“Oh, a temper,” Martine says. “I guess maybe you are a soucouyant after all, but I’ll have to see this.”
“Okay, enough!” I say. “Stefanie, you can’t vote. We need an odd number in case we have a tie. Plus, we don’t trust you yet. All in favor of aiming for the Don . . .”
Six hands raise, including Giselle’s.
“All in favor of Gerard the fisherboy . . .”
Martine and Veronique raise their hand.
“There. I don’t need to vote. You’ve made your decision,” I say. “Thank you, Lourdes.”
She smirks, only looking at Stefanie and not me.
“No. Thank you,” Stefanie says.
Then I clear my throat and raise my chin. “Let me repeat the rules: Shedding is a solitary act. Please give each other enough privacy. Keep your moans and groans to a minimum. The best way to deal with the pain is to bite down on a piece of cloth and grunt if you need to, or take deep-deep cooling breaths. The start of the race begins at the moment of shedding. Take flight as soon as you are fully formed. Remember, our smoke consumes the souls, not our flames. Please don’t burn down my mother’s resort, or else we all lose much more than this race. If you have the name of the first victim, then you know the face and the location. Your fire instinct will guide you. Asking for more information will be cheating. And no, it would not give you an edge. Your anger does. The hungrier for vengeance, the quicker the shedding, the faster the flame. So, inhale the soul for energy, fly fast and fly far, touch the moon, kiss the sun. Stay up there for as long as you can until the earliest signs of daybreak. Fly as close as you can. If you kiss our beloved, bring back some of that sunfire with you. We will only know the winner once we’ve all settled into our skins. The darker the skin, the closest to the sun. In the unfortunate event that you do not reach the victim in time, you know what to do, and keep it to yourself. Our first victim is Donald Hightower, nominated by Lourdes. The Golden Sun Resort. Tropical Suite.”
“Is that all?” Stefanie asks.
“Oh, this game is too easy for you?” Martine says. “You are free to leave, you know.”
“What she means is”—Lourdes interrupts—“I made it sound much more complicated than that.”
“You told her the rules before you even brought her here?” I ask, but I put up my hand so Lourdes doesn’t respond. I don’t need to hear her excuse. I will know what her true intentions are soon enough.
A loud bang makes us all jump, and we turn our heads down the hill. More flames are raging on the streets as night falls over the island. The National Guard trucks are rolling into town from the capital. I’m sure my mother is looking for me right now. All our mothers are. But they also know that this is the night we feast. We are safe. Others are not.
Someone hisses. It’s Veronique. The skin around her arms glows and begins to bubble up like molten lava. She quickly runs behind a bush, leaving Martine to drag the cooler to where they’ll be shedding.
Beads of sweat form on Giselle’s forehead. She knows better than to fan herself. She’s one of the lucky ones who gets to sweat while she sheds. It eases the pain. She looks around for a spot. Soon, she’s out of my sight.
Almost all the girls are, except for Lourdes and her friend. She’s helping her with her clothes. “Careful now, you don’t want to burn them,” Lourdes says.
I squint to get a better look at the two of them now that darkness is beginning to wrap around us. “What are you doing, Lourdes? This is a race, and we’re not on teams.”
Lourdes raises both her hands off Stefanie. “You’re right. Stefanie, this is your race to win. Good luck, child.”
But Lourdes doesn’t stray too far from her. Stefanie sits on the ground with her legs crossed and simply stares out into the late-evening air as if she’s meditating. Soon, she is all red. Her skin doesn’t bubble like ours does. It’s like blood. Smooth. Liquid. She’s quiet and still as if her skin will simply melt off without her even crying out in pain.
My shedding starts at the bottom of my feet—a tingling sensation, then it’s as if I’m standing on hot coals. I have to slip off my sandals. I can’t even stand. I find a spot behind a lime tree where I can still keep my eye on the new girl and Lourdes, and from where I am, I spot Giselle, who is also watching Stefanie.
Shedding is several simultaneous sharp, grazing pains as if many knives are peeling away my skin from bottom to top. I used to sob like a baby, the pain was so unbearable. It moves up my legs, and that burning sensation reaches my bones, where I can feel everything start to melt into thick liquid. We are volcanoes when we shed. Heat rises up from the pit of our bellies until our souls combust into flames.
I waver between clenching my jaw and fists and taking in deep breaths. I don’t follow my own rules by biting down on the balled-up hem of my skirt. At this point, I can either submit to the pain or fight it. The worst part of it all is when I hear my soucouyant sisters cry out in agony. Our collective hearts are melting into bloodfire. To the island people, we are the sounds of the warrior ancestors who succumbed to the great big revolution that drove out the colonizers centuries ago. That is not true. We never succumbed. We are still here.
Do you know how hard it is to not be able to release pain with our voices, to not be able to scream into the air with hopes that the deep aching will finally release us from its deathly grip? Our very breath has become like tiny grains of cayenne or Scotch bonnet seeds. Everything burns. Until it doesn’t.
Shedding human flesh is liberating.
In the frenzy of it all, I had opened the cooler and sat my round behind on hundreds of cubes of ice, and that is where my skin rests as I combust into a blazing flame, crackling and whipping the warm night air.
Four girls have shed before me, and one of them zooms up into the now starlit sky, aiming for the Golden Sun Resort. I stay high enough above the treetops, searching for the light-skinned girl. She’s still there, slowly turning into a dim firelight barely strong enough to take flight. Ah! That’s the only way she’s still alive, poor girl. Her flames don’t burn as bright, as hot. She’s not a fireball, she’s a lit matchstick of a soucouyant, if I can call her that, and here she is wanting to be part of this race.
I press my fireball body against the night air and begin to aim for the resort, but the presence of two soucouyant flames keeps me where I am, circling the hill and careful that my flames don’t lick the treetops. Stefanie has completely shed now, and she leaves her skin at the edge of a bush. Her flame is still a dull, yellow-orange ball of potential. She flies past me, slowly, as if the air itself is molasses. Poor child.
But it’s not Stefanie’s weak flight that makes me pause. Lourdes and Giselle have already shed, but they’re circling the hill just as I am. They’re not joining the race. I fly higher so that I am above them, watching. I’ve never won a race, because I’m always keeping an eye out for any cheating. Of course, we don’t have eyes out of which to see, or lips out of which to speak, but as flames, we still have feelings and intuition. We are still living energy, another state of matter. We are humans become gas, so we still have to eat.