firm and tender to keep her in place, her eyes closed while she submerged in the pool up to her chin, water rippling, refracting the red of her swimsuit beneath, and when she finally look down in the water and see she reflection, she start laughing so hard, she start to cry and say, daddy, what madness you do here? God if you see mess I made! It look like a dog bit into a doll and rip out the stuffing. And I just wanted that moment forever. The wind blowing on the grey wood of the deck, the speckles of water splashed here and there in play and heat, steaming up and disappearing when you look too close. I was never a poet, but in a way, that was how Jeanine became when she was older. When she find friend and real professional to do she braids, and she always out the house as soon as you spoke to her, like she think she could sneak out of the house every week to some party somewhere and I not staying up inside waiting till I hear the whoosh and click on her window as it closes shut to know she safe. That’s one time your drinking came in handy. You would wake up for neither love nor money, because if you did, lord, this house would have burn down, no you could wake for neither love nor money nor pre-war car engine rattling bringing home our daughter from God knows where, to the house where you—and sometimes, yes, me—would just push her back out again. In the morning I would try and tease her and I’d say, how’s that person you seeing, and I knew it was a girl because I knew even then and I didn’t mind but I didn’t want to force her to tell me anything, but she walking past me like she don’t hear me, as if she don’t think I hear her late at night through the walls talking on the house phone saying to somebody’s child on the other end, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful and I’m laying in bed and I think alright good, that is good, then a week later I hearing you’re terrible, you’re terrible, and I think what a shame, my poor baby, heartbreak abound with beauty coming before and after it. 

All the lights in the house are on now. Who will pay for that? Errol gone outside somewhere to talk on the phone, Jeanine is somewhere else too, and is just me and the littlest one, Maestro, in the living room, lights humming soft. Though he not little anymore technically, but he still hunch he shoulders and looking small. Children have their feelings etched on their face like sculptures, but his face when he get older just grow blank, blank, blank and I could never seem to quite see it or understand it, as much as I wish I could, as much as I want to. He standing over near the piano where you used to practice, watching the dimpled grooves in the floor from the weight of the piano in the summers hot and heavy when it started to ease into the wood like wax, and I feel he’s probably remembering what I’m remembering, and I wonder if you remember too.

He was the last one we had. You say you wanted to stop after that. You said three mistakes is too many. You decide to name him Maestro, which I always thought was a weird choice. How you go name the child like that? But you said you name him that so he would be prodigious, and I had to look up the word. And you know what, I feel it worked because the boy could play good too, better than I could ever play. But you couldn’t see that it was good enough. You couldn’t see that you saying it wasn’t good enough was the only reason it wasn’t good enough. I don’t know what drive the boy to keep playing—I tell him, over and over, you don’t have to play, you don’t have to play, but maybe he feel he would let you down if he stop, so at night, when he think we sleeping, he open up the piano and hover his tiny fingers of the keys, trying to mimic you, I would see him do it because he think nobody watching because he was always a quiet boy, you know, the kind that like to hide behind big people leg and play with bug outside and all that. One night, when I finally try to get some sleep because I think you not home, he get carried away and accidentally let out a sour chord. By the time I get out to see what going on, I see you leaning over the piano, breathing through your mouth. I could smell your stink from the doorway. Eh heh. You feel you is a big man making one set of noise in my house?  The boy say nothing. Well go on then, Mr. Man, don’t let me stop you! Play something! And I try to tell you Leave the child alone and your neck turned to me but your body still facing he, looking through me, something wretched But, look, the boy feel he Beethoven! So, let’s hear him play! Maestro shaking and I try to tell him no with my eyes, but he don’t look at me, don’t listen to me, and I don’t know why he always seem to want you more than me, and he press, ever so slightly, down on the keys. I think oh god to myself because as soon as the hammer touch them strings, you grab the lid of the piano and slam it down onto the back of he hands. He didn’t even scream and that get you even more vex, so you cuff the back of he head and then he start to bawl, but that get you vex again so you cuff him again. Don’t you ever feel you is a big man in my house again, you hear me? I already have one excuse for a man here, and you not even half of dat. And I cry out What the fuck wrong with you?  and you look at me and fling the bottle in your hand and I duck it mash up on the wall behind me. 

I don’t see the mark in the wall from where it soak into the wallpaper. Maybe I had it painted up. Or maybe it didn’t break at all. Maybe I remember it wrong. Maybe none of that happened. I wonder if lessons truly exist in nature or if they are just a way for us to convince ourselves that our memories are important. Or that some are more important than others.

For example, do you remember how we met? I don’t, and it never mattered to me because I do remember the feeling. Little glimmers, glimpses into a future and a past. The shop I used to visit in the neighborhood to buy a juice or a pack-ice or something I didn’t need just to pass the house with the beautiful piano music floating of it like a longtime ghost or myth, and the boys tell me is the preacher them family and they raising a lil’ girl who can play the hell out of that thing and so I start walking slow, taking more trips to the store to waste mommy money, just to peer in through those curtains of that house to see the beautiful, slender, Black fingers that moved so fast, and is those fingers, your fingers, I still remember most, wrapped around the keys, around the sun, around my neck.  

The beauty of a small place like this is that things can just kind of happen. I like you, you like me, we get together, we fall into something, a kind of rhythm, we marry, and I invite you to come live in the house my daddy build, and my parents never really take to you, you know, they feel you too controlling or too something, but I don’t take them on, and we live downstairs and it a small but it’s nice and its peaceful and I hope the warmth and the cream gate out front and the ochre walls will open you up and keep us together. I young and now that I have a woman, I feel like Mr. Man, so I standing up straight and flexing muscle and shaving face even though none of the muscle or hair come in yet, and one morning I trying to shave and rushing it, going against the grain, struggling by myself, you come in the bathroom and see my neck, and bawl because blood pouring out and you think I trying to take off from you early, so you hold the wound and cuffing and cussing me and I keep saying Is jus’ a cut, is jus’ a cut, I was shaving but you screaming so loud you can’t hear me and when you do hear me in the end I couldn’t stop laughing and you start beating on me harder and those days were full of love and laugh and all them kinda old storybook thing they tell you exist but you feel like it could never exist under such hot sun and wicked politician and small place like this, but you find it really can, and it really does.

Then, you know, for some reason, it doesn’t.

Things between us start to grow quiet. I can’t remember how the silence came on. Slow like an eclipse, or sharp, like a semi-colon; but this old house was stuffed with it for a while. It was a silence that made my bones feel brittle, something heavy on us like a blanket, like snow. You stopped coming home some nights. I don’t know where you went, if it was outside man or just away from me, but I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care or complain because even when you home, you not leaving the room, you not eating, you not drinking again, you not saying nothing, and silence between us like we already resting in two graves with our worms touching.

That was how Errol was born, remember? Just something to bring back the life between us. To remind us that we was young people and we could do what young people do and keep each other up all night, but then, like young people, we scared because we forget what come next: one then two, then three, and then we a family. And when I watched that boy enter the world, ripping through our silence, he screaming, you screaming, I understood that organs, veins were the way of the body separating itself from itself and that this child was not ready to become separate, seemed to want the very skin of himself to unravel, to slip off, to not just be inside but to have what was inside him leave and enter you, to float among your body as one part something fluid and suspended and viscous and animated, a gel of stars and blood vessels twinkling, suffuse, diffuse, across red and pinks and oranges and slick sopping somethingness full, and full, and fuller, and firm its own bodyness, but that it needed to separate, to learn, to know what does it mean to touch? to feel tiny lighting bolts between fingers, the body a cloud, passing and made up of water, the creases in your thighs slick with sweat, your mouth gaunt, lips hanging, threads of glisten, and I thought how curious, how indulgent, how malevolent that this was how bodies made new bodies became new bodies.

The children seem to bring the energy back to us for a little bit, but then just as you get it back like it go in the other direction and you become wild and frantic and the drinking start again or maybe I just finally notice it is bad. And every morning you a woman of the church raising your hand for amen and smile and then at home in the evening you raising your hand again like benediction but when it lower, it on one of us and it stinging like a curse, and you cussing and banging on that piano like it was a house of monsters, a house of Munsters, like we was Wednesday Adams and company in there trapped with you, experiments, not human. And the children angry with me, and I don’t blame them, why I never left, why I didn’t do more (this is what they said to me when they stopped visiting for that little while), and I shame to say that because I was man, and man don’t talk about them kinda things, letting woman put hand on you and feeling like you can’t keep someone around, so yes I shame I didn’t leave or do more, especially because where I am now, I understand man and woman and dog and cat and goat and name and number is one big game somebody out there playing on all of us, and winning, winning, winning all the time and hindsight is a new kind of freedom, a new kind of trick that I didn’t know then, because back then, I just stay quiet, I just wait for you to leave, and when you leave I never look for you until they tell me you’re gone, and then I take the kids to your funeral to see what happens when the lights go out, and we feel like strangers there.

You know, after you left, I never took another. 

Though, there was the postwoman. She was lovely. Used to stop by in the mornings and call the kids in the yard and chat with them, and that’s how I learned all their favorite animals—Maestro like hippopotamus and Jeanine like bear and Errol like wolf—and I feel shame for never having asked before, but that’s how it goes sometimes and that’s why it takes a village. She never asked anything about why she didn’t see you anymore, never tried to maco my business, and I like she for that. I remember one day, she looking tired, tired and wet because it raining whole day, and I invite her in for a drink to rest, and the breeze cool and nice and I sitting across from her and suddenly she make me want to remember what it like to drip sweat onto another’s sweat, to taste salt from salt, but as soon as I sit down the feeling pass and I know I too old to keep anyone up all night again so we both just smile and drink our drinks quietly and say goodnight early when the rain stop. It was she who find me in the end, you know. When the mail pile up for too long and nobody come to check for it, it was she who make them open up the house. All those letters lining up on the front step looking like snow, though it never snows here. I hear the earth is getting warm now. Think of the trees they wasted.

The crowd finally starts to gather in. Not too many, just the way I like. I was a small country boy. I watch as they pool in, some neighbor, some distance cousin, the children friend, it’s good to see they have friend, and I feel the sensation in me, something warm and ferocious, just on the surface ready to be touched, but turning cold, cold, cold, something I have not felt before, and suddenly the hour breaks and the guests still coming and I see them with one eye by but my other eye see the future and the house is mulch, something for someone else to contemplate, to understand, and the cold streak strides through me, I have an urge for disruption, begging me to leave the place with a memory of myself, to show that I too can exist, can take up space, can rupture, can house, and I think, for a moment, to leave the door open or the stove on or scatter the furniture, pile it all together into one room, something esoteric and grand but none of this will do because now uncle gone and father gone and mother gone, and memory gone, and I gone, and you gone, and the house my daddy build is this house and it here and look at all it housed, and they don’t tell you that this is part of it, watching them go on and undo the bit of them that is your youness, making a mess of it, showing you all the little bits that didn’t deserve to land there, pulling em out, like pig guts, just heaving ‘em out and drying em up in front of you, all the little bits of you that were in there, that you put there with the help of God, that used to be your little antenna, help you feel what you thought they felt, talk to them when you weren’t there, give them something to calm them down soft and easy like a sugar cube on the tongue, and then you see it pulled up and dried out in front of you like a bag of weeds and you start to wonder if you ever really knew what they were thinking or if they just wanted you to think you knew, like they had a plan the whole time and had mapped out where to feel what and when so that you never knew a thing, and you start to feel, yes, indeed, maybe you never knew nothing at all.

I miss the yes daddys.

Because after you left, the yes daddys became where’s mommys and now I see the children probably feel I was going mad, and maybe I was. I didn’t have answers, and when I don’t have answers I fall back on what I know to be certain, I double down, I stuff the world with hardened earth and clay, something to stand on, to squeeze to water out of it all. I start to preach about Order! Order! Order! That this life will give you ruction and destruction with no schedule or calendar, so you must find order where you can, in the little things, and I sounding like one of them Baptist preachers, but I understand too now the reason those people have such big congregations to feed. I start waking them kids up earlier, keeping them in the house, trying to keep them safe because suddenly the world seemed bigger, like the bottom had dropped out and I could see it on every side and it wrapped around till it met us again sitting there in that house and—

I will tell you now, about the plates. I will tell you now, about what happened to the plates.

One morning I going to give them my breadmeatwater speech and I pull out my French plates, and say, ok, allyuh know how it go: bread, meat, and water, and I talking in a high-pitch voice, trying to make the clown of myself to lighten the mood, to give them something to hold on to and then, Maestro—would you believe it was he of all people?—grab the plate from my hand, just snatch it up. And I standing there about to cuss the lil’ boy but when I look at him he huffing and puffing and I wait a moment to see what go happen, and he stare at me hard with those little-boy eyes feeling he man and he say, I still remember what he say, even now, he say Why you talking about bread, meat, and water, when all we have to eat in this house is soup and crackers? and he take a plate and fling it against the wall like a discus Olympian and it crash. Boy, I don’t even know what to do next, yes. I raise my hand, and he gets scared as soon as I do it, because he thinking I going to cut his little tail, and for a second I thinking so myself, but I seeing you in my mind, and can’t move, and I’m just stuck, posing, hand to the sky, no sun in the room to touch, and then, Jeanine, bless her, come and save him, come and save me, come and save us all. She start to laugh. She like she never laugh before, like she the first person to ever laugh on this planet and she trying to figure out how it works, test it from every angle, head swinging, arms swinging, and the laughs all coming out and flying around the room like spirits and landing on each of us and crawling into our ears and our nose and working back out the mouth until now we all laughing, and then Errol fling a plate and Jeanine grab one and I grab one like madness and we start flinging the plates around the room and smashing them up, mashing them up, like porcelain fireworks, we laugh until the silence come back and when it does it makes us feel small, useless, afraid to talk to one another, to look each other in the eye. We go to different parts of the house and I didn’t know how to face them for the rest of the evening. That night I lay in bed night thinking what kind of example I setting for these children now and how they ever will respect me again or understand the world, and I thinking hard about the actual answer to their question where’s mommy because I didn’t know, how could I have known until now, and then I hear scratch, scratcth, scratch, outside my door in the middle of the night. I lay there still, waiting to see what duppy or jumbie coming to take me away, and I to hear it once more, and then I get up and crack the door and see the three shadows moving in the kitchen: one with a coconut broom sweeping, one with cupped hands full of plate pieces, one holding open the trash to sprinkle the pieces into.

I step outside here before anyone has a chance to speak. From out here, the house buzzes. I can no longer hear the neighbor vomiting. The air is warm, which is not symbolic because the air is always warm here; it is just a fact of nature. Leave them to reminiscence and conjure and conjecture and paint me to be grander than I was in some ways, smaller in others. I’m glad none of them were there to find me. Now they can imagine me with some grace, some dignity. Would you believe the last thought I remember having was tasting the silver filling in my mouth I got from eating too much jam as a kid and trying to remember what flavor of jam it was? Then I find myself in this place, this body beyond my body, thinking of my uncle, and you, and these plates, thinking of things that are all dust--pulverized, beautiful, and blue. 

I suppose all this is to say: you should not worry. Our darlings, our doux douxs, my breadmeatwater babies will be ok. Even when we are not around, they clean up their mess—and ours.

Image © Europeana

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Stefan Bindley-Taylor is a Trinidadian-American author, musician, and educator born and raised in Maryland. His stories showcase characters from the Caribbean diaspora with humor, empathy, and a touch of magic.

His recent and forthcoming work can be found in several outlets, including Chautauqua, The Common, Adda, and Brooklyn Rail. He is the recipient of the 2025 Chautauqua Janus prize, the 2025 DISQUIET Flowers Fellowship, a 2025 Kimbilio Fellowship, the 2024 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival Elizabeth Nunez prize, a short-lister for the 2024 Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the PEN 2023 Emerging Voices Fellowship.

Outside of writing, Stefan has been a performing musician for over a decade. He writes and performs in two projects: FISHLORD, a punk project, and Nafets, an alternative hip-hop project. He has amassed over 8 million streams worldwide and landed sync placements with Netflix, HBO, Hulu, BET+, The CW, and more.

He received an M.Ed. from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and he is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Virginia.