Where their father had grown up, everyone had a nickname. His, for some reason, was Bora—the local word for green bean—though his real name was Marcus. No one in the family could tell him why.

            While the mystery of his nickname never did surrender to logic, there were other mysteries that did. Like the old-fashioned words buried into the ostensibly English patois of Guyana. When Poppy would sit down on a hard bench, for instance, when there were cushioned chairs available, Nanny would say, “Eh, suh mahga, you sit suh?” Marc pondered this. Mahga. Did she mean his Dad was acting like a martyr, to sit on so hard a chair?  It wasn’t until he overheard the butcher with his son next door that he caught the tail of the mystery. “Throw the mahga ting, no?”  Meager. As in, not much.

            Their father’s search for truth arose from the tension between his education—based on strict British empiricism—and his actual life, which was filled the myths and gods of five religions, seven languages, and the hoodoo endemic to people who exist at the edge of the world’s largest jungle. As he came of age, he had exploded the superstitions that surrounded him, one by one. Old wives tales were shown to be merely sound house-keeping advice, while tales of jumbies and bacoos were thinly disguised parental injunctions, designed to scare children.

            On the whole, though, he found that people seemed to prefer their superstitions. And so, in his youth, he’d developed this particular staccato laugh— a response designed to remind himself that the person with whom he was speaking was an idiot; one of those who preferred their illusions.