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Kimberly died at the end of rainy season. It was a Friday, and as I hurried to work, she was still alive. Maybe she was making breakfast for her small son and grandmother. The three of them lived together in a town called Content, in a comfortable cinder block home that was painted bone white and roofed with red zinc. She would soon lay lifeless inside their burning house. I tread through wet guinea grass on my way to the bus stop, shadowed by a farmer wearing gumboots and idly swinging a cutlass. The route taxi filled quickly. I nursed a schoolgirl on my lap and watched as the driver rubbed the thighs of a young woman in the passenger seat. The car wheezed under our weight: weaving through a maze of deep potholes, carrying us higher into the mountains. At Mandeville Bus Park I paid my fare, then walked down to the hospital, passing the rum bars where drunken men slept on cardboard beds. By now, Rohan had jumped the fence into Kimberly’s yard and was arguing with her. Their two-year-old son stood watching as he chopped her with a machete. The news that night reported: ‘5 Days, 4 Beheadings — fourth decapitation in a week stuns the nation’. Kimberly was the fourth, in a country with one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Her baby daddy chopped her, wrapped her in linen and attempted to set her alight. The newspaper featured the photograph of a petite, pretty face, framed by perfect ringlets. She was only eighteen. When I applied to work as a nurse in Jamaica, I’d imagined myself lying on white sand beaches sipping Pina Coladas between shifts. Instead I was tucked away in the islands mountainous interior — in the middle of rainy season — a film of grey mould encapsulating my unused bikini. I’d quit my job in Australia, leapt into the unknown, and found myself caught in the islands rapid rhythm of sex and violence. The other nurses wore figure hugging white dresses and lace caps pinned into their perfectly lacquered coiffure. ‘Fix up your hair’ the sister-in-charge scolded me when my humidity fried ponytail flapped past her. I ducked into the bathroom and slicked it flat with pipe water; careful not to soak the nursing permit I carried in my pocket — a small square of worn cardboard with my registration details scrawled in blue biro. On my way into work I greeted the sagging triage nurse. The department was always full. The sick and injured spilled from the seats onto the floor. Muffled cries bounced around dark halls. The hospital was in a constant war with the rainforest that threatened to consume it. Banana palms spewed purple flowers and overripe fruit onto the damp earth; feeding vines that choked the hospital’s crumbling concrete. Just like the pitted roads, this was a reminder of the country’s poverty and foreign debt. I joined the other nurses and doctors already pressed against the windows. We watched as security guards ran out to the police car carrying Kimberly’s broken body. A swarm of angry people descended onto the hospital; shaking the fence. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked another nurse. ‘She nah go mek it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘She dead already.’ Dizzy, I excused myself to the bathroom. As men in navy coveralls carried her corpse into the morgue, Rohan took refuge in her burning house. Hundreds gathered — armed with machetes, sticks and rocks. The police fought them back for eight hours; protecting him from jungle justice. I wet my face again. It was one day in Jamaica, but it was also every day. Kimberly’s murder was the kind of violence that shocks you. Like the snake that comes into your fowl coop, killing chickens, spilling blood and feathers. There is another violence though, more insidious. It is the Boa that has always lived in your coop, swallowing eggs everyday. You never knew it was there. You never even knew you were missing eggs. Working at the hospital taught me very quickly about the Boa living in Jamaica’s coop. It plagues the country with a fragile economy, broken infrastructure and inadequate social services — failing women like Kimberly.