“Cold tears as salty as ocean spray wet my face. The day...

“Cold tears as salty as ocean spray wet my face. The day before she died, my mother did something I still don’t understand. She took me out in our little fishing boat, out on the open water of the sea—the thrum and hiss of surf upon the shore behind us, the rhythm never ceasing.

My mother waited until we were out of sight of land. She squinted against the bright sunlight, making sure we were alone. And then she taught me something: strange words in a foreign tongue, a lilting singsong cadence to it.

…………

My lips seem numb from the welter of memory that surrounded me there. Memories of running on the tall grass near the ocean waves, laughing with my mother nearby. And later memories, of watching my family suffer and die.

On her deathbed, gasping and shivering with pain, my mother brought forth words no one else could hear, and she gave them to me as her last secret, making me promise to fulfill her dying wish. For no one else was left here to take her name forward: none were left alive from this village.”  

— from the novel Sinful Folk