She gather up her knees and pull them close close to her chest. Shari stare at me like I was Jesus and I was going to give a sermon from the top of a mount. Then I open my mouth and my story start to tumble out. I careful though. I sew the story of my life, but I take out some of the straying threads. I didn’t tell her how when I was in school and Miss teaching, all I hearing is voice like Joseph and nothing making sense. I see the other girls, dipping their fountain pen in ink and writing. When I do that, I know it’s the guava whip on my palm because everything will be wrong. I didn’t tell her that when I get home I rush to wash my panty before my mother come home and smell the pee on it, because that is another guava whip coming to meet my hand. I didn’t tell her that I wait till late at night, when I hear the man snoring, that that is the time I go outside to use the latrine. I do this because one time I was washing off myself with a dipper of water and all I hear was his nasty voice saying, “Make sure you scrub that thing real good.”

∞

June Aming is an award-winning writer based in Trinidad and Tobago. She won the BlackInk Writing Competition in 2023, was longlisted for the BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest in 2024, and was, in the same year, a Bocas Breakthrough Fellow, which saw her mentored by Lauren Francis-Sharma as she progressed her novel Yellow Is Not for Girls Like Me. This flash fiction piece is taken from a chapbook-length excerpt from that work, an excerpt published in Port of Spain in 2025 by Peekash Press, the imprint begun as a partnership between Peepal Tree Press and Akashic Books in 2014, now administered by the Bocas Lit Fest. The 2024 Bocas fellowships were awarded to early career writers to support them in advancing their fiction or poetry debuts, with funding from UNESCO, Caricom, UWI, the EU, and the ACP, under the Creative Caribbean joint project. Aming’s novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Deborah Rogers Award.