Linda girded herself and reached out for the dorlis with a wave of her empathy. She had to stop this mad, enraged thing from hurting any more people. The shadowy creature once again reacted to Linda, once againtried to surge toward her, its tendrils sharpened to knife’s edges. It would eliminate her for good.
She ignored the disgust that crept through her consciousness from restraining the thing with her mind. More of her Broken Hearts shared themselves with her, their beautiful soul selves giving her strength, resilience. She wouldn’t survive this, she would bleed out, but maybe she could hold out long enough so others could get away. Maybe she could blow the damned thing apart like before, even for a moment.
And that’s when she felt it, her latest and last Broken Heart, Evelyn, giving herself to Linda as well. The glistening turquoise-blue silhouette that was Evelyn’s and Evelyn’s alone.
Except Evelyn had a stowaway.
Linda gasped, felt the vile touch of the dorlis within her consciousness.
The dorlis had begun to feast on Evelyn’s soul.
The creature was inside Linda’s mind.
Linda croaked for help, writhed on her side as the creature instinctively latched itself onto her psyche. Given direct access, there was no need for an amulet. It was hungry for more to eat, to add to its power. The precious memories that Linda had… so many, with her Broken Hearts. Linda felt the dorlis encircling her, surveying that which it could consume. The dorlis saw her, and she saw it.
She saw it…
Her mind was in connection with the dorlis…
She struggled to hold at bay the shadowy, amorphous thing that hung right above her in the sky. She heard the moans and wails of people in agony. She experienced all of this as she began to do what she’d done for more than eight years since establishing her agency in the District of Columbia.
She entered into ritual.
Linda pushed her consciousness through the dorlis’s murk. She persevered for as long as she could, though she feared she would lose her mind, the creature’s maelstrom of emotion unrelenting. She pushed on until she saw the small sliver of a figure that represented who this being once was. A young man. A young man who’d been passed around as a plaything among those who’d enslaved the bodies of others.
The dorlis recalled who it was before he held on for too long in the realm of ghosts and became the deranged creature who appeared before Linda now.
The dorlis recalled that it was not a creature but a person. He remembered his name… which his mother had given him. Had sung to him on countless nights. His name was Georges.
Georges.
Whose fury and bitterness had transformed him.
The dorlis remembered…
… when his mother had sung to him in her native language of Igbo when he was a little child. How the song soothed his nerves when she would put him to rest in the plantation huts or strap him to her back before another morning of toil in fields of sugarcane.
The dorlis remembered…
… the rapture of running through the forest alongside his best friend, Jean-Claude. Wet soil beneath his feet. Far above his head, the brilliant green of fromager and mangrove and breadfruit trees. The unending green, in his heart since birth.
The dorlis remembered…
… the roar of a waterfall, being surrounded by rocks in the swirling pool formed by Les Gorges de l’Alma, the water warm as he stood naked withAntoinette. Her nipples and areolas and bushy hair that sat atop her head magnificent in the sunlight. Jean-Claude caressed him from the back, two fingers missing from his left hand. His massive chest rested against Georges’s shoulder blades. His thick arousal pressed against Georges’s behind.
The dorlis remembered…
… the l’Alma waterfall yet again, how Antoinette and Jean-Claude praised Georges for his beauty though his back had been scarred from multiple lashings. How their kindness made him cry. The three having stolen away from the slave quarters to enjoy each other on a Sunday, their day of rest. One of the happiest days of Georges’s life, before Antoinette and Jean-Claude were each sold away weeks later.
Linda amplified these memories, made them larger than the heavens. Reminded Georges of the moments where he felt full of life before he became a plaything of his enslavers. Before the master of the plantation forced him to be a plaything for other Frenchmen and women who visited the property, young Georges too gorgeous and spry to be reduced to hard labor in fields of sugarcane. Georges became broken, fragile, numb in the mind. He made his soul small to escape the deprivations forced upon him, as he found himself passed around from master to overseers to captains to do with as they pleased. In a few years, no longer considered desirable, Georges was finally forced to work in the fields. He died from diseases that consumed him before he turned twenty-nine. And in death, he refused to let go.
Linda observed all the unspeakable horror that drove the dorlis to feast on desire, to snatch away the precious things from others that had once been stolen from him. She sat with the horror, then moved past it, for she needed Georges to see who he really was. The person he’d forgotten. She brought his soul self to the fore, a silhouette saturated with the kaleidoscopic hues of the forest.
The dorlis had to remember.
And then she asked Georges to stop this. She was a daughter of Elegua, orisha of the crossroads. She reminded him that he had a choice. Her will, like steel, for she now engaged in ritual empowered by dozens of her Broken Hearts.
She heard another scream. One of anger, regret, of all the time spent reliving pain and trauma instead of remembering who he once was.
