when a son is born, the sorrow inside the home glides out of its hiding places like birds
       and scavenges the remnants of hopes and dreams.

       Pregnant women feed the birds in hopes that they will be sated and thus allow them to give
       birth to a girl.

       At night new mothers can be seen, framed in their lit windows, lifting their infant sons in
       their arms, telling them not to worry. They are as good as daughters. Don’t let anyone tell
       you otherwise. But the sons already know, deep in their bones, something about them is
       terribly wrong.

       Many boys don’t wish to grow up to be married off in exchange for cash. Nor do they want
       to join the ranks of the unmarried island men who work the menial jobs. Some run away
       to join the monastery, hoping to devote their lives to purifying their souls.

       But monastic life is not for every boy. To enter, men must first become eunuchs. Everyone
       knows that the gonads have a mind and soul of their own. An uncastrated man can never
       be trusted on sacred ground. For while a man’s mind says one thing, his penis says
       another. The penis, according to island legend, is the horn of the devil and the source of all
       evil. It is the curse the island boys can never escape.

       First the Spanish came to our island, then the English, then the Dutch. They came with
       ships and guns and cannons and their god of death. They came to take our gold, our men
       and women, our souls. We gave them everything they wanted. When they had had
       enough, when they had stolen everything they could and were homesick for their own
       wives and lands, they left. We were never so happy as the day we watched the last of them
       go. But just as the ships were setting their heavy sails and heading across the bay, several
       women waved their arms and ran across the water to ask a few last questions of their
       priest about their god and about their strange kind of prayer. The priest, who was standing
       on the prow of the ship in his robes, was so surprised to see the women running on water,
       he lifted his arm in the air in the sign of the cross. At once the women sank like stones. In
       this way, the first converts on our island arrived. The people on shore who watched the
       women sink became converts as well. And they, too, began to die. This is how death came
       to our island. To this day there are those who believe in death, and those who live forever.
       It is often debated which is the better way.