The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived.( A Caribbean Story: written by:Kittitian Poet and Novelist Loughlin Tatem)

Once upon a time in a far, far away land there lived one hundred people.The people were a happy people. They had no lack of anything. As far as the hundred people could see, their land was paradise. The little children played happily on the dusty,unpaved streets until they were exhausted by their running, and jumping and the happy shrieks of laughter that rang pleasantly through the gentle air of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived.

One day a young man drove into The Land Where Only A Hundred People Lived.He had a shiny, new car. The children stopped their play and gathered around. They glared longingly into the class windows, touched the gleaming metal, stooped to gaze at the wheels that spun even after the car had stopped.The parents left their houses and gathered themselves around the shiny car too. They too touched the car and looked into its glass windows, laughing, adjusting their collars brushing their hands across their hair as they gazed into the shiny new mirror. The people of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived wanted a car. "How can we get one of these?" they inquired of the Young man who had driven the car into The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived.

The Young man explained to the people who lived in The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived how he went about getting the car.They laughed.Getting a car was so much easier than they had imagined, so off they went to get a car each for themselves.

When the children came home after school or play the mothers and fathers of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived were not at home.They came home late into the night or very earl the following morning to find their children had fallen asleep across the floor or sprawled across the beds, with dusty feet. Some of the children bore scars upon their hands, their necks, their faces, their foreheads; scars which the parents of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived had not seen when these wounds were fresh. Their little daughters carried hairstyles done upon their heads by no one with whom the parents were acquainted. The little boys spoke a language that was not of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived.They no longer squealed and played happily on the dusty streets. Instead, they fought, and smoked and gambled. They hated, and scowled and bopped. They suspected and distrusted. They drew imaginary borders which one group of children from across the other side of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived dared not cross on pain of death.They kicked the corpse, for it was not the body of the boy with whom they had played on the dusty streets of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived. They had only kicked the lifeless torso of a punk.

The cops of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived said they were investigating. But no one saw them question anyone. They did not go to the houses of the people of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived, or perhaps they did when people slept, for no one noticed them seeming to be investigating anything.No one saw them talk to the boy everyone knew held a grudge against the boy who was slaughtered in the street. No one saw them talk to his girlfriend and baby mother, who perhaps, just perhaps,he might have told about a threat to take his life away. The people of The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived waited for the cops to tell them something...anything; to simply look and sound as though they cared; to indicate whether or not they were making any little progress at finding out which of the hundred people living in The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived could have found the time, had the motive, sought the opportunity, possessed the temperament to slaughter the boy.

Now there are only ninety-nine people living in the land Where Only a Hundred People Lived. Now there is no playing on the streets as the brand new cars crawl by on their way to their garages through wrought iron gates. Curtains hang stiffened in air-conditioned houses behind metal-plated windows.

Today another boy was killed on the now paved streets of The Land Where only a Hundred People Lived.

Now there are only ninety-eight people living in The Land Where Only a Hundred People Lived.