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He thought that the mountain would kill him, that he would never see the other side. He had been walking for two hours when suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his side. He tried some breathing exercises he remembered from medical shows on television, but it was hard to concentrate. All he could think of, besides the pain, was his room mate Michel who'd had an emergency appendectomy a few weeks before in New York. What if he was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, here on top of a mountain, deep in the Haitian countryside, where the closest village seemed like a grain of sand in the valley below?
Hugging his mid-section, he took cover from the scorching midday sun under a tall, arched, wind-deformed tree. He slid down onto his back, over the grainy pebbled soil and closed his eyes, shutting out, along with the indigo sky, the sloping hills and craggy mountains that made up the rest of his journey.
He was on his way to visit his aunt Estina, his father's older sister, whom he'd not seen since he'd moved to New York six years before. He had lost his parents to the dictatorship when he was a boy and his aunt Estina had raised him in the capital. After he'd moved to New York, she had returned to her home in the mountains where she had always taken him during school holidays. This was the first time he was going to her village, as he had come to think of it, without her. If she were with him, she would have made him start his journey earlier in the day. They would have boarded a carrion at the bus depot in Port-au-Prince before dawn and started climbing the mountain at sunrise to avoid sunstroke at high noon. If she knew he was coming, she would have hired him a mule and sent a child to accompany him, a child who would have known all the shortcuts to her village. She also would have advised him to wear a sun hat and bring more than the two bottles of water he'd consumed hours ago.
But no, he wanted to surprise her, however, the only person he was surprising was himself, by getting...