Aislyn with the Other Eye. Short story, Althea Romeo Mark

By: aromaproductions on 2:18 PM

Share it Please

Tweet

 Aislyn with the Other Eye. Short story, Althea Romeo Mark

 

 

My Name is Aislyn. I was told I had another eye that saw the departed still lingering around the earth: some trying to settle unfinished business; some watching over loved ones, and some with uncertain motives. They hid in dark corners, in the shadows and shade, or emerged in the quiet of late night on my tiny Caribbean island.

I first saw a shadow at the age of five while playing under our house, which, like most houses in Rotten Town, stood on wooden posts. Many houses stood on wooden pilings as a precaution against hurricane flooding.  

The silhouette had invaded my quiet place, playing peek-a-boo, flitting and flirting, lurking where the sun’s rays could not reach. The first time I saw one, I called it “Fraid.” I ran, my heart pounding, screams trapped in my throat. I had barely held myself together as I ran to my parents, my thin, copper-colored frame letting out piercing shrieks as I flew into their arms.

It was then my father said, “Aislyn you have the other eye like me, and my mother.” When my mother was young, he said, there were many with the other eye. The living and the dead shared the same space and could be seen going about their business in Rotten Town. In those days, the dead took longer to complete their duties on earth. They would disappear at the sound of airplanes, motor cars, and roaring noises, and as the living grew louder, they crossed the divide to the other world sooner rather than later.

My father had told his children about one of his most harrowing encounters. He was returning home from his farm late one night when a shadow screamed at him. The cry echoed in the hills, shaking the surrounding trees, and, rooted in fear, his feet felt like boulders, his head becoming a chamber of noise and darkness. And then the shadow disappeared. After, its warning,  he never stayed out so late again.

 

And then, there was the story of Cousin Inez, whose experience became a cautionary tale about not letting your other eye lead you astray.  When Cousin Inez was led away by a shadow everyone went out to search for her. And when they found her, curled up under a tamarind tree, she was burning up with a fever.

Inez had been distracted and led into the bush, just after sunset, when the trees were silhouetted against the setting sun. Inez remembered a blurred figure leading her, waving her on. She, in her early teens, was lured by curiosity and became a goat on a short rope. The soft voice of the dark long-fingered vision had coaxed her forward. 

The woman wore a long,  ruffled, empire-waisted, eighteenth-century dress.  The figure had walked slowly, almost hovering over the dirt path just out of earshot of the villagers returning home from their farms. Some cotton pickers were the last to see Inez walking in the opposite direction.

After Inez was found, her mother and aunts placed her in a huge basin of water filled with sage, rosemary, thyme, and mint which they poured from cups over her head. As it slowly ran down to her feet, they sang and prayed, begging the ancestors to let her go.

The refrain: “Do not follow. It is not your time to join the Ancestors. Le’ go of her hand,” filled the air, and was distant in Inez’s ears. They continued to shake her shoulders, bathe her pale body, and shout, their words still distant. And finally, the shouting and shaking broke the spell, pulled her back, pulled her out of the shadow’s grip.

             In Inez’s mind, her aunts’ voices had been a distant howling wind. In the haze, she had remembered seeing a faded photograph of that woman, once.

On her return to the real world,  Inez described an old photograph she had seen in an album and the woman she had followed. Her family explained that it was her great, great, great grandmother, Elizabeth.  She was the daughter of a local woman and one of the English navy men assigned to the village dockyard in the mid-1800s. Great, great, great grandmama had been the eldest of the Englishman’s ten offspring. “You look like her,” they said. “She has come again in you, Inez

And so I had learned not to follow my other eye, to let the sightings come and go, to ignore the stalking of ancestors searching for me. I did not wish to be taken away.

 

When the bold form visited me again I was a teenager. It was a mist floating in front of me in human shape as I climbed the steps to our home. Not wanting it to take hold of my thoughts, I had wiped my eyes to remove the unwanted shroud. I wondered what it wanted but knew I had to ignore its invitation to walk beside it. And where would it have led me? Into a frightful void? The underworld? Would I have gone quickly like a cousin who had died of cardiac arrest the week before? Did my cousin follow the vision in her other eyes?

 

And decades later, far from the Caribbean Islands, on the African continent,  the apparition appeared one night as I corrected student essays. I knew then that it would never leave me alone. I saw it through the portal of the kitchen door. It was sitting at the kitchen table waiting, fingers fluttering like white petals in the breeze. Was it waiting for me to enter and then taking me away in the still, morning light?

I did not enter, did not wait. I fled to my room to the comfort of my bed and my husband.

 

And in another land, on a second continent, and climbing the ladder of years, the phantom showed its face—appearing as a young woman in a long green, glittering robe, walking past my waking eyes.   I still between sleep and wake, the phantom, no longer a shroud, waited. But fled when I sat up. Did it reveal too much?

 Do the old decades-old family albums still exist? And if they do, would I find the woman among the photos on the browning, brittle pages?

Is this phantom an ancestor come to snatch me away or was she my guardian angel all along? When my eyes are closed forever, will it accompany me beyond the veil? Will it be there waiting, no longer hiding in the shadows?

Note-Aislyn Origin: Irish. Meaning: dream or vision. Aislyn is a feminine name of Irish origin. A variant spelling of Aislinn and Aisling. 

© Althea Romeo-Mark 

Althea Romeo Mark is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Nakedness of New and If Only the Dust Would Settle, (English-German), and four chapbooks, Beyond Dreams: The Ritual Dancer, Two Faces, Two Phases, Palaver and Shu-Shu Moko Jumbi: The Silent Dancing Spirit.

Her work has been inspired by major transitions in her life: Her family moving from Antigua (then a British colony) to the US Virgin Islands. her moving to Liberia in 1976 and having to flee with her family in 1990 due to the Liberian Civil War (1990-2014) and her family having to declare themselves refugees in London, UK.; And finally, her family having to start all over again in Switzerland that welcomed her husband, who had studied medicine there. Her family’s new beginning was a challenge because of culture and language. Switzerland is now home.

Awards and prizes include: The 2023 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize to a Caribbean author for exemplary writing in Caribbean Nation Language (a term used by celebrated post-colonial Caribbean author Kamau Brathwaite to describe vernacular language born in the Caribbean). Poetry Prize for poems published in POEZY 21:Antologia Festivaluluiinternational Noptile De Poezie De Curtea De Arges, Romania; the Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize, The Caribbean Writer for her short story “Bitterleaf,” in Volume 22; short story prize for “Easter Sunday,” Stauffacher English Short Story Competition in Switzerland, Poetry Award for poem “Ole No-Teeth Mama,” Cuyahoga Community Writers Conference and, a Scholarship Award from Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.