This is a community that does not quite come together. If on one road the houses are separated into tidy lots, on the road just over they are crowded together and lean into each other as if for comfort. If solid concrete houses rise like sentinels at the beginning of a road, the architecture will devolve into clumsy board shacks by the time you get to the cul-de-sac. The streets run in unplanned and sometimes maze-like directions paved roads often thin into dirt paths wide streets narrow into alleys lined with zinc or scrap-board fences. Perhaps it is the dust bowls, the tracts of sand and the dry riverbed that give the place this cornmeally look. Seen from up here, the ramshackle valley looks like a pot of cornmeal porridge, rusting tin roofs stirred into its hot, bubbling vortex. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin-as if a kind of ruin has befallen them. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar-a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. Down there is a dismal little valley on a dismal little island. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. Below us, the green and blue disc of the earth. Next-and this is the important bit-you must imagine yourself inside it. First you must imagine the sky, blue and cloudless if that helps, or else the luminously black spread of night.

Augustown by kei miller