The tears did not come but bubbled and boiled inside her, making her belch loudly; they did not drip down her chin and fall onto the empty floor; they did not streak her face and make her eyes red. She cried dry. She was hunched over, low, as if she was carrying the world on her back. People bumped into her in the market. “Moderfuckers,” she muttered wandering from stall to stall, looking at the roundness of tomatoes, feeling the joy in the colour of carrots, squeezing homesick mangoes, letting her fingers remember the taste of them, staring at the sheer beauty of cabbages. “My works, wonders to perform.” She looked at the arguing men, the laughing women, the beggars, the lost and soon to be lost, the undecided lovers holed up in doorways, letting bus after bus pass them by. “Boomboclart dem.” No one paid any attention to her. The body she inhabited appeared old, and age had rendered her dead to them. She remembered everything. Her own cross – the cry of lonely children, the moan of grief-stricken fathers, the eyes of women who would never feel their bodies whole again.
