Krik? Krak!

The first story in the collection is presented as a series of letters written between two anonymous lovers. In his letters, the young man describes the horrific conditions onboard his refugee ship from Haiti to Miami, Florida. He is one of 36 refugees on board, including a pregnant 15-year-old girl. The boat is old and full of leaks, which the refugees attempt to repair using tar. The group sings songs and tells stories in order to pass time and distract themselves from the smells of the boat and the unrelenting heat of the sun. His letters become gradually more abstract, as the young man comes to terms with dying far from his lover and Haiti. After a few days, the pregnant girl, Célianne, gives birth; the baby does not cry. As the boat takes on more damage, the passengers begin to throw off unnecessary weight, including dead passengers and clothes. The male narrator realizes that the baby is dead, and wonders why Célianne has not thrown it overboard. He learns that she became pregnant when Tonton Macoute officers entered her house and sexually assaulted her. As the situation grows more desperate, Célianne throws her dead child and herself off the boat. The narrator expresses a belief that he was fated to die at sea and return to Agwé, the Haitian spirit who is patron of the sea.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend struggles to survive the political violence in Haiti. She describes gendered violence against women in their neighborhood, including a neighbor named Madan Roger, whose son was involved in the same political group as the two lovers. The narrator’s father finds tapes of her boyfriend’s radio show, and is physically violent in response. She expresses suicidal ideation, and wishes that the police would kill her rather than assault her. When police return to the home of Madan Roger, the narrator’s father insists that the family hide, and they are forced to listen to the police beat their neighbor to death. The family then flees to a village in the countryside called Ville Rose; on the way, the narrator and her mother stop to buy black cloth to mourn Madan Roger. In Ville Rose, the narrator learns that her father sold their home and all of his possessions in order to keep the police from killing her as retribution for her boyfriend’s political actions. She apologizes to her father, and thanks him for the sacrifices he made to save her life. She spends her time in a banyan forest, where she continues to experience suicidal ideation. As the story ends, the narrator is chased by black butterflies, which she sees as an omen of her boyfriend’s death. Even after she hears news of a boat collapsing in the Bahamas, the narrator refuses to let the butterflies land on her, in an effort to delay what she knows to be true.