Hymen

They called it The Final Mercy.

The books said it rose from the churning blue waters after the Great Flood. It rose up into the air with all the majesty of the humpback whale. The waves subsided and land formed once again. An island twenty-three kilometres wide, thirty-four long. The great Gententia Strip. The promised land. The Fishbone Crown of Mercy had stood on its own pedestal at the centre. Burnished wood a phoenix to a people that would not be subdued. The chosen.

No one alive today had ever seen it. Nor their parents, not even their parents’ parents. Or anyone before that. But it is still said that it was carved from the burning Shrub of Flame, from the tears of the Great Guardian and Shield. Now it was just a Baobab plinth. Weathered by the island wind but protected by rope and the white cloth of myth. And on it: nothing. The Crown had been hidden from view so very long ago.

Still, at school on Friday, the holy day of crawfish and Bajan cherries, children were taken from school to bow to its goodly majesty. Lovers kissed beneath it to validate their engagement. The true townspeople had all been married under it. Tourists and foreigners were forbidden from this indulgence. For they had not been chosen. And in darker times, when the Ariangietees came, wars were waged in its shadow.

The absence never seemed to bother them. Absence they said was the true test of faith. And so, they endeavoured to worship harder. Especially around the annual hurricane season. They gave food as sacrifice when there was none to feed their own. They drank wine and toasted to the promise of safe passage through the storm.

Standing in the line of barefoot children with a fishbone poking her gum, Narissa couldn’t help but wonder. To her it seemed a strange kind of adoration. To build your life around something you couldn’t see, couldn’t prove, couldn’t question. She tried to ask her teacher once. Saying simply, “But there ain’t nothing to see”. More declarative than interrogative. But still the teacher heard the flash of the wayward. The daemon in the seeker. The teacher slapped her hard with a palm that smelled of cassava and salt.

“Wha wrong wid you?” he hissed through gritted silver teeth. “Yuh betta hope di crown be deaf today, else yuh never sees it gain”

“I ain’t never seen it yet neither,” Narissa thought but never said.

There was no sign. No mercy shown or taken. It came during the dead of night. The kind of storm that people do not weather. The kind that breaks villages and people in two. The rain surged in waves across the corrugated metal of the shanty homes smashing drum fire through the forest. The wind howled in desperation and fury, devouring trees and sand and anything that stood in its path. It was a rampage of violence. A looting by nature scorned. The villagers hid in dugouts. Muttering supplications to the Crown of Mercy but there was nothing to be done.

Many lost their lives that night. Mainly elders and the young, not yet strong or too weakened to fight against the power of the incoming torrent.

And the Baobab plinth had split clean down the middle. The rope that had protected it had snapped and was hanging from the branch of an uprooted tree like a noose. The white cloth that had cloaked the myth had vanished with the bodies. The pedestal lay cracked on the ground like a coconut. Broken and prepared for a feast.

There was no Crown inside.

Nothing. Just a clump of seaweed. A broken shell. A crab on its back, long dead, its claws curled around nothing sacred.

A boy cried first. Then a woman. Then a hundred more.

“De Crown done gone, an it ain’t comin back,” someone muttered to no one in particular.

Narissa stepped closer. She looked into the echoing space. She didn’t feel anything at all. Neither cursed nor blessed. Just tired.

“It neva been here from de start,” she replied, her voice steady as she turned towards the muted waves and began walking slowly. She allowed the waves to carry her. It took her small body in their arms. Bouncing her up and down until she vanished. The villagers too shocked and already filled with more grief than a human can bear, looked on unmoving.

It was too late when the men ran towards the shore – splashing and thrashing, they dragged the piraua out through the glistening sand. She was gone forever.

With the crown gone and along with it the years of servitude and hope, the villagers sought a sign. People need something to believe in that is greater than themselves. There has to be more to life than the cycle of death and rebirth. Or death and the silence. It is too much to bear.

She said it came in snatches. The dream. Sometimes it would wake her in the night. Sometimes during the day sitting on the hard workbench of the school room, she would come. One day she drew a picture of Narissa in chalk on the playground floor. A girl she was too young to have known. In assembly later that week she spoke out loud the visions that came in snatches, “She was wearin de crown o’ light,” Malina asserted, little hands on little hips. Chin raised in defiance. “An pearls was spillin from she mouth, jus so.”

Then, the elder found a sandal. They crowded around it at the bonfire at the carnival of the Merciless. It took place every April. Depending on the moon.

They nodded. Grateful for a sign of mercy.

A new pedestal was raised in the same place the Crown had once lain. This time of coral and driftwood. A smooth fishbone was placed at the centre, and the sandal of mercy hung from it like an anchor. Or a question. A plaque was created. Narissa the Bone-Mother o' de Sandal o' Mercy. So spake her name.

Her story was written in verses that rhymed. High Anointer Brother Benedictorus, the teacher who slapped her became the first to be anointed. They say he drank seawater and his hair grew tenfold overnight. His teeth, restored to white enamel from silver, gleamed. He said he had known her well. The villagers listened when he told stories of her wisdom and grace. The miracles she had made.

The crown became the lie. The betrayer of the faith.

The truth had been in their presence the whole time. They wondered how many bone mothers they had missed. Slowly it dawned on the, the storm that killed half of them had not brought destruction but the clear-eyed truth they needed to see.

A new generation was baptised with fish-scales and salt. They ate crawfish from sandals and sang hymns in her honour.

And when the next war came, it was fought under the shadow of the sandal. Mercy came again. And every year after that a girl would be chosen. A sacrifice not of fish but a child willing to give as Narissa had done.

She would walk into the waves willingly.

She would walk into the waves willingly.

Carrying nothing at all.

So long as it was sacred.

It was enough for them all.

—Hymen—