Nearby, an old woman stood watching the family bathe. She was bent over in a C shape, leaning on a bamboo cane for support. A waist-length gray braid hung down the back of a shapeless dress that grazed her ankles above bare feet. As if sensing me watching her, she turned, holding me fast in her gaze for several seconds. My heart thrummed as I took her in; a thousand wrinkles mapped her expressive face on which lines—like cat whiskers—had been drawn or tattooed. Jewel-colored feathers winged back from holes in her ears. A wildness emanated from her. I looked away, then started back to the hut.

The rest of the village had begun to wake; smoke rose from the ovens and twisted into the cloud-hung sky. A few of the women, scraping coal dust out the back of their ovens, eyed me warily as I walked past. To each of them I smiled and said hola, but mostly I got stares or narrowed eyes or shaking heads. They grabbed the hands of their swollen-bellied babies and led them away from this red-haired alien, a few barking something back at me I didn’t catch. A dozen or so macaws—a family of split-tailed rainbows—perched in the trees over the longhouse. Some communal decision sent them flapping up into the sky, where they crossed the river in twos, wing-to-wing, cawing like madwomen.

The smells of cooking surrounded me—fish, meat, something toasty and sweet-smelling, like yams laced with cinnamon. Suddenly light-headed, feeling the cut of hunger, I stumbled up the hill to our hut. Smiling, Omar handed me a ceramic bowl of something hot; the source of that sweet yam smell. I climbed up the short flight of wooden steps, falling on my food like a starved cur, no doubt eating in the manner Omar had once described.

Through the open door, I watched Paco running with the other children, chasing the half dozen tiny piglets that had lost their mother the night before. He slowed each time he passed, smiling and waving up at me, until he gave up the game entirely and stood squarely in view, watching me eat. Behind him, the other children continued to scream and play, the baby pigs squealing and skidding on the muddy ground.

“Good morning, Miss Lily,” Paco said softly.

I smiled. “Good morning.”

Omar—shirtless, barefoot—sharpened a machete on a round stone on the ground. “You never told me what I was eating,” I called out to him.

“Plaintain and yucca, some ground rice, some molasses sugar. Do you like it?”

“It’s the best thing I ever tasted. It’s like heaven in a bowl, it’s—” A furry black tarantula as big as my hand dropped down from the ceiling into my bowl, dark and hairy and scrabbling. Screaming, I hurled the bowl of hot mash away from me. The spider leapt, turning in midair before launching itself toward the wall of the hut, where it hung on briefly before skittering down to the floor and out the door. Like a gymnast, it whirled down the stairs, leaping and spinning as if I was the most frightening thing it had ever seen.