---

---

 

CHAPTER ONE — MIMI

You might think I came to Africa as a humanitarian, dispensing medicine to babies so malnourished their delicate rib cages threatened to snap, rib after rib, in a glissando of tiny broken bones. You wouldn’t be a fool. I let most people believe that, perhaps because I wanted to believe it myself. 

This is my secret: a baby brought me to Africa. A baby I loved; a baby I could not keep. A baby fresh out of my womb, slippery with vernix and blood. He was so small. The moment, so quick. I sang him a lullaby as I counted his toes so he would remember my voice, so the nurses would not be so eager to take him from my arms. Each time I heard their shoes tap down the hallway, I would begin to sing. They flowed back and forth past the doorway, white and blue uniforms a blurred wash, fluid as a river, waiting for me to lift him in my hands and offer him up. 

---

Shortly after arriving in Zambia, I made a pilgrimage to the Falls, where a woman told me the story of a child found upriver along the Zambezi. A river whose current of dark waters snatches whatever you hold and runs, never stopping until it reaches the Falls: the Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders. The world’s largest sheet of falling water. If you let go, you’ll find your treasure swirling in the gorge below with the rocks and the crocodiles, and you can never have it back. 

The village was burning. A drought, a cooking fire, a wind that stretched flames from the ring of stones until they met the dry grass. Men and women ran for the river, snapping up jerry cans, bowls, basins without stopping. They filled them and ran straight for the heart of the fire, throwing water and running back to the river while branches lit up and cracked and dissolved into skeletons and ash. 

Eventually the people formed a line, beginning with one person filling the vessel and passing it up to the fire while empty buckets were passed back down. They rotated when the heat became too much for the one closest to the village, skin on the verge of blisters. Up and down they went in a relay. Orderly as the Jacob’s ladder I played with as a girl, wooden squares clicking down the ribbons. 

The fire only grew; the water an impotent tease. Mothers carried children to the river, standing them in the shallows. Some stood alone, others held hands. Some sucked on their fingers and cried. Others splashed, throwing water in the air, looking up into the sky. “It’s raining, it’s raining,” they giggled. 

“If only it would rain,” their mothers cried as they watched their homes become torches, enveloped in smoke and light. 

This mother had tied her baby to her body with a chitenge. He bounced on her hip as she ran from their hut. She hushed in his ear as they approached the river, looking for her older son who had run ahead. She looked through the swarm of villagers, arms swinging like pendulums as they passed water back and forth, earth beating from the fire as though the Falls were approaching the village, so loud she could not possibly hear her son’s voice. 

“Twaambo,” she called over voices giving orders, the brushing of bodies, buckets slamming water. All she saw was a mass of wet, sparkling skin. “Twaambo!” Her baby screamed as they knocked through the thicket of people. 

Ahead, she saw the boys she had last seen with Twaambo, no older than four. She ran to them. “Twaambo,” she said, crouching down, taking their shoulders. “Where did he go?” They looked at her, then each other, bellies sticking out, chins tucked in. She shook them. “Twaambo!” she said with each shake. “Twaambo! Where is he?” 

The baby was becoming heavy. He was not yet crawling; she needed to set him down. That’s when she spotted the tree along the riverbank. Roots reached from the old gnarly trunk, twisting into a nest suspended above the river like a ladle balanced on the lip of a pot. 

The fire’s heat felt like hot oil on her skin as she balanced along the roots, grasping them with her toes, while her baby cried. “Shh,” she hushed as she untied her chitenge. “I am not going far.” She smoothed sweat from his forehead. His screams were so frantic, as she placed him in the basket of tree roots, mucus ran from his nose and urine streamed down his legs. “I will be back,” she said before running to the fire to save her son. 

---

Twaambo had been hiding in the branches of the very tree whose roots wove the baby’s nest. The mother saw him as she returned from the fire, just as she thought all hope had been stolen by the river, just as her hut crumbled to the ground. 

He stood near the tree’s crown, hugging the branch. “I could not see you! I climbed up here so I could find you, Mama.” 

His mother’s instinct was to scold him: Where have you been? Why did you hide? Why didn’t you obey? But she couldn’t erase the image of the children with blossoms of pink flesh blooming from their eyes, ears, and shoulders, carried by their mothers to the water to clean their wounds and stop their skin from burning. 

Instead, she talked him down the tree, giving instructions as she retrieved her baby, current rushing below.

“Put your highest foot down,” she said as she embraced the tree. “Reach down to that branch,” as she leaped across the gap. “Now the next foot,” as she wobbled down the root. “Almost there,” as she reached for her baby who had fallen asleep, worn out from crying, hiccups popping from his chest. 

The wind from the fire was still against her skin, the roar of it in her ears. But as she rescued her sons, it seemed it was burning on the other side of the earth. What she cared about most was safe in that tree. 

She squatted, slid her hands beneath her baby, gently tied him to her chest, and straightened her knees. He inhaled a broken string of breaths. As her gaze moved from her baby to her son, it swept past the frantic people. 

“I am afraid,” Twaambo called from halfway up the tree. “Come help me, Mama.” 

She argued with him about the baby, the village, why he needed her now when he had climbed a thousand trees. But eventually, she swung the chitenge around so the baby rode on her back. She reached and stepped and pulled her body up the tree, smoke thickening the higher she climbed, caught in the leaves and branches. The people below looked like termites, busy and orderly. Her husband was still in the water line, passing and filling and pouring to no avail. 

Twaambo cried, reaching down to her. His weight slowly tipped from the branch, his feet in front of her eyes, the river eager to catch him. 

“Wait! Not yet, I am not ready.” 

But he let himself fall, as if diving in slow motion into the river below. 

His arms and head came first. She held the branch beside her. The river, a stretch of waving light.

“Mama,” he said, when his arms wrapped her neck, his legs and feet still above. She felt herself falling back, the baby throwing off her balance, her hands tight around the small branch. 

The river reeled beneath her. She heard children up the shoreline, splashing and screeching. The rhythm of the men and older boys: slam, splash, pass. The smoke clouded her eyes, clouded the air. 

Someone, she sensed, was about to be caught by the river. 

Twaambo’s legs flung down, encircling her waist. He was so happy to be in her arms, he couldn’t seem to get close enough. Her feet rocked on the branch. Her view blocked by his head; his hair rough on her face. 

“Twaambo, you must climb down yourself. I cannot hold you.” 

His fingers dug into the chitenge holding the baby. “Mama,” he cooed. 

The Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders. Even kilometers away, you could see the mist, hear the rumble. She felt it rushing, pouring, as though she were standing on its edge. 

And then she knew who it would be, and there was nothing she could do. 

The knot unraveled. The chitenge unfurled, billowed in the smoky daylight above the baby falling, bouncing along the branches, into the river. 

She pried Twaambo from her neck, leaving him on the branch, and screamed. “Kole!” He had not been named until that moment, when his flailing body cracked the river’s shell. 

The mother flung herself into the current. It grabbed her, somersaulted her. Water ladled into her mouth as she looked for him up the river, down the river. The trees along the shore, the river floor below. 

No one came to help. In the chaos, no one knew it had even happened. 

“Kole!” The mother screamed and kicked and paddled until her body gave out.

Sometimes, the river is merciful, and will carry its cargo safe upon its back until it is released into an inlet of reeds, a place it might stand up on its own and walk to the shore and dry off. The river delivered her to another empty nest of roots, not far from the one that had held her baby. 

But sometimes, the river grows tired and overburdened. Like a careless messenger, it takes your offering and drops it over the Falls like pennies in a wishing well. Still to this day, she is searching. Combing the riverbanks, scaling the rocks along the Falls. Perched on a cliff, watching water hit the bottom and spring back up, the sound drowning out all that surrounds her. The Smoke that Thunders. Desperate for any sign he had been spared. 

---

At the top of the Falls, I waded in the Devil’s Pool, a deceivingly placid body, preparing to drop over the edge. Water came over my knees, sun fastened to my back, and I knew everything that had happened until then would remain hidden in the water. No one needed to ever know. 

As I left, the storyteller held up a necklace with the symbol of the Falls. The Nyami Nyami, a swirling snake body with the head of a fish carved from bone. “For you to remember.” I bowed my head as she tied it around my neck, and for seventeen years, I never took it off.

 

CHAPTER TWO — LILA

Lila stood before the young doctor in the doorway, cool dark at her back, head bowed under artificial light luring moths and mosquitos. Her eyes fixed on the long crack in the cement floor, snaking from the entry to the table in the middle of the room. What might be found below if it were pried apart? 

The crack began at her feet, at the precise point where the V of her sandal tucked between her toes, calloused and chalky with dust. Never had she walked so far at night, fifteen kilometers under the shroud of clear stars and miombo trees, sifting through the sounds of the bush. Elephants brushing acacia leaves, frogs croaking, mosquitoes zinging in her ear. The cats were elusive, perhaps because she repeated poems Mimi, her teacher for those brief months, had taught her as a girl while she walked in the dark. 

She was eighteen years old and had known only the bed of her husband, Mapenze, whom she had married under the arrangement of her parents two years earlier. Mapenze traveled a further distance to work in the mines of Solwezi and returned home once each month, sometimes with money, sometimes a new shirt, sometimes with scabbed burns and bruises. She had heard stories of young girls lapping the miners’ quarters, selling whatever the men might ask of them for a few kwacha. Though Lila suspected Mapenze shared their wedding bed with other women in the city, she knew better than to ask. And she knew this gave her reason to fear the sickness that had taken her sister Bupe that very year. 

Lila caught her reflection in the doctor’s spectacles as his eyes paused on her face. Her ripe cheekbones, the well in the center of her upper lip her mother would trace when she sang to her as a child.

He didn’t ask why she came or how she had learned about him. 

“Test,” she whispered, like someone was listening. 

Rumors circulated in her village about the new clinic. Five kilometers past the well. A muzungu. Hair like red earth. He will drive Kyabu out. 

“Come in.” He stepped aside, and she walked through the doorway of the small clinic. “Have a seat.” He motioned to the table beneath a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. She sat, holding the edge of her chitenge closed. “I’ll need a blood sample.” He disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a needle and vial, hands in white gloves. She unfolded her arm, he lifted her elbow. He found a vein, punctured it with the needle, and pulled back the plunger until it was crimson and wind tossed the curtain. She stared at the crack in the floor when he extracted the needle and placed an orange cap on it. 

“Thank you,” she said as he bandaged her arm. The words felt thick and blocky in her mouth. She had not spoken English since Mimi brought her back to the village nine years ago. 

He set a cup of water on the table and walked back to the other room with the vial. She waited until he was out of sight before gulping the water and placing it back on the table. 

When he returned, his glasses glinted under the bulb so she couldn’t see his eyes. She stood with hands folded, eager for his answer she hoped would immunize the fear that had infected her the past months. 

“I’m sorry.” 

She raised her chin, nodded. Mimi had always told her to look people in the eye. But her gaze was now drawn to the gas lamp in the corner, its weak blue flame. 

“I’m out of medication but should get another shipment soon. Come back in a week. We can talk more then. It’s late.” He picked up the cup. “Can I get you more?”

The thought of water made her stomach turn. 

“It’s good you were tested early.” 

She turned to the door. 

“Wait.” From the shelf, he brought her a white pack of material folded into a square. But when he gave it to her, she dropped it. Her fingers felt loose. 

When he picked it up, the translucent sheet unraveled. “A mosquito net,” he said, folding it in half, pinching the corners together over and over. “Hang it over your bed.” 

She held it to her neck and walked through the door. 

---

Along the path, the air began to move, a shimmering hiss across the bush. The wind snatched the net from her hands, opening it into a white spirit floating over the grass. Sharp blades licked her legs as she chased through the forest until she caught it at the edge of her parents’ compound, high on the hill. She wrapped it around her head and shoulders; it ruffled her arms. 

She hadn’t been back since Bupe died. The memory came of her sister’s paper-thin skin, rancid breaths, reeds cracking as she coughed on her mat. 

Small drops of rain grew bigger and faster, rattling her parents’ roof. Thatch bouncing and bending, puddles swelling below, too much for the earth to swallow. 

She stood beside the miombo tree where Mimi had come for her. 

In the moonlight, her mother emerged from the hut. Across the distance, Lila watched her fuss with the cooking hut’s thatch, protecting the fire pit and pots like children she would hate to see get wet. 

Lila tore off the bandage, winced from the sting. For all her resentment, the pinch in her throat took her by surprise. “Mama?” Lila’s voice was as high and thin as a little girl whose mother could not find her in the dark. She pulled back the net and held up her arm, rain rinsing crusted blood. 

Her mother stepped out and opened her arms, embracing the storm. It was all she ever wanted. Why must it all come at once? Why could it not be stored away for the next drought so the girls hadn’t needed to walk to the well that morning? So they didn’t need to be given for cattle and kwacha? 

Lila stood and threw the wadded tape and gauze with all her might, only to have it land two paces away. 

Under the loud clapping rain, she picked up a stone and threw it at the old woman worshipping the heavy sky. Another and another, but none reached her. Beneath the tree lay a rock bigger than her fist. She hoisted it on her shoulder like Bupe had taught her, bouncing her knees and hopping before launching it down the hill. It cut through the rain and bounced to the bottom until it met her mother’s feet. 

“Who’s there,” she called up the hill, over the thunder. She picked up the stone. “Answer!” 

Lightning lit up the miombo tree, the crest of the hill, the translucent net around Lila. 

“What is it you want?” 

Her father ran from the hut, took his wife’s arm. Lila heard her mother between shots of thunder. A ghost…up there… 

Lila shivered, net clinging to her body. She crouched down and lay in the grass. She saw fear in the way they stood, shoulders caved, leaning back. 

“She is bewitched,” Kyabu had pronounced when Bupe lay on his mat beside the horns and tusks and the small radio that didn’t work. He set a bowl on her stomach. Her father’s eyes moved between the powders being emptied into the bowl, his daughter’s heaving chest, the puffy black coat Kyabu wore, even though the day was hot. Lila couldn’t look away from his cloudy blue eye, fixed upward, watching the sky. He chanted frantically, shaking short brooms. Silently, Lila and her parents waited for the magic. Waited for Bupe to stand up, brush off the dirt, walk home. 

“Leave us be,” her father now shouted over the thunder, his wife in his fold. 

Lila picked up another stone, hoisted it over her shoulder, hopped three steps for momentum. Lightning transcended the village as her voice rose. “You are to blame!” 

They stepped back, hands fisted at their throats. 

Lila’s chest spread from elbow to elbow, rock in her hand. 

“Bupe,” her mother cried and dropped to her knees. 

Lila stopped. The rock fell, a thud in the earth. 

“You were too much for us to save,” her father’s voice cracked. 

Lila lifted her arms, white net draped like wings. She took a step toward her mother weeping in the mud. But then, the image of herself kneeling over Bupe, whose breaths slowed and vanished like water boiling off a pot. Lila backed away from her mother and ran home, the net trailing behind. 

---

She returned to the mud hut she shared with her husband, Mapenze, who was due to return from the mine in Solwezi late the following day. She looked around at what little she could see in the dark. The rain had stopped, the clouds dispersed. Slits of moonlight pierced the grass roof. She shook out the net, stepped inside, and hooked it on a sharp edge of thatch above her mat. Doubt washed over her. What was the use? She lay down under the damp net and pressed her thumb against the injection site. She closed her eyes and drifted to a place that didn’t have needles and vials and sickness that made sisters cough away their last breath. 

The net dropped around her. She looked up. The roof wasn’t strong enough.

 

CHAPTER THREE — PASCHA 

The evening before the accident, Pascha and Simon sat on a bench on Queen Anne’s crown overlooking Elliott Bay, blades of land and barges cutting through the water, Mount Rainier a mystic blessing. Pascha was tucked under Simon’s arm, legs draped across his lap. Spring’s cool snap came as the sun descended into the Olympic mountains, shadows flooding the park, the city’s skyline a hall of mirrors. 

They hadn’t seen each other all week. They talked about the exhibit Pascha was framing, the VA rotation that had Simon on call every other night, his voice moving through the hidden chambers, ventricles, and arteries of his chest. 

“I got the fellowship,” he said after a while. 

She lifted her head. 

“I didn’t think I’d get it. Or that I even wanted it.” 

The lenses of his glasses were blank with light. She waited out his pause. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a big deal. Something that could change everything.” His hand circled her knee, marking tendons, bones, and ligaments. “It would fast forward my training by a year. Which would help after losing all that time.” 

“Those years weren’t wasted.” 

He glanced over his shoulder at a car parking in the street. He rubbed her hip, kissed her forehead. “Thanks for always saying that.” 

She pulled in the sting of his aftershave, the bitter nil of cut boxwood. 

“We’d have to postpone the wedding,” he said.

Her head bobbed for a while, as if shaking the thought into place. The dress that was now altered, the invitations in the printer’s queue, the site of the wedding that was to be held a few feet from the bench where they now sat in Kerry Park. By now, her mother had printed her boarding pass, programmed the coffee maker, carefully packed the heirloom wedding veil. 

“How long again?” 

“Two years. In Zambia.” 

The sky felt untamed. “That’s a long time.” 

People lined the railing, zipping jackets, balancing tripods, parking bikes, wrangling toddlers and dogs, bracing for the sun’s exit as darkness pulled its hood over the city. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. 

She lengthened her fingers to see the diamond ring she’d worn for over three years, then curled them into a fist. They’d postponed the wedding two years ago, a year after his last day in the operating room. 

“Maybe this is what you’ve needed.” She looked up at him. “New scenery, new start. No triggers.” 

By now, she’d come to picture the open incision, tray of instruments, saucer lights, IV drip, monitors, clamps, tubes, bed, scrub hats, hairnets, loupes, masks, gloves, gowns as though she had stood in the OR with him that day. The case runs like clockwork, ahead of schedule. Textbook. The patient is exceptionally healthy—young—to have grown a mass so invasive. They get it all, margins are clear. His family would let out a cry. There would be relief. Joy. The attending has Simon tie off the veins, she checks. She asks him to bovie the last adhesions, close up the fascia. She talks him through it, he understands, he’s done this before. He makes a small joke. She laughs and moves toward the door, lifts her hands to shed her gown, when Simon says her name in a cadence she’s never heard. She turns. Blood wells up, streams over his hands, the patient’s abdomen, spills to the floor like the water feature in Mimi’s garden. For a millisecond, it’s peaceful. They watch, they assess. The attending lunges toward the table, reaches into the cavity, arm straight as a post. She says, Pressure! What happened, where’s the bleeding coming from? Pressure! Get help, get help. Pressure! Now. Get help. 

They walked the three blocks back to Pascha’s apartment, holding hands, mostly in silence. When they reached her door, he hugged her for a long time. He kissed her ear, said something about two years not being so long. Only a micropause. Years from now it would seem like nothing, a small blip, and she sculpted a smile with her shaking mouth. 

The floodlight overhead set fire to his red hair and the patch of Mimi’s roses that had gone mostly brown and limp. Mimi had been away for over a month. Pascha thought of the toll that the garden had taken without her presence, persistence, and immense amounts of water. 

“What does this mean for us?” she asked. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I just wonder if you need to go without anything holding you back?” 

“You’ve never held me back.” 

“I know, I just wonder if this will, I don’t know, set you free?” She pinched the corners of her eyes, her head hinged back. “That’s so cliché, I can’t believe I just said that.” 

Three years ago, he would’ve countered with a better cliché, and they would’ve sparred back and forth in a cliché duel, and they’d laugh until they couldn’t breathe. 

He looked into the floodlight, and it shone on his face like the afterlife. 

“It wasn’t your fault.” She took his arms. “It’s been three years.”

That night, he’d gone straight from the OR to Pascha’s apartment in Chicago. When she opened the door, he collapsed in her arms, and she held him up as long as she could until they sank to the floor. She rubbed his back, took his face, said, Hey, hey, it’s okay, what’s going on, you’re scaring me. He choked out the story about the severed vena cava and got up to choke down a bourbon and went into the bathroom and sobbed once and maybe vomited. When she cracked the door open, he was choking down water from the faucet like he was waterboarding himself, then sucked in a breath, wiped his arm across his mouth and nose, cleared his throat, and said he was fine, all good, it was all good. 

He now stepped back, exhaled a chuckle, and looked at the ground. She stood on her doorstep, which made them almost the same height. 

“You want to come in?” 

“I have an early morning.” 

“Sure, no, of course.” She sifted through her keyring and inserted the key into the lock. 

She thought about the vision she’d been having while falling asleep, a prelude to a dream. The two of them walking in an open field, late afternoon when everything turns gold, grass like wheat. She held a swaddled baby, hazed by sundogs and waning light. She thought how impossible all of that now seemed with someone so stuck. 

She wriggled the key and pulled the handle to release the bolt, which took such effort she wondered if eventually it would no longer open at all. She twisted the ring on her finger. “Would it be best for you to hang onto this until you get back?” 

“Pasch, that’s not what this is.” 

“I know. I just wonder if it would go better if you had some space? Time to sort everything out? We’ve been trying for three years, and we’re not getting anywhere.”

He stared at his feet. 

“What are you thinking?” she asked, though it was always the same. 

He never talked about it after that night. He never returned to the OR; he quit his surgery residency with one year remaining. He was accepted into an internal medicine residency at the University of Washington, not far from where he’d grown up. He was fine. He was still the same, still in there, just harder to find. He’d make jokes and trail off like he forgot how jokes worked, when people were supposed to laugh. He’d talk with stretches of quiet, like the couches under his eyes weighed down time. He didn’t know she knew about the man’s chart he opened every morning on his hard drive, the obituary he read when he couldn’t sleep, the number he’d dial and then hang up when the widow answered, a baby crying in the background. She’d urged him to talk about it. Maybe with his chief, maybe a therapist, maybe a minister, maybe a hypnotist, maybe his mother. But he was fine, he would be fine. 

A chill flashed through her as she pulled the ring over her knuckle, took his hand, set it in his palm, and closed his fingers. “Just a micropause.” She kissed his cheek. “Maybe that’s all we need.” 

And he didn’t object.

 

---

AMY WIDMOYER HANSON has been awarded The Iowa Review Award in Fiction and the New Letters Prize for Fiction. She holds a degree in piano performance and has taught both privately and in the public schools. When she isn’t writing, she volunteers with a refugee resettlement agency in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband and three children. Find her on Instagram @amywhanson.      

 

Featured image by Jonatan Lewczuk, courtesy of Unsplash.