What I Have Been Doing Lately"
By Jamaica Kincaid
What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang, I ran downstairs. Quick. I opened
the door. There was no one there. I stepped outside. Wither it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air and
the dust was damp. I stuck out my tongue and the drizzle or the damp dust tasted like government school ink. I
looked north. I looked south. I decided to start walking north. While walking north, I noticed that I was barefoot.
While walking north, I looked up and saw the planet Venus.
I said "It must be almost morning."
I saw a monkey in the tree. The tree had no leaves. I said, "Ah, a monkey. Just look at that. A monkey."
I walked for I don't know how long before I came to a big body of water. I wanted to get across it but I
couldn't swim. I wanted to get across it but it would take me years to build a boat. I wanted to get across it but it
would take me I didn't know how long to build a bridge. Years passed and then one day, feeling like it, I got into
my boat and rowed across. When I got to the other side, it was noon and my shadow was small and fell beneath
me. I set out on a path that stretched out straight ahead. I passed a house, and a dog was sitting on the verandah
but it looked the other way when it saw me coming. I passed a boy tossing a ball in the air but the boy looked the
other way when he saw me coming. I walked and I walked but I couldn't tell if I walked a long time because my
feet didn't feel as if they would drop off. I turned around to see what I had left behind me but nothing was familiar.
Instead of the straight path, I saw hills. Instead of the boy with his ball, I saw tall flowing trees. I looked up and the
sky was without clouds and seemed near, as if it were the ceiling in my house and, if I stood on a chair, I could
tough it with the tips of my fingers. I turned around and looked ahead of me again. A deep hole had opened up
before me. I looked in. The hole was deep and dark and I couldn't see the bottom. I thought, What's down there?,
so on purpose I fell in.
I fell and I fell, over and over, as if I were an old suitcase. On the sides of the deep hole I could see things
written, but perhaps it was in a foreign language because I couldn't read them. Still I fell, for I don't know how
long. As I fell I began to see that I didn't like the way falling made me feel. Falling made me feel sick and I missed
all the people I had loved. I said, I don't want to fall anymore, and I reversed myself. I was standing again on the
edge of the deep hole. I looked at the deep hole and I said, You can close up now, and it did. Analyze literature