In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Subraj Singh’s story is the winning entry from the Caribbean.
The creature arrived in the deep of the night, as a ball of fire floating in the sky, and as it circled the cottage, Margot held her baby tight against her chest, as if it was the last time she was ever going to hold him, and she avoided the imploring stares of the old women, Estelle and Bhanu, who were crouched beside her on the floor, as the ball of cold, yellow flames flew around outside, ravenous, rippling against the dark and searching for a way into the cottage, as Margot clenched her fists and inhaled deeply, and found herself thinking about how cruel her fate was, how, soon, at midnight, after so many centuries of strife, the country, poised to gain Independence from England, would finally be out of the white man’s hands, free and ready to heal itself from years of exploitation, and she let out a brittle laugh as she considered that this was supposed to be a jubilant occasion for everyone – a time for gatherings, for music, for dancing, new clothes, and good food, and heavy drinking – but instead, for her, and for her baby, this night was one that had festered, turning misery-stink, swelling with fear, and, as she thought about these things, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the fireball spinning, non-stop, lighting up the windows of the cottage as it passed by, a long plume of smoke trailing behind it like a malignant tail as it searched for a space at the bottom of the door, or between the hinges, or a key hole, or a crack in the wood of Margot’s home that it could use to slink through, and then proceed to bite into the tender body of Margot’s baby so it could feed, and Margot shivered at the thought, and clutched the child closer, and upon feeling Bhanu’s urging hand on her shoulder, she realized there was no other way out of it, and she had to do what they had planned to do if she wanted to save her baby, and so she gave the child a kiss on his forehead, let him breathe against her cheek, and then said to him, in a hard and desperate tone, as if forcing the words to become true, she said, grinding her teeth, Mama gon come back soon, and before the tears, hot, and lingering just behind her eyes, started to fall again, she handed the baby over to the women, as the revolving fireball, like a star cast out of heaven started to burn more and more, brightening the floor and the walls with its harsh glare, its gold flames desperately trying to reach into the womb of the house as it sensed, and sought to claim, the blood that ran through the child that the three women shielded with their bodies, and Estelle, her eyes wide and holding the fire within them, turned to Margot in a panic and said, Quick, quick, yuh must go now, as she swaddled the baby in her arms with a comforter, and Bhanu, who had already wrapped the chopped onions, cloves of peeled garlic and handfuls of hot scotch-bonnet peppers into the jute sack that she handed to Margot, whispered, This fireball looking fo a way in, and it going to find one soon enough, so you best make haste, and get to de skin befo it too late, so Margot clutched the jute sack to her body, as if it was her own heart that had somehow manifested itself outside her chest, and she rose to her feet, and she tried to ignore the creature roving along one wall of the house before coming to settle behind the front door, and as Margot headed to the window opposite the doorway, she looked back and saw Bhanu ripping open one of several bags of raw rice that she dumped out onto the floor, the tiny white grains pinging against the wood, bouncing everywhere, and as Margot opened the window, and felt the grasping of the cool nocturnal air against her clothes, and lowered herself on to the black ground, she heard the unspooling of another layer of protection, as Estelle’s and Bhanu’s voices, rising from low rumbles to full-throated shouts, launched curses at the creature, and as Margot fled into the thick night, tramping the soft grass beneath her feet as she ran, swatting white-lit fireflies out of her way, in her mind, she could see them, these two old women, Estelle, with several of her fingers stiffened from years of untreated arthritis, and Bhanu, hunchbacked, bent like a sapling carrying a heavy fruit, holding the child between them, surrounded by a circle of rice, ready to face off against this thing that undulated outside the cottage, and she could hear their drifting voices, as Estelle screamed, No more, yuh blasted bitch, yuh best get yuh nasty rass away from here, right now, and leave this chile alone, because yuh big, stinking self won’t get a drop more of he blood, so yuh going to starve tonight, LOUSE, and then Bhanu cried out, Get from here, whore, with yuh dutty soul, and go back to hell, and if you only try and enter this house, see if I don’t chop yuh right across yuh face with me cutlass, yuh ugly, old WITCH, and Margot was running as fast as she could, her skirt kicked high, dashing against the dark, hurrying past the paddy fields, glimmering wet in the moonlight, Margot, whose feet seemed to work on their own, having memorized the pathways laced through the village and knowing where to take her, Margot, who moved so fast she barely had time to register the tender, pearly glow of the stars in the night sky, or the crescent moon that was matching her pace from behind a cloud, or the outlines of the nearby houses, each cottage resting on the ground like a troll, eyeing her every step, each one empty, as most of the villagers had long departed for the capital city, or other towns, for the Independence celebrations, and when enough time had hurtled by and she realized that Estelle’s and Bhanu’s curses had been strangled by the night, forcing her to look back, Margot saw her illuminated cottage, and the creature, now firefly-small in the distance, still dancing in the air, and casting its ghastly light over the building, which was so rudimentary, Margot realized, made of nothing but thatch and driftwood, and it was then that she faltered, stopping in her tracks and looking back at her tiny home, and the glowing monster looming above it, and as she thought of her son, unwanted images pushed themselves to the forefront of her eyes, so that she saw the creature’s red mouth pressed against her baby’s arms, and then his legs, draining the blood from him so his skin turned as white as old, forgotten rice, and she pressed her body against one of the nearby mango trees lining her path, and she let her weight fall against the trunk, even though she knew that the bit of time she had managed to snatch should not be squandered, and Margot found herself weeping, her tears dripping down her face and salting the roots of the tree that was providing her with respite; I can’t go back, Margot said to the night, biting back sobs, and swallowing them whole, I can’t go back, I can’t go back, I can’t go back – not yet, before wiping her eyes and forcing away her hostile thoughts, focusing again on the things she could see, the things that were real, the jute sack in her hands, the rough bark of the mango tree, the cloud of leaves rustling above her head, the toads scattered all around her, leaping as high as her knees, and then she made her legs move again, shaking the burn out of them, and she started to run once more, so the sweat on her skin went cool in a sheath of breeze, and as she ran, she told herself that she needed to trust Estelle and Bhanu, and their promise to guard her baby while she sought out the fireball’s skin, that these were fierce old ladies, women who had survived years of protests and hard living, and so, on she ran, and it was only when she could hear the murmuring of the surf that Margot realized how far she had run; she had managed to reach the edge of the village, where the land gave way to the sea, and when she looked out on to the stretch of sea water, it was shocking in its vastness and its greyness, and, as she sprinted past, she found herself thinking about her baby’s father, as it was years ago on a sunny day at this same bit of coastline, where he had stood, with the rest of the troops that had been called in from England – to enforce control, to imprison political leaders, to destroy books, to quash any possibility of dissent – holding their rifles aloft and practicing their shooting, yellow sparks bursting, and tendrils of smoke bleeding, from the tips of their weapons with the release of every wave of gunfire, and, as she had passed those white men, in their brown soldier’s outfits, each one red in the face, arms peppered with mosquito bites, she had noticed Arthur, with his strong stance, and his large, handsome nose, and the wisp of a golden moustache above his upper lip, and she was young enough to be impressed by those things, and foolish enough to ignore what others told her about him, so she never pushed back, not even when he said, My dearest, what I do, I do for my country, and for you, and it was only much later, when he had leeched all the happiness from her life, draining her, so she became melancholic and dreary, while, after the revelation of her pregnancy, he constantly seemed to be brimming with a frigid meanness, that she came to understand who he really was, and, as Margot bounded along the beach, the hill finally emerging from the shadows, she tried to force Arthur from her mind, thanking God that he had boarded a ship for England as soon as Independence became a certainty, and that she had, instead, met Estelle and Bhanu, who had heard her complaints about the strange marks on her baby’s body, and her cries about how the child remained thin and sickly, even though she nursed him as much as she could, and who had seen, one night, a ball of flames bouncing from a certain hilltop, then flying along the shore, and over the flooded paddy fields, and above the village, only to vanish into Margot’s home, and she was grateful that they saw this, and put two and two together, and came to her with a plan to stop the wretched fireball, and, as she began the climb up the mound of hard-packed dirt that made up the hill, Margot felt the pain deepening in her legs, her breath becoming ragged, a dart throbbing in her ribcage, but she fought on, and kept hauling herself up, willing her feet to keep moving, and when she looked down on the entire village, she felt as if she was flying alongside the stars in the sky, and as she neared the top, she noticed, along the distant horizon, silent from afar, a bit of the capital city, jutting out into the sea, and adorned with minute white lights that blinked at her across the water, and when she turned and looked at the village once more, in the direction of her cottage, she saw the creature was nowhere to be seen, the flames gone, which, she knew, could only mean that it had found some way to enter her home, some tiny cavity that they had missed and failed to stopper, through which it could pour itself, as a stream of black smoke, before rising up, in its deadliest form, before the old women and the baby, and as Margot hurried up the last of the hill, terror bristling along her back, she could see, in her mind, the creature standing in her cottage, without fire now, humanoid, and skinless, with sagging teats, a head full of long strands of grey hair, its mouth a gnash of teeth, its fingers that it used to smooth over bite marks – so, in the morning, the victims’ mothers could never be sure what had left the black blemishes on their children’s skin – elongated and tipped with talons, and as Margot felt her feet slowing down again, as the weight of the sight in her head threatened to saddle her and drag her down, she clutched her jute sack tighter, and reminded herself about the rice Bhanu had poured, the rice the creature was doomed to count, grain by grain, before it was able to cross the threshold and launch an attack, and Margot knew there were thousands of grains in the bag that Bhanu had opened, with several unopened bags remaining if she needed them, which meant the fireball was doomed to spend all night there, clacking its claws against the wooden floor as it lifted each bitter seed of rice to its yellow eyes to count them, one by one by one, until daybreak came, forcing it to flee, so Margot kept up her pace, moving fast, and as soon as she reached the top of the hill, she threw herself at the foot of the lone calabash tree standing there, a gnarled sentinel, its branches knotty and twisted, like the limbs of a deformed skeleton, and, in a small hole, hidden between the tree’s tangled roots, Margot found what she was looking for, and she immediately pulled out the swathe of soft skin, and unfurled it, and dusted the little pebbles from it, and then she opened her jute sack, so the smell of garlic, onions and peppers erupted, blasting into the air all around her, and as she used her bare hands to ground the aromatics into the skin, the sharp and heavy scents prompted a memory of Margot’s father, who, when she was a child, worked hard, from Sunday to Sunday, morning to nightfall, in the kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Galveston, a white couple, who lorded over the main street in the nearby town, and Margot had visited her father at work on several occasions because that was the only way she got to spend time with him, and he would let her peel the milder vegetables, while he cut the meats, salted the marinades, kneaded the dough, chopped provisions, washed rice and ground the onions, garlic, peppers, scallions, parsley and thyme to make green seasoning, while monitoring the many pots, each one hissing and bubbling over yellow flames, with sweat lining his neck as he fanned himself with an old newspaper, and reminded her to ensure that she was never alone with Mr. Galveston, and then made her laugh by telling her stories of spirits and ghouls, and now as the seeds from the peppers exploded into the fireball’s skin, and the garlic bulbs were rubbed in until they were invisible, and the onions were pounded in until only tiny white slivers were left behind to shine in the moonlight, Margot wrapped the skin, just as she had found it, and carefully tucked it under the old roots of the calabash tree, and even though she was almost blind from the stinging of her eyes, and her hands felt as if they were aflame, Margot knew it would be worth it, when, in the final grey minutes before morning came, the fireball would fly to this spot to escape the sunlight, and attempt to don its skin to return to its human form, to hide itself in plain sight, but this time, it would find destruction wrapped within itself, and as Margot stumbled down the rocky terrain of the hill, her entire body feeling as if it was on fire, she thought about her father, who had dropped dead in that heated kitchen, where so much of his life had been sapped for so little, and she thought of the Galvestons, too, wondering if they were on the same ship as Arthur, back to England, and Margot also thought of the fiery monster that had sought to harm her son, and she almost smiled when she envisioned how the creature would howl as its tainted skin started to sizzle on its body, as it tore into itself, and tried to return to its fireball form, only to find that it was too late, that the skin would not come off, and it would writhe in burning anguish, and die, on the same hilltop it had stolen and secured for itself, so long ago, to make its home among its victims, and Margot told herself that this was what the creature deserved for wanting to feed on others, and, as she descended, she muttered out loud, Go back to hell, demon – where yuh belong.
At the foot of the hill, Margot crouched in the grass. She rested her legs and allowed her breathing to return to normal.
When she was able, she stood and walked to the beach.
She looked across the water, at the capital city, as fireworks were released in a dazzling display of lights. They shot high into the air and shimmered in place before exploding into large, soundless sparks. They were so far away from her, but Margot knew the importance of those lights.
She crossed the spit of sand and approached the murky sea.
She let the waves splash over her feet, as she bent and washed her hands and arms. When she was done, her fingers were cool but still burning slightly. She held her hands out to the wind and thought of her child. She watched the horizon, dotted with fireworks and white stars, and waited for the dawn that was to come.
Image © Steven Weeks
