“Rain and Dust” by Chanel Sutherland

All children are curious, but none so curious as this one child. 

If her mother had not up and died, leaving her and her sister orphans in the care of Madame, I would have shooed her away already. She does not eat the food I cook and refuses to bathe when the water is warm and welcoming.

Madame told me, “Do not waste my electricity heating her bath water if she’s so ungrateful.” 

Madame still has not forgiven her sister for dying in the most inconvenient manner, leaving two children behind to be her burden. Not to mention dying of all times in the wet season when the ground is too loose to hold graves. A complication that costs more than when the soil is dry. 

“Some people are as selfish in death as they were in life,” she told me the day we watched the diggers lower the plain pine coffin into the rain-soaked ground. 

Now, this child, as I have mentioned, has gotten into the habit of following me around like a shadow in the sun. Each morning, I open the door to my room, and there she is, sitting crossed-legged, waiting, last night’s bathing theatrics long forgotten. 

“I think Auntie is a devil-worshipper,” she tells me today. “Mama told me so. Said it’s why no baby will enter her womb.” 

Each day, a new revelation has come to her in sleep, always in her mother’s ghostly words. 

“You should go and play with your sister,” I tell her. “And it isn’t nice to call people names.” 

“I didn’t. I said she was a devil worshiper; I didn’t call her the devil.” 

With my lips absent of a rebuttal, I have no choice but to start my chores with her at my heels, always with her questions. 

Why do you work for Auntie? 

Because I need to make a living.

This is living? 

The look in her eyes tells me she is seeing farther than me, perhaps beyond the border between life and death. 

As I sweep the floor, the dust humours me, rising in the air only to settle back down again. This little girl whose face reminds me so much of my own – round, black, slightly slanted eyes – watches my every move, and I can’t help but think that together we are alone in this world.