the beaten path

The good god smiles upon us; rain sheets across white sand, black lava rock. Warm water soaks thin cotton, sand climbs up calves. I run past rocks coves and strange abandoned Arabian bungalows rising like a mirage between outstretched palm fronds. A woman beats an octopus into the sand with a stick, over and over again. Another slams heavy cloth into coral. An old man with yellowed teeth hisses tst, tst, as he guts porcupine fish, slitting a steel blade from jaw to tail. He removes the meat with a twist and scrapes it aside into a pile. The spiny skin is spread flat on the rocks like a map of the world, eyes still bulging bright in sockets.

I come around a rock outcrop and the women washing shout Munzungu! and run towards me. They come close then stop and smile and so do I. Only one speaks English. She asks where I’m from, what I’m doing. Walking, I answer. She seems confused.

“Are you washing your body?” She gestures towards the aquamarine ocean. No need--the sky does it for me, I laugh.

The women are jabbering excitedly in Swahili, and Fatima, the largest boldest one in bright yellow, bellows and I know they laugh at me and I wonder what about. They stare at my bare feet and cringe when I walk. It’s okay, sawa sawa. It makes me strong. I flex. Their flat black feet with light underbellies float upon recycled rubber. Shreds of fabric wrap around ankles and arches.

One approaches me with a translucent white and blue squid hanging from hooked fingers. Its tentacles hang down, swaying slightly like dreadlocks. “Photo!” she demands. I have no camera. But I hold out my fingers and replace hers, hooked in the creatures brain. Guts and tubes ooze out, engine parts. It’s heavy and limp. I hold it until I feel awkward and then I rub my finger down its face and pretend to lick it, safi sana!

We all start walking back the way I had come. Moments later an older woman shouts at these young ones who are about my age. I ask if they are in trouble, but they don’t understand.

You give me money, one tells me. I have no shoes, no camera, you think I have money? I explain. But Muzungus mean gold, as the man in the market had warned me, even here when there is no path and all pockets are empty.

The full moon is cause for celebration: fire dancing and eating and breathing, and acrobats dressed in beaded fringe. I join a train of locals, moving with jerky spasmodic motions, like the swell and crash of waves. A boy with a crown of woven palm asks me to dance, and we spin faster and he puts the crown on my head and it slips again and again. I dance in the moonlight in at the water’s edge, my feet feeling the path of trenches left by rain finding its way home. A ghost crab scampers around me, and I let him lead, and I follow. He stops and we stare at each other and I curtsy away, and he burrows down to bed.

The fire burns long and late, even when there is only wet wood left that crackles and smokes. I sit on a long bench to watch it, next to a man I’d met on the shuttle, a Muslim man whose family has lived here always, and I wonder if that means they were slaves and can’t trace their origins beyond this island anymore or if they were born here, free. We speak of God. He tells me, “Everyone is same blood. Same people. Same everything. One God.” Only many ways of seeing, I say. He reminds me of the first man I’d met in this country, a taxi driver you insisted, “We respect each other here, because we don’t know who is right.” I stay on the beach in a hammock into early morning, watching the sky so carefully, trying to detect the movements of the stars and decipher time from bird calls.