Paté

“Paté, paté, paté!”

The woman selling Fritay and Paté shouted as she walked in the streets below. I quickly shot up from my seat and ran to the front of the building, looking below. The night air was still, lukewarm, and loud with insects, laughter, and casual passersby. The rooftop kept us high enough to find solace in the intermittent breeze under the moonlight.

“You going down to get some? Cuz you’d better hurry. Get me two Paté Kodé,” Pat said as she dug around in her pockets for money.

“I don’t know,” I responded—more to myself than anything. I looked across the street from where the woman had stopped to sell to the customers who had walked up to her. Beyond the moonlight, a cigarette butt glowed in the darkness.

A week earlier, upon arriving home from school, I heard commotion at the house gates. Voices shouting at each other. One of them sounded like Mama. So, I dropped my bag and slowly made my way towards the gate. I pressed my body to the wall and peered through the metal bars.

“So, you think you can up and leave me, and I’d just let you walk out with the kids?!”

“Oh, was I supposed to lie there and let you kill us instead?”

“I’m coming for them, and you’ll get what’s yours!”

“We’ll see, won’t we? Try me and see what happens.”

Mama turned to walk back through the gate and into the courtyard. She slammed the gate shut behind her. I felt the vibrations of the loud metal clank inside me. I ran as fast as I could to tuck myself behind the house steps.

Since then, every night when my siblings, cousins, and I would climb the rooftop of our house to tell stories under the moonlight, I’d look at the street below and see a cigarette butt burning in the darkness beyond. I don’t know who or what it was, but it made the hairs on my arm stand up.

Mama warned us about playing in the streets at night. She said the lougawou next door would get us. That they preyed on children who did not listen, especially when the lights went out on nights like this, and the city settled into darkness. Life spilled into the streets, and people soaked in the light wherever they could find it.

But I never had a problem with listening.

I thought, for sure, if I went down there, whatever was lurking in the dark would get me.

“I don’t think I like Paté anymore,” I said as I made my way back to my seat to listen to my brother finish his story.