story edited by @rhondak
It’s Kenya, 2001, and my empty belly has growled since morning.
My brother and I beg our mother for a few coins to buy food, and our drama might get results if we are persistent enough. Around noon we double down. These are times when pocket change can buy a day’s worth of food . Our determination pays off. She hands my brother five cents.
“He can go without me.” I watch my older brother’s nostril bulge as he pokes a finger into it as far as it can go. He digs briefly, then wipes the result of his effort on his shorts. Yuk. “I don’t feel like walking.”
Our mother doesn’t notice my brother’s bad habit. She barely glances at us. She stares into the distance, toward the edge of town.
“Joe.” She says, still not looking at me. “Little Paul is hungry, too.” Finally she turns her face toward me and leans down, her dark eyes holding mine with an urgency that’s startling. “If you don’t go with him, he will eat everything alone.”
I need no other convincing. I set off with my brother in the direction of the nearest shop, where we devour as many sweet cakes and cheap snacks as five cents will buy. Giddy from the sugar, we head back to the spot where we last saw our mom, playing and teasing each other as we walk.
But she is not where we left her, and we don’t find her anywhere.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
Paul stands very still, fingers twitching at his sides. “She’ll come back soon.”
“I hope so. I don’t think I can stay at the farm without her.” I can’t take another minute of the way our grandmother treats us--the beatings for no reason, our hunger while she eats. “We have to find her.”
Searching starts innocently, with concern but no fear. This is just one more problem for us to solve, another urgent matter in the way of life we know. We look for our mother in all the places she usually goes, but she is not there. We ask the people we see and they tell us nothing.
Until finally one of the women weeding corn in a nearby garden stops what she is doing and calls out to us.
“She has left you,” the woman says. “She ran off to the city with the butcher. They’re not coming back.”
“What are we supposed to do without our mother?” My throat is so tight I can barely squeeze the words out. “How can we live?”
All of the women in the group have stopped weeding and just stand there, not moving, staring at us. Their faces are blank, as if they are afraid to show us pity.
“Go back to your grandmother’s house,” one of them says. “You don’t have a mother now.”
I go numb, like I’m not in my own body. I can’t feel my bare feet standing there in the dirt. I can’t answer the woman, can’t say a word.
Our grandmother will not welcome us back. She lives alone, no husband, and uses money from the sale of her crops to buy drink. We will just get in her way.
I swallow hard, trying to gulp down my fear. But it’s suffocating. Paul and I are just children. He is six. I am five. We are alone. We have no one.
What can we do but climb a tree and hide in the branches? It’s uncomfortable, but being up so high keeps us safe from the drunkards and violent men of the village.
You don’t have a mother now.
It’s one of the most terrifying things my brother and I could hear at that moment of our lives. We cling to the tree and cry, huddled like orphaned kittens against the harsh reality of our new future.
The only chance of freedom my brother and I have is there in the village, being street kids in the up-country, with nothing promised or assured. No taking a shower, no changing or washing clothes, no bed to sleep in, no three meals a day and sometimes even one meal a day will be too much to ask.
After that point, our life reduced itself to a routine of sleeping outside in the cold like animals, clothes hanging on us like rags, no shoes or food or education. Our bodies became bruised all over. Rashes covered our skin, wounds festered on our feet. We would wake after endless nights of rain shivering from cold, hoping the sun would rise soon and share its warmth. Sometimes we went to the river and washed our clothes, only to run around naked until they dried.
Occasionally a kind soul took us in for the night, fed us, and let us sleep under their roof. Then with a cup of tea in our bellies, we’d leave in the morning for another day of lack. Everything had changed forever for my brother and me, our world winnowed down to nothing except survival. Yet we couldn’t give up. We fought to overcome the circumstance, hoping our mother would come back to us, all the while accepting every day as a blessing, and every meal a gift.
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Editor's Note:
I first saw this story in the typical rough state of a first draft, painstakingly typed on a smartphone in Google Docs. Rarely does a piece of writing silence my internal editor and make me forget that I'm supposed to be looking for ways to improve it. This one did.
While far from polished, the story grabbed me from the first line and held me until the last word. Yes, Joe and I have put many hours since into editing and perfecting this vignette, collaborating in Docs until both of us were happy with the result. However, I must stress that imagery and word pictures that hit you in this story came straight from him. He's an author in the making, and I consider it a privilege to be trusted with such a deeply heartfelt and utterly authentic glimpse backward down the road he has traveled.