need to change her dress. She glanced back at the veranda. The adults were roaring with laughter, slumping with drunkenness. Whatever wrongdoing was happening in her garden, it was up to Isa to fix it.
* * *
She raced diagonally across the lawn in her bare feet. As she neared the wall, she slowed and stalked the boys, tiptoeing right up to their backs and peering over their shoulders. At first she couldn’t see much of anything, but then she caught a glimpse of a thick-looking puddle at their feet. It was mostly clear but, as Jumani now pointed out in a hushed whisper, there were spots of blood in it. Isa’s eyes widened. Blood in her own garden? She looked back at the party. Emma was interrupting Stephie’s quiet read; Winnifred’s freckles were pooling into an orange stain in the middle of her forehead as she concentrated on the next croquet hoop; Ahmed, snot dripping dangerously close to his open mouth, stared back at Isa but he seemed sunstruck rather than curious. She glared warningly at him and turned back. The boys had disappeared around the corner of the garden wall. Isa took a deep breath, circled the mysterious puddle, and followed.
She found them squatting at the foot of the guava tree – her guava tree, with its gently soughing leaves, its gently sloughing bark. Isa strode towards them with purpose, abandoning all efforts at sneakiness now. But the boys were too fascinated with whatever they saw to notice her. A whining and a rustling from under the tree drowned the sounds of her approach. Isa looked over their hunched shoulders, her throat tight. Lying on its side, surrounded by the four boys, was Ba Simon’s dog.
Cassava was a ridgeback, termed thus because of the tufted line of fur that grew upward on either side of the spine. At the bottom of this tiny mane, just above the tail, was a little cul-de-sac of a cowlick. Ba Simon had named the dog Cassava because of her colour, though Isa had always thought her yellowish white fur was closer to the colour of the ivory horn her father had hung on the living-room wall. Today Cassava’s fur was crusted over with rust, and her belly, usually a grey suede vest buttoned with black teats, was streaked with dark red.
The boys were whispering to each other. Isa’s first thought was that they had poisoned Cassava and were now watching her die a slow, miserable death under the guava tree. But then she realised that Cassava’s head was pivoting back and forth along the ground. Isa stepped to one side and only then did she see the oblong mass quivering under the eager strokes of Cassava’s long pink tongue. The mass was the cloudy colour of frozen milk but the way it wobbled was more like jelly – or the layer of fat on gravy that’s been in the fridge too long. It was connected by a pink cord to a slimy greenblack lump. Jumani reached a stick towards it to investigate.
‘No!’ Isa said in a hushed shout.
Jumani dropped the stick and he and the others turned to her. Cassava whined and licked faster, her tail sweeping weakly. Just then the oblong thing on the ground jerked. Isa pointed at it, her eyes wide. The boys turned back. Where Cassava was insistently licking, there was a patch along the oily surface through which they could just glimpse a grey triangle. It was an ear. Isa took a seat beside the boys in the dust, her precious marigold dress forgotten.
Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of reverence, the children didn’t try to touch Cassava again while her tongue continued to lap at the oblong mass. Occasionally a tobacco-tainted breeze would float from around the corner or laughter would flare up, crackling down to a chortle. But the grown-ups didn’t come. The children watched in silence, gasping only once, when the outer skin finally burst, releasing a pool that crept slowly over the ground.
There it was, lying in a patch of damp dirt, trembling as Cassava’s tongue grazed its sticky body. It was the size of a rat. It was hairy and pink. Its face was a skull with skin. Below its half-closed pink eyelids, its eyes were blueblack and see-through. But no, that was just the sunlight dappling through the guava tree leaves and reflecting off them. If you looked closer, you could tell those eyes were opaque.
The boys grew restless. Cassava was