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The sleepy town of Visible was an exploration into the darkness of nighttime. It was the sum of a submissive place of archaic occurrences from the dark ages. The women were good and the men were "men". Vinette had breathed of a different life. She counted the moments until her departure to a cosmopolitan world of equality: A world where patriarchy was abuse, and domestic violence against the law.
Misunderstood and accused of being satanic for daring to speak of nighttime in Visible, Vinette gladly accepted her first round offer at a small university on the edges of nowhere, yet still on a daytime highway of travel. Timbuktu was hardly her ideal place to experience the Bahamian life of a student, but, hell, it was far better than the suffocating night of being in Visible, and that could only be good.
In Visible, folks kept to themselves, except to gossip about outsiders. Vinette had always been an outsider. The people who grew her up (not cared for her you understand, just grew her up) adopted her when she was 2 years old. A willful child apparently, who had been rejected by both birth parents because she had a fee will, she never did fit in with the town's preference for keeping bad behavior hidden. Whenever the male person with the voluptuous penchant for flogging her, did flog her, she would tell someone. On deaf ears it fell because flogging was a parents right in Visible. The child protection laws lay dusted over in a bottom drawer somewhere. Never did they see the light of day; not that there was much light in Visible, because in Visible nighttime reigned supreme.
Vinette had made but one friend during her years of imprisonment in the backward town of covered over dysfunction. Lina had come to Vinette's attention on their first day of school. As the teacher roared at the little children, Lina peed herself and hid under her desk, her hands clutched tightly over her head. Vinette recognized the behavior. It was the behavior of a kid, flogged at nighttime behind closed doors and ridiculed in public for being clumsy enough to attract multiple bruises. Although this was no different to what happened to all the other kids, Lina took it harder than most. Her broken button nose, "s" bent arm and bleeding welts, inflicted upon her by an evil and dark person of difference. That devil was a person who no longer cared if the nighttime was hidden or public because darkness in Visible would support him either way. The behavior in Visible was changing. Nighttime was engulfing
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