France won the World Cup. Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red apple though everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic. We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waiting for the Kingdom of God, sat on a throne in his dark room, translating Dante. The Galileo space probe revealed there was an entire ocean hiding beneath a sheet of ice in Jupiter’s moon. The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve and wanted vengeance. Elsewhere a desert caught fire. We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir Desmond Tutu. A snake entered our house through the drain and like any good son, I ran and hid under the bed. Google became a thing. Viagra became a thing. In July, it flooded at night and a wind nearly tore off our roof. I thought God is so in love with us, he wants to fill us with himself. My mother, I saw her through a slit in the door, a glimpse of amaranth-red scarf and swirling yellow skirt. She thought no one was looking. She was dancing in a trance to Fela Kuti. She laughed and clapped at the mirror. It was the year our house became a house of boys and girls, and a ghost, our little sister. Calmaria. That’s what the Portuguese called it. When it rained and the world was suddenly becalmed, we would run and peel out of the door, waving at the aurora of birds flitting past in the sky. We knew one of them, the little one, used to be one of us, those spectral white egrets.