I promised myself that someday I would tell you about the Black Shell Girl. How she looked at me with eyes of such loathing that in the equatorial heat they struck my heart cold and still haunt my dreams. How she slid soundlessly through putrid water and all I could think of was her thin body, her girl parts, being exposed to so much bacteria and the infections that must follow. How dark dark black her skin was, though it was only meant to be coffee colored. How she didn't appear to go to school with the other children but instead spent all day in the water gathering snails for her family to eat. This is the lowest form of poverty in an impoverished country.
She was black.
The water was black.
The snails were black.
Snails the size of your fist, but it still took several buckets to feed a family for a day. They are mostly shell, after all.
She diffused silence and hatred. Hatred for the snails, hatred for the putrid water, hatred for the merciless sun, but especially hatred for everyone else. Because none of us were in that water, none of us were that cursed, and none of us were that young.
She slid through the stagnant trench with her alligator eyes locked on me. Me, pale as a helpless fish, under a UV-blocking umbrella, belly full of anything but snails. None of us deserve the life we are given.
In my dreams she one day crawls onto the bank and discovers that she no longer has the body of a too-thin 12-year-old girl, but instead the armored skin and prehistoric jaws of her brethren. She slips back into the water and slides away from the rotting shack forever, full of power and vengeance.
Eventually she finds me and eats me.
And at last we can both sleep peacefully.
