The Possibility of Lions E-Book

Marta Maretich

• Herausgeber: Gemma Open Door for Literacy
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 53

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The McCall family should be thrilled to be back in California, after what happened to them in Africa. Forced to flee their home in Nigeria by the violence of the Biafran Civil War, they turn up in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, and everyone assumes they must be delighted to be back in their own country. But while life in the States may be safe, it's also foreign to this unlikely family of refugees. They dream of the day they'll return to their real home in Africa--a prospect that seems more remote as they watch the brutal progress of "their" war on television. Fortunately, relief comes in the suave form of Anatole Hachette and Roland, his lion. Like the McCalls, Anatole has been thrown out of Africa. Unlike them, he has solved the problem of losing his native land. His plan is to recreate a piece of it in California by establishing a wild animal park, Safariland, on the dry plains outside of town. But will the cautious locals embrace the possibility of lions? And can two such different worlds really be brought together in one place?

Leseprobe

Marta Maretich

THE POSSIBILITY OF LIONS

Marta Maretich is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Georgia Review and The Jacaranda Review. Marta was editor of The Berkeley Poetry Review and Whispering Campaign, a journal of arts and literature. She has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo and Norton Island, Maine. Marta Maretich lives in London.

First published by GemmaMedia in 2011.

GemmaMedia

230 Commercial Street

Boston, MA 02109 USA

www.gemmamedia.com

© 2011 by Marta Maretich

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles of reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

15     14     13     12     11                 1     2     3     4     5

978-1-936846-02-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maretich, Marta.

The possibility of lions / Marta Maretich.

   p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-936846-02-3 (pbk.)

1. Nigerians—California—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Fiction. 3. Families—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3613.A7398P67 2011

813’.6--dc23

          2011022043

Cover by Night & Day Design

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

Inspired by the Irish series of books designed for adult literacy, Gemma Open Door Foundation provides fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

Brian BouldreyNorth American Series Editor

For Ruth and Frank, with love.

ONE

The suitcase was small, made of green and blue plaid canvas with a black plastic handle. A zipper made the circuit of one side like a golden racetrack. Mercy unzipped this, then she zipped it again, enjoying how smoothly the teeth locked together, how tightly they clenched to close the case. Then she unzipped the lid completely, flipped the soft top back and began to fill the suitcase with her most precious things.

She knew the problem with having too many treasures, or ones that were too big: you couldn’t carry them. Mercy kept hers small and portable. She knew what mattered. A large box of crayons, the thin grown-up kind, with skin color included. A pad of paper. Her striped bathing suit, because if you were lucky you would get to swim where you were going. A stuffed rabbit. A liverwurst sandwich, nice and flat, in a thin plastic baggy. Her copy of Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss. At the last moment she included a pair of pins, two sleek cats with rhinestone eyes, that her grandmother had given her for her last birthday. They were small, and they might be valuable. Mercy guessed you could trade them if you got into real trouble.

She closed the suitcase and slid the zipper around its track with satisfaction. It made a tight seal. She carefully folded, then rolled, one of Irene’s dishtowels into a round pad the way Imelda had shown her, and she placed this on her head. Then she lifted the case and balanced it on the pad. After a moment she took her hands away and began, carefully, to walk.

She went down the long shadowy hall using smooth, ladylike steps. Her rubber flip-flops kissed her heels lightly as she went. She glided past the room her father was using as an office. A few steps farther took her past the door to her parents’ room, closed and locked. She paused and listened but heard nothing. It was Saturday morning. From the family room came the sound of cartoons—screeches, bangs, the roar of canned laughter. Stephen would be up and watching in his pajamas, soupy brown Cocoa Puffs dissolving in a bowl, his eyes still swollen with sleep or crying. Mercy slipped through the living room to avoid him. She managed to pull open the heavy glass sliding door with one hand and descended the cement steps onto the patio, head held high, with only a slight wobble when she bumped the corner of the suitcase against the doorframe.

Outside, the sun had just come up over the tall redwood fence, but the day was already hot. She closed the door behind her, shutting in the cool, stale air. Out on the shady cement patio, she commenced pacing back and forth, queenly. The suitcase was comfortable on her head. It reassured Mercy that she could carry her things by herself now. She could carry it like this for miles, or as long as it would take to get away.

For a whole year after the McCalls arrived in the town, nobody except Bill’s sister, Aunt Alice, knew that they were refugees. How would they know? The family looked like everyone else. They spoke English. Bill McCall worked in the oil fields like so many local men. Irene was a trained teacher, though she wasn’t working. There was nothing special about the two kids, nothing that obviously set them apart, except for the little girl’s stubborn habit of carrying everything on her head.

Their sudden arrival in town was nothing unusual. Just about every single person in Bakersfield came from somewhere else, and most had come recently. The town had been nothing more than a dusty farming center not long ago, standing all alone in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Now, at the end of the sixties, Bakersfield was growing fast. People were attracted by the oil business and the profits to be made from the cotton, grain and fruit crops that stretched out in all directions around the town. In a boomtown, no one asks why you came there. No one was curious about the McCalls.

Mercy soon learned that even if she took the trouble of explaining how her family got to Bakersfield, people didn’t understand. Children in her class, teachers, neighbors, ladies at the checkout in the supermarket: they looked at her with confusion when she tried to tell them how the war had come suddenly, how they had walked out the front door of their house in Port Harcourt with only one big brown Samsonite suitcase, how her father had stayed behind for three months, then come back to America without a job. The people she tried to tell didn’t really know what Mercy was talking about, except the part about losing your job. They sympathized with that. But it seemed like not a single person in Bakersfield had ever heard of a place called Nigeria. Some people only had a foggy idea of where Africa was.