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By Root 402 0

can't just let them kill her. go and give them some money like you gave them for your daughter, papa says, the only money i have left is to get us out of here tomorrow, manman whispers, we cannot just stay here and let them kill her. manman starts moving like she is going out the door, papa grabs her neck and pins her to the latrine wall, tomorrow we are going to ville rose, he says, you will not spoil that for the family, you will not put us in that situation, you will not get us killed, going out there will be like trying to raise the dead, she is not dead yet, manman says, maybe we can help her. i will make you stay if i have to, he says to her. my mother buries her face in the latrine wall, she starts to cry. you can hear madan roger screaming, they are beating her, pounding on her until you don't hear anything else, manman tells papa, you cannot let them kill somebody just because you are afraid, papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid, they are the law. it is their right, we are just being good citizens, following the law of the land, it has happened before all over this country and tonight it will happen again and there is nothing we can do.

Célianne spent the night groaning. She looks like she has been ready for a while, but maybe the child is being stubborn. She just screamed that she is bleeding. There is an older woman here who looks like she has had a lot of children herself. She says Célianne is not bleeding at all. Her water sack has broken.

The only babies I have ever seen right after birth are baby mice. Their skin looks veil thin. You can see all the blood vessels and all their organs. I have always wanted to poke them to see if my finger would go all the way through the skin.

I have moved to the other side of the boat so I will not have to look inside Célianne. People are just watching. The captain asks the midwife to keep Célianne steady so she will not rock any more holes into the boat. Now we have three cracks covered with tar. I am scared to think of what would happen if we had to choose among ourselves who would stay on the boat and who should die. Given the choice to make a decision like that, we would all act like vultures, including me.

The sun will set soon. Someone says that this child will be just another pair of hungry lips. At least it will have its mother's breasts, says an old man. Everyone will eat their last scraps of food today.

there is a rumor that the old president is coming back, there is a whole bunch of people going to the airport to meet him. papa says we are not going to stay in port-au-prince to find out if this is true or if it is a lie. they are selling gasoline at the market again, the carnival groups have taken to the streets, we are heading the other way, to ville rose, maybe there i will be able to sleep at night, it is not going to turn out well with the old president coming back, manman now says, people are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. people will believe anything, they will claim to see the christ return and march on the cross backwards if there is enough hope, manman told papa that you took the boat, papa told me before we left this morning that he thought himself a bad father for everything that happened, he says a father should be able to speak to his children like a civilized man. all the craziness here has made him feel like he cannot do that anymore, all he wants to do is live, he and manman have not said a word to one another since we left the latrine, i know that papa does not hate us, not in the way that i hate those soldiers, those macoutes, and all those people here who shoot guns, on our way to ville rose, we saw dogs licking two dead faces, one of them was a little boy who was lying on the side of the road with the sun in his dead open eyes, we saw a soldier shoving a woman out of a hut, calling her a witch, he was shaving the woman's head, but of course we never stopped, papa didn't want to go in madan roger's house and check on her before we left, he thought