Excerpt from "Sent From Overseas" by Rudy Gurley

Copyright © 2006 Rudy Gurley - All rights reserved

I exhaled slowly through my mouth, feeling warm blood coursing through me, my aching eyes scanning the commotion below.
   Curious spectators thronged both sides of the street. The narrow sidewalks were teeming, people spilling over into the street, tourists wandering about clicking their digital cameras. The rowdy procession moved along slowly, cardboard placards raised high in boisterous protest. No burning effigies of me that I could see.
   Across the street loomed the ultra-modern bluish glass and steel structure of the Bank of St. Lucia, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, casting sparkling rays of sunshine in the air.
   It was a luminous blue-sky day in the land of my birth.
   With her immaculate beauty ‘Helen of Troy’ had launched a thousand ships. So too had the tiny Caribbean island, St. Lucia, ‘Helen of the West Indies’. Fourteen times it had changed hands in a tug of war between the British and the French, our history books said.
   The Brits prevailed but the French influence was ubiquitous – in the names of families, towns and villages, and the capital city, Castries, where, on Bridge Street, stood the nondescript three-storey concrete structure that housed my office.
   Today, in the tiny isle, still a battle raged. A fierce battle. A battle not between the British and the French, but a battle between …

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