Excerpt from Fleury’s fiction book: It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories]

Jislene scurries around her apartment determined not to be defeated by the Haitian Time Curse to always be late. She is married to a White man and living—what looks like to most outsiders—the American dream in the suburb of Lakeville, Massachusetts while her only daughter is away at university.

Now, in her red convertible with the top down and the wind in her straight black hair, she is listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from her debut album just released. She sings along with the lyrics: “You got a fast car; maybe together we can get somewhere. Maybe we make a deal, starting from nothing got nothing to lose…” She smiles to herself as she anticipates seeing the girls since they only meet once a month.

First there is Gilda, a gregarious gal who’s constantly laughing, even at things most people don’t even find funny. Betsy is a yoyo dieter. Her husband often mocks her by making “BooBoom Booboom Booboom” sounds when she walks in public, which Betsy always pretends to laugh off and then cries herself to sleep at night. Wanda, an Arabic woman who always wears a head wrap and covered up in layers of clothes leaving only her face and hands visible to the
public, to appease her Arabic husband. Polish Paula, at 25 with blond hair and blue eyes, is the youngest of the group with a curvaceous hourglass figure that most middle-aged men would mortgage a house for.

Jislene arrives just as the sun is setting over her rural surroundings. She pushes through the door left ajar with an apologetic half smile on her face for always being late. “Bonsoir and sorry ladies, I really tried hard not to be late this time,” she says in her Haitian accent.
“Oh, Jislene. Next time, I’ll have to send a time police to your house to handcuff you and bring you here on time?” Gilda utters laughingly.
“Sweety, you think I would waste my time with you bitches if you sent me a uniformed stallion to play with?” Jislene tilts her head back and laughs.

“Ladies, I take it you all have finished the book? I know I did and it was a fascinating read please, sit,” Betsy declares. “I particularly like the title ‘Mother, Lover, Murderer.’ I also found it to be quite relevant to the plight of modern women to free themselves from male domination, don’t you?” They all sit in Betsy’s living room and commence sipping tea and coffee.

“Oh, yes…I’ve known plenty of women who have been pushed to the edge to…you know, have reason to kill,” says Jislene as she looks nervously around the room, avoiding direct eye contact with the other women while she sips her coffee. “I found the sex scenes to be quite tantalizing indeed….” Wanda chuckles as she looks around at
the women.

“You of all people? Walking around all covered up like a mummy? You almost had me thinking that all you do in bed is pray!”” says Jislene, which invokes laughter from the women. “My favorite part was when Marla murdered her husband. I think it was justified since he practically enslaved her. I mean, who ties someone’s arms and legs to bed posts and then continuously act out mock rape scenes just for kicks and then afterwards expect her to cook his dinner and draw his bath. I would kill the motherfucker too if I was in that situation.” Spitballs are flying out of Jislene’s mouth and the veins in her neck are visibly throbbing as she practically barks out the words. Wanda squirms uncomfortably in her seat as she watches Jislene speak. Gilda laughs, but it almost seems forced. And at that very moment, a hissing sound can be heard coming from the kitchen, and Betsy—welcoming the distraction—stands up and asks, “More tea
anyone?” Everyone said no.

“Well, I definitely think that the son of a bitch got what he deserved,” offers Paula. “Now you can understand why I use my looks to manipulate the hell out of those assholes and clean out their bank accounts by the time I am done with them. Sex appeal is my ultimate weapon against those pigs and he better be packing no less than eight and a half inches if he wants to slip his key into my lock.” Paulo tilts her head in a brief forward and backward motion to accentuate her point. And all the women drop their jaws and raise their eyebrows in Paula’s direction.

“Well, my Charlie has his asshole moments, especially when he pokes fun of my weight, but for the most part he is good to me. As long as I do what he wants and try not to piss him off with back talk, we’re good. So what if he wants me to cook and clean in full make-up and high heels when he is around. I like to surrender to his 1950’s housewife fantasies,” Betsy says in a low resigned voice. As the ladies take turns talking, the moon can be seen hovering behind a cloud outside the living room window and the sizzling summer night air, which has seeped into the house—feels stifling and Betsy responds by turning on the ceiling fan.

“My husband is fucking my brother!” Wanda exclaims and all eyes turn to her in shock and disbelief. “As you know my brother has been staying with me since his divorce. Now I know why the marriage didn’t work!” The ladies are all silent and shocked. Paula speaks first, “Your macho male chauvinist husband? What makes you think…I mean…do you have any proof?”

“Well, one day I came home and my brother came out of our bedroom bare-chested, sweaty and buttoning up his pants, and I could hear Slav scurrying around our bedroom and when I quickly
poke my head in, he too was half naked trying to get his pants on. They both said half in unison that they were just wrestling with each other. Which I thought was a crack of shit!” Wanda leans forward with her right hand on her right thigh and cupped under her chin as she looks down at the floor. Outside, the moon is still slowly trying to evade the dense cloud that obliterates it and the windows are illuminated slightly by its fluorescent glow and rattling a bit from the growing wind. All the women are silent for a brief moment and the sound of crickets can be heard coming from the nearby woods. “What are you gonna do now Wanda?” Gilda asks.

“I don’t know. The women in my family never even consider divorce” Wanda says as she looks off in the distance. And then suddenly, like she just became infused with a sudden boost of manic energy, declares “But you know what, I think I’m gonna be the first. I’m going to divorce his faggot ass!” Then she stands up, yanks the head wrap from her head, takes off the long robe to expose a tight strapless red dress she wore underneath and all the women gasps in utter bewilderment and then suddenly begin clapping while Wanda takes a number of bows as if she’d just given the performance of a lifetime. “This is the kind of clothes I am going to wear from now on,” she says in a triumphant fashion. And with that, they adjourned the meeting.

As Jislene drives home, she is content to think that the ladies don’t really know her or what she has done. They don’t know that she is a serial black widow and that she has killed every man she’d ever married because they all reminded her of her father. She had been raped and sexually abused by her dad—while her mother looked the other way—since she was just five years old to the age of sixteen when she finally mustered the courage to run away from home. They don’t know that as she is driving home, she plans to stop by the store to buy more arsenic to prepare her current husband’s dinner. They don’t know that she has been physically and mentally abused by every man she’d ever married since running away from home, including her current one.

Would they judge her to be a bad person if they knew about the killings? After all, isn’t she the real victim here? They don’t know that the book they are reading was written by Jislene herself under a pen name. “It just goes to show,” She thinks to herself, “’our secrets are what constitute who we really are.”

As she shifts the gears of her stick shift, the moon finally peaks from under the heavy-handed mass of clouds to illuminate the dark highway on which she had driven many times on her way home from her book club.

Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured and internationally published Haitian American poet, theater reviewer, educator, author of numerous books of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and literary arts student through Harvard University. He was chosen among over 4, 000 competitors from 83 countries as the Recipient of the International Naji Naaman Literary Prize for Creativity (2026) and a Certificate of Participation for his “…esteemed contribution of poetry to the anthology Water: The Source of Life (Volume IV) presented by La Fenetre De Paris. 

It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories among other titles are available at all Massachusetts public libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, Wyoming University, Askews and Holts Library Services, the leading library supply specialist in the United Kingdom, The MIT Press Bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore and the oldest poetry bookstore in America: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop (est. 1927) has hosted great American poets E. E. Cummings and Alan Ginsberg and online bookstores worldwide such as Bookshop dot com, Amazon etc…