May 09, 2017

PC 469: Ravana’s Children

* Author : Ian Muneshwar

* Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PC 469: Ravana’s Children is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13.

Ravana’s Children

by Ian Muneshwar

It was the end of a summer that burned through Queens quick as a fever, and Jamie couldn’t sleep. He twisted in his sheets, kicking them to the bottom of the bed, and watched his box fan. The blades made ribbons of the streetlights and cast sharp-sided shadows that chased each other across the walls.

Outside, his parents were fighting.

He took the fan out of the window and climbed into the night. Perched on the flat stretch of roof over the back deck, bare feet against asphalt shingles, he listened. Every time one of his parents said his name—usually his mother, since his father almost never raised his voice—Jamie pinched the fat just above his hips. If he could make out a whole sentence, it was a pinch and a twist. He only let go when he couldn’t hear them anymore.

He laid back, letting the shingles dig through his cotton t-shirt. Low flying airplanes roared overhead, drowning his parents’ voices. He got to thinking about how strange it was that there could be so many people right above him, with only metal and plastic and the muggy air between them. He thought about how likely it was that they would crash (there had been seven hundred and sixty-one deaths from plane crashes last year, which was more than twice what it had been the past two years combined) and how no one would be there to catch them if they fell.

Jamie was nearly asleep, lulled to dreaming by half-heard whispers, when he realized that the roof was no longer beneath him. Summer air rushed by, whipping at his clothes and stinging his dry eyes. He tried to twist his head around, to look for the ground coming closer and closer but the wind was too strong. After a few seconds more his stomach became sickly hollow as he realized that he wasn’t falling at all—the ground wasn’t getting nearer, the sky was coming closer.

It took another minute to feel the hands. First, the pair around his waist, pressing into his bruised sides; then the ten fingers clasping his legs and another ten around each of his arms and finally the calloused palms cradling his head, supporting his neck.

Before the fear came to pull him under, Jamie closed his eyes and hoped that the hands would not let him fall.

Elaine crossed the Demerara the day her parents left for America.

She and Don got off the boat in the late afternoon, suitcases in hand. Fishmongers dragged their hauls onto the silty banks, shorts and t-shirts stained with mud and blood.

“This isn’t so bad!” her brother said with a relentless enthusiasm Elaine was quickly tiring of.

The whitewashed buildings and paved roads of Prospect, Guyana had been visible from the boat but here on the shore, on packed dirt and remains of fish intestine, there was only the green of tamarind trees.

“I suppose I should be happy this is only until September.” She kicked a still-bloody eel spine out of the way with her white tennis shoes.

“C’mon,” Don said. “You’re a little too eager to get to grammar school. We have the whole summer. Besides, we get to see Robby and Bish again. How long has it been since you last saw them?”

“Never long enough.”

“Don’t be a pest.”

They started down the road into town. It had been years since she’d been on this side of the river.

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