I celebrate in a darkness of my own. My syringe supply won’t last forever, but I don’t want the thunder to stop, don’t want the tiles to stop screaming on the roof. I tell this to Jaime. This is how the scraps will be better stitched together – in uncertainty.

The electricity won’t be fully back for days, who knows how many. Families in neighbouring Bluefields must be weathering the same thing, and even in Puerto Limón and Cahuita. The ground floor is flooded and it’s no use wasting glucose in trying to bail the water out. I think of the captain again, the soldiers. I’ll figure it out, he’d told me; we’ll figure it out, whatever happens. I think of Rudy, of the claim, of Europe. It makes me laugh. Otto doesn’t care about any of this, pays no mind to papers or dark accords. He only obeys his present, and he’ll lift up us Creoles all together.

The wind groans and the house quakes with fury, with sorrow – with joy? Liberation: the tiles fly off the roof. Jaime hugs me close, whispers into my ear, shares ideas that will be lost in the rain. I talk about Maa Josephine: what are those two little boys doing right now? Are they clutching her skirts? I can see her swaying rhythmically among the high dark clouds, flying with her crown of braids; I hear her murmurs in the wind that shakes the windowpanes. The clamour has silenced my great-great-grandfather’s nawal, but I can see them all around me, here they are, lit by sepia flashes, full of delight, laughing together, Rebecca, Jerry, Torquel and Dumorrea, Rossilda, James, Sarah… there are other faces, faces like mine, men and women with no papers or names, entire crowds, all silent. At peace. So let the eye destroy the concrete, let it leave a space where we can suffer enough to stop seeing the past and its margins and distinctions, a space where we can start again. I want to see the disaster wipe it all clean, the trail of flags, the record of prejudice, I want to see, even if it’s clad in sepia, a kingdom of liberating lovers settle amid the wreckage of our masks. Josephine, I can hear your silky voice, singing in a new language, a choir follows you and my tears are tears of painful happiness, like the tears of childbirth, my heart leaps and thunders. The injections don’t fix anything, the monitors, the techniques, the calculations, the plans.

The Caribbean is a navel, deep, infinite… I whisper. I feel myself held by taut muscles, feel myself tickled by cool breath. San Andrés trembles in ecstasy. And I tremble too. I don’t know what time it is, what day; the fiction of time has also vanished and I let myself plummet into the spiral of the seahorse.