LITMIR.BIZ

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should ask for!” His hands would take wing as he spoke, flashing rings with the sunset insignia carved into them.

      We women on the beach would begin unlooping necklaces over our heads and pulling bouquets of suckers from bags sunken in the sand. The colored wrappers shimmered in the heat. Our stiff arms would reach toward them like branches. Murmurs of approval would flutter through the crowd.

      “And now all of you!” Columbus would flourish his hand around the boat. Even the people who’d been grumpily waving their phones around on the key would relax, docile hands at their sides and their chins pointed ever so slightly toward Columbus. “Our natives take anything and give willingly whatever they have! Our staff shall be so eager to please you during your stay on Furnace Island. They shall be called eeeeyes. A-Y-S: At Your Service. You need eeeeyes? They will provide!”

      The staff would motion for them to climb from the boat and would press pennies into the squishy pockets of their hands. Kids would cry for suckers, jump happily at receiving them, cry again when they ducked into the sand, sticks up.

      Our group in white would begin to disband, pulling sheets from our shoulders, revealing the maid uniforms that would make them think of fifties sitcom reruns on late-night TV. We, the women, would disappear through a break in the fence they would never see behind.

      They would tell one another and themselves to forget any dropped pennies as they were directed away from the fence, up a graveled path to where the pool sat on the beach, hugged by either wing of the hotel. Speakers hung like bats under the roof’s edge, vibrating with the pock of steel drums. They’d hear the faint sound of someone sawing very dry wood.

      At night the speakers and the sawing would fall away, but the sounds of Furnace Island would keep them alert. The whoosh of the waves, a sound that was supposed to put them to sleep but was called a roar. After a night or two, they’d dream through everything.

      Archipelago, the maps in their rooms would tell them: scattered seeds floating away from the finger of Florida, that imperative pillar to our point of exclamation. A tiny island way out from any mainland, quivering like an unattached period in the water, seemed like an invitation to decide how to complete the sentence that had brought them here. Sentences started elsewhere; we were just a dot. A dot named twice, neither time by us. They would hone their geographical grammar, tracing the explosion of islands across the map’s flat sea. Or they would turn away, be no place. The rooms would be full of no one’s history, never belonging to anyone.

      They would end up sitting by the pool most of their days at the resort, reaching out for drinks on trays. Flipping through magazines, maybe forgetting the books weighing down their oversized pastel bags they’d bought to bring here. Most of them would never swim. Those who did would dip in the pool, never the ocean. Their loungers would face in toward the pool, the hotel. Never out to sea. Some would do laps, strapped with full snorkeling equipment. Back and forth, slow-motion lawnmowers, finally emerging like primordial creatures with the baggy seats of their bathing suits leaking water down their legs. Plastic masks and the snakes of their snorkels like plumbing for their heads. The soupy words they called out to the staff would sound like complaints or warnings.

      They would eventually discover that the sawing was the sound of the maids sweeping crabs from the deck with wire brooms. Back onto the sand to scuttle in loops down to the beach or into the truck parking lot.

      I was one of the maids they heard but didn’t see, sweeping away.

      By day.

      By night I swooped with gravity like a ghost was crocheted around my arm, the machete its extension. Not hacking away like a crazy bitch. My brother, Troy, did that. He couldn’t be taught, Mother used to say, and she had been a teacher. He was the bad one, the one who’d left her for work in the capital on Wells Island and wouldn’t ever be coming back. I was the good one, the one who came home every night, bringing money. I was the one who would never leave.

      She had no idea I went where I wasn’t supposed to go. Wandered along the stones that peeked from the earth like calluses hardened from time. Slicing a path big enough only for me, not caring if the nettles picked at my work uniform, which would cost us money when it had to be replaced. Sliced and climbed and grubbed and tiptoed around anthills to walk inland among the dead.

      Those are not our bones, she would have said to me. She would not have meant people. She would have meant the ruins: the stone walls creeping up within the brush, which led nowhere, which told you nothing, which were built only to keep in. I knew; I had followed them.

      I didn’t know what I was looking for. Mother loved the knowing. Knowing Bayard a third of a mile down the road in the limegreen house could fix your car. (We didn’t have a car, but Mother knew Bayard could fix it if we got one. And she liked knowing exactly how far it was to walk if someone else broke down in front of our house.) Knowing a whistle in the air meant Hebbie was coming around the bend. Knowing her hair’d be some shade of red you’d never find growing in your garden. Knowing Miss Patrice’s store would always reopen after lunch and would always have ibuprofen when you couldn’t find it anywhere else. Garrett would always stop by when he’d been catching crabs, and we’d always eat well each night that he did. Miss Minnie would ask every time I saw her if Mother would join her in selling at the Straw Market that coming Wednesday or singing at church that coming Sunday. And the answers would always be yes and no. Knowing her brother, my uncle Q, lived as far from us on this oval as you could get, but he wouldn’t go three days without seeing on her. And Mother knew I’d wash all the plates if she’d grab a needle to fix up the edges of my work apron until her hand was too stiff and came to rest in her lap, a knobby cavern. She didn’t wonder how it got torn up, because she hadn’t been inside the resort to see they’d cleared away the brush so you’d walk through the entire stretch of the place without anything touching you. For all she knew my uniform got snagged all day at work.

      Haulback, we called those nettled plants. They dug into your skin and your clothes when you tried to get by, hauled you back.

      Before the resort, most of the men went to the capital for work. Many still did. My dad had. And my brother, Troy; Troy’s best friend, Andre; so many. Some women, too. And way before that, there was only the land you were in a relationship with for anything you could plant or pluck. Everything else had you waiting for a boat to come in. Those boats came slowly, infrequently. Still did.

      And before that, long before our time, life—if you could call it that—was only on the inland. Working the land for someone else who’d claimed you, corpse that you were, from the ship that docked in the capital and put you on another boat to this bitty outermost island. Once you were here, you were theirs. Even if you could slip the inland to reach the shore, there was nowhere to go, nothing to take you away. The horizon surrounded you. The sun and the water promising escape only in surrender, only in giving yourself up to the waves instead of to your master. The platform of sale in the capital was now where the cruise ships docked, and with every arrival Americans in visors filed down to the beach. That’s what Troy had described.

      Even Ole Mr. Vit was too young to remember the move down from the inland, but he once told me about it when I was young enough not to know I shouldn’t ask. He was just a boy when the oldest people around would remember their parents reminiscing about it. Each family turning its back on the high inland, a while after the masters had deserted this place and its miserly soil.

      New houses were put up just back from the beach trim, and a road ringing our oval island was built in one swoop. Still our main road. After a storm its potholes became mini-oceans, and rocks rose like icebergs. They ruined cars that went too fast.

      Water and electricity came more slowly, each family saving up week by week to pay for the connections. Those of us who still weren’t on the water grid came to the spigot at the gate of the resort with jugs the size of calves. Six dollars came out of my pay each month.

      I had a water bottle from the resort’s gift shop that I took with me when I went inland. (I found it, still shrink-wrapped, behind a bush by the resort’s main gate.) See you, Mother would have said if she saw me using it, you don’t belong up there. See

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