‘They went together like two bottles beneath a waterfall.’

A line from Edwidge Danticat’s heart-breaking short story, The Children of the Sea (1993)

I will have to explain to you why this image is so perfectly heart-breaking. Those two bottles in the centre of the sentence are a mother and child. They are so perfectly neat, inseparable, identical, a union of two forms. Say it out loud. It sounds like the ending of a fable or a fairytale, a children’s story. The compound structure of ‘waterfall’, two words joined together, intensifies that sense of a pair. The bottles merge into the image of the waterfall. In fact, they are the bodies of a young mother and a child thrown overboard – voluntarily, by the mother, – on passage between Haiti and America. It is a desperate act, but the tragedy is resolved or held – honoured, given space -- in this image of complete conjunction. They are two identical forms plunging side by side into a body of water that carries them down to the bottom of the sea, their burial ground. We feel both the lightness and the weight of their bodies -- bottles bob on water but eventually they go – this sentence is their perfectly formed burial. In this moment in time, all differences between them are eliminated.‘What God has joined together let no man put asunder.’