Excerpt: Pirate Story (Tentative Title)

Chapter One: Rain

It’s been raining for months. The dampness and chill seeped through Nadif’s body. He’s sheltered under a roof of woven coconut leaves, a makeshift shelter he’s built yesterday during the brief hours of sun. He cut china sticks and gathered the coconut leaves fallen from the previous night’s storm. The cutlass he’s been carrying since he’s been on the run was rusted badly. He had to find smooth stones to conjure up tools to sharpen the blade. He cut the china sticks and stuck them onto the ground to form the posts and split the tops to insert the cross bars. Then he wove the coconut leaves onto the china stick frames. As he bent over to weave the leaves, he thought about his grandmother who taught him how to weave coconut leaves into nicely patterned sheets. She had the best hand in the village. She would spend days making big sheets of woven coconut leaves, the patterns cascading down from one corner to the other. As a young boy, he would sit there marveling at the miraculous patterns that his grandmother made with these leaves, his eyes following her hands moving fast, up and down and tuck under, up and down and tuck under. As his hands moved frantically weaving to finish his shelter before the next storm, he missed the tranquility of his village and his grandmother. He missed the voice of his grandmother, singing songs that had been sung to her when she was a baby, clucking her tongues and tapping her right foot as the rhythms of her hands danced to the songs as she sang and wove. He loved drifting into sleep as he listened to her sing.