Cricket in a Fist by Naomi K. Lewis

book I’d read or a movie I’d seen. I realized I’d wrenched myself free from the chokehold those memories once had on me. The present became and remains luscious and ripe.
    Imagine yourself in a train station, dragging everything you’ve acquired in your life. Not to mention all the clutter you’ve inherited from your family. All those bags and suitcases — all the anxiety they cause. You’re afraid you might lose them, afraid they are becoming too heavy. Afraid they might tumble open and spill your dirty underwear in a humiliating pile around your feet. Put it all down and set it alight — build a pyre and leave it! The train pulls out, leaving that smouldering pile of ashes behind. Yes, it’s normal to feel a momentary pang of loss, ofregret, just as we grasp at dreams while we wake — even nightmares. But the station is already behind us and there’s no need ever to look back. Now you can go wherever you like.
    J. Virginia Morgan
    The Willing Amnesiac: Reappearing into the Present

Three
    It was Benna Hadrick who showed Jasmine the stocky, shiny-faced man in the mall. He had a receding hairline and wore light-coloured jeans and a matching jacket, and he was with four girls, helping them choose clothes in La Boutique. “And those are his hoes,” claimed Benna, pushing a small, lacy red shirt into Jasmine’s hand. In the changing room, Jasmine took off her father’s grey and blue Adidas jacket and dropped it on the floor along with her baggy T-shirt. “Come out and show,” said Benna.
    A roll of white flesh poked out between the tiny red shirt and Jasmine’s jeans, and her chest was squashed, her nipples clearly visible through the fabric. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t fit.”
    â€œShow,” said Benna.
    â€œNo,” said Jasmine, pulling the shirt back over her head. “I ain’t your ho.”
    That was no pimp they saw. There are creatures that slip into this world, that have human faces but that rightly belong to some other order of being. There were more of them when Jasmine was younger; they used to reveal themselves often, in barely perceptible flashes. Angels hovering whitely outside the window; the tooth fairy’s quick hand under a pillow; Elijah’s split-second sip of wine at Granny and Grandpa Winter’s Passover Seders. She didn’t believe in many of them anymore, but she was trying with all her might to believe in pimps. Tall men, thin-muscled and silent, with sparklydark eyes that took everything in, scanning a room in seconds, scavenging for lost girls ripe for sexual slavery.
    For years, she had tried to look like a girl whose parents would search for her unremittingly if she was late home from school or swimming; though she was in fact that kind of girl, she was afraid a stranger might mistake her for the other kind. The kind that could slip, like a small animal under a door, into a different life where her parents would never be able to find her. But that was when she was little and afraid to be separated from her father’s side, as if the world was trying to drag her away from safety. Now she was older, in grade eight, and she could see that it was the other way round. Her family and her routines and her school — they were traps that she could escape only by violently wrenching herself free.
    Lara had recently shown Jasmine an article about pimps — it said an abductor might trail a girl for days waiting for the right moment. “These are calculating, manipulative people,” Lara explained over dinner, rubbing her corn over the lopsided, melty butter. “They prey on girls with no social network. Girls who seem lost and insecure.”
    So, walking in crowds, Jasmine hung back from her parents, trying to look abandoned and astray. When Lara and Dad took her back-to-school shopping at the Bay, they were distracted by a coat sale, and Jasmine wandered across the room