Dream Me An Island

An island rising from the sea, sand strewn with coconut husks frothing at its perimeters; leaning palms; the hills a mirage of purple looming from the rainforest… Set on an imaginary Caribbean island – a conflation of Tobago and St Lucia – ‘Dream Me An Island’ tells the story of local taxi driver Charles Wesley ‘Smiley’ Gumbs, who is coerced into using obeah magic to pressurise the Raubbau International Mining Corporation to stop mining for gold. The island’s slave-descendant inhabitants also face other kinds of invaders: tourists, non-indigenous plants and animals, and they continue to ward off harmful magic and cure their ills with ‘jumbie names’, bush baths and medicine bags of blood, bones, skins, eggshells and feathers. But, as Charles W. ‘Smiley’ Gumbs discovers, curing an island dying of greed is another thing altogether: as the Obeah Magic Man tells him, “Anything that belong to this island be taken back by this island.” By the author of Liquidambar (http://amzn.to/QChmjx), Songshifting (http://amzn.to/2d2ILJI), The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens (http://amzn.to/1SYgbZr) and Saccade (http://amzn.to/QChFel). ‘Dream Me An Island’ received an Honourable Mention in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy And Horror, Tenth Annual Collection, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York. It appears in Chris Bell’s story collection The Bumper Book of Lies, which received an Honourable Mention in the same anthology. The story was singled out for special mention by writer and critic Paul Di Filippo in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

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