the tortoise shell

Among the strewn and broken crates and watery fish waste, Chloe ambled on through the darkness that had descended upon Grand Street. She remembered the story about the tortoise who happened to lose its shell and who then, after many moons, happily found it again. Through the red door and into the cement-paved courtyard behind her building, up the steep stairwell, she finally returned to her own shell. Within its walls, alone, stuffing the socks she never wore in the bottom drawer, just like before, and her toothbrush on the second level in the bathroom cabinet, she let her mind wander on through the mists of her memory of childhood. How the mangoes dropped like snowballs onto the roof of their house on Pinta Court. The great banyan trees and the way they swayed before a storm, rustling. She had come home.