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III. N’onc Télémaque

Our grandmothers remembered the River’s tangled banks. At certain stages of the moon, they would trample through, disrobe, dip in—to ease cramps or to conceive, to cure the sun-pain from a day in the fields. The River swept prayers, luck, fertility, beauty, health away from northern women and carried these offerings a thousand miles to our grandmothers. They took the water away in jars to sprinkle on babies. They blessed their husbands’ fields and animals. They blessed the doorsteps of their homes.

Then the River moved.

Our grandmothers went to the swamp one summer night, hoping for the same cures from stagnant water. The hyacinth, by then, had grown dense across the water, and anyone who did not know better might have mistaken swamp for field. Anyone who did not know better might have walked across it.

Our grandmothers waded in to their bellies, some plump, some thin, some pregnant. The hyacinth separated, let them pass, then closed again behind them. Tidy greenness swept away the ragged disorder of current. They floated on their backs and thought, Who needs a river? Their bodies flashed like swamp fire.

They heard a splash behind a cypress stump. Hyacinth bobbed and parted. They covered their breasts, and thought: Cocodrie! Ouaouaron! Caouane! Serpent congo!*

An old man sloshed around the stump, waist-deep in swamp-water. His hair was knotted and green with slime, his moustache a matted clump on his lip. Behind him, a shrimp boat, draped in nets, tilted out of the muck. Everything smelled of rotten fish.

I followed the glow of le feu follé to you! the old man said. I’d gladly stay lost a hundred years to see so many lovely bottoms. He laughed and waded toward them, his fingers itching to touch.

Who are you, old man? asked one of the women.

That’s just N’onc Télémaque, said my grandmother. Those twitching fingers, like crab claws (now blue) had pinched her bottom often enough. He won’t hurt nobody.

But when the swamp-blessed mothers gave birth to babies with webs instead of fingers and toes, our grandmothers prayed for the River’s return.


IV. A Little Chat

Marie dreamt and there was a man in her dream, mustached and white-haired, who was and was not Mark Twain. He reclined next to her in bed. They were having a chat. The old man spoke between puffs on his pipe. I traveled the world, met gods in India and island-dwellers who ate their fellow men, and having seen the world, I am certain of one thing: the bulk of mankind occupies a place somewhere between the angels, he said, and the French.

Marie said, But we are French.

Did I say the French, my dear? I meant the cannibals.

*Alligator! Bullfrog! Snapping turtle! Moccasin!

Stephanie Soileau holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa. She received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and the anthology Best of the South.