The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction JanuaryFebruary 2014 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 126) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2014-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

SHE WAS a heavy bronze woman, not fat but big-boned, as tall as me, and a real chef to judge by the main dish of fresh-caught flounder stuffed with lump crabmeat.

She ate with us, so obviously she was more than just a servant. But what, exactly? She and Mac treated each other with casual intimacy, yet she deferred to him and never directly contradicted anything he said. I deduced (correctly) that she was an employee, part of whose job description was to sleep with the boss when he chose. It seemed like a good, practical arrangement for a well-to-do bachelor, and I figured he had the best of the deal, whatever he paid her.

She wasn't what you could call beautiful, being built more like a monument than a lover, though she did have a fine pair of chocolate-dark, moist, sloe-shaped African eyes. She spoke in a Mississippi drawl laminated onto the singsong intonations of her home islands, whichever they were. She had the usual Caribbean tendency to stick Oh yes, mon, or Oh no, mon into a sentence at odd moments. She smelled of fresh sweat, allspice, and a faint, intimate something that might have been a vaginal cream. I thought she was about forty, but maybe she was older—it's hard to guess the age of a monument.

After dinner, Mac and I went back to the balcony and had another cigar, plus a drop of Courvoisier to aid digestion. He poured the liquor himself, explaining that Marley had gone back to town in his own boat to pursue his private business, which I gathered involved ganja, as you'd expect from a Bob Marley fan. Again the cigar tips glowed in the dark; fragrant clouds spread; and a light breeze crinkled the surface of an otherwise smooth and moonlit sea. And then out of the darkness came Mac's voice telling me how Yma had killed his wife.

"That bitch," he growled, clearly meaning the victim, not the murderess. "I guess I never told you about Amanda. For a few years I was besotted with her, even though once the honeymoon was over, she didn't do much for me in the bedroom and nothing at all in the kitchen. That's why I hired Yma, which turned out to be good for me but bad for Amanda.

"Yma has old-fashioned values, and from the beginning she didn't approve of her mistress. I mean, here's this woman doesn't sleep with her husband, treats him like dirt, has never borne a child for him or anybody else. Heat lightning was already starting to crackle between the women when I left on a business trip, and as soon as I was off the island Amanda ordered Yma to help her pack, because she'd decided to split before I returned.

"They went to her room, and Amanda selected from her bulging closets what she wanted to take with her. She took her jewelry out of the wall safe and tucked it into a money belt she always wore when traveling. All the time she was bragging how she intended to clean my clock in the divorce settlement.

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