with his foot so that I trip and fall forward, facedown into the mud.
I come up sputtering, wiping my eyes, dirt gritted between my teeth. Immediately I
think of the telegram in my pocket that I haven’t read yet, that I
won’t
read now. Maybe it is better that way.
“You’re going to pay for that.” I dive, trying to push Neo under. We wrestle as the
mud plasters our clothes to our bodies and Lesego splashes behind us.
Neo is stronger than I am, but I am determined. I struggle and push against him until
he is lying beneath me, my arm braced over his chest, my weight pinning him. In my
free hand I hold a heaping scoop of sludge, which I let drip slowly onto his forehead.
I realize that my skin is as brown as his is now. That we match.
“Say uncle,” I urge.
He grins. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” I suggest.
And he does. His arms come around my waist and he knocks me completely off balance,
not with brute strength or sheer force but with a kiss.
His hands are in my matted hair and his mouth presses against mine, a validationas sacred as the seal of a king. And then suddenly a wall of water sprays me in the
face. We spring away from each other, guilty. Lesego’s fountain separates us like
a river that carves through a continent, leaving the landscape irrevocably changed.
One day when I was seven I came home from school to find that my mother had redecorated
my bedroom. My shelf of stuffed animals was gone, replaced with all the books on math
and science she had used in college. The small table where I had tea parties for my
dolls had likewise been cleared, and was now a laboratory—covered with a broken toaster,
the guts of an old desk phone, a screwdriver, a wrench. But the jewel in the crown
was a microscope, complete with preprepared slides. There was fiber and blood and
cork. Salt crystals.
“Take a look,” my mother said, showing me how to peer into the microscope. She slipped
a slide into place—the small brown fleck that was onion skin, stained with iodine.
I gasped and jumped back from the eyepiece. Up close, that little sliver of nothing
became a wall, each brick a cell surrounded by others. “What do you see?” my mother
asked, her voice falling like a secret into my ear.
“It looks like cars,” I told her. “Stuck in traffic.”
She laughed. “Does each car have a driver?”
“Yes, a brown dot.”
“That’s the nucleus,” she told me. “It’s like the command center for the cell. And
it’s floating in fluid called cytoplasm. And the cell membrane, that’s the brown circle
around each one.” She watched me marvel over each slide and then, abruptly, said it
was time to set the table for dinner. “Make sure you put everything away neatly,”
she told me. “That way it will last.”
But I didn’t, because I was using the microscope every free moment I had. Magnification
was a miracle to me. I wondered what I was missing with my eyes, just going about
my day; I couldn’t believe that some scientist or doctor hadn’t invented contact lenses
or glasses that allowed us to look at our surroundings as if they were underneath
a microscope at all times. I began to regard the world differently. Simplybecause I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had dreams where I
opened my eyes and saw everything larger than life—magnified ten times, a hundred
times, a thousand times. I could look at any organism and know what made it behave
the way it did, because I could scrutinize what lay hidden to ordinary people. I imagined
this was what it felt like to be psychic.
About a week after I got my microscope, I was itching to see more than the slides
that had come with it. I ran into my bedroom after school to find my mother reshelving
all the books I’d left open specifically to the pages of organisms that I hadn’t yet
seen under a microscope—mold and strawberries and hair cells. “This room is
I come up sputtering, wiping my eyes, dirt gritted between my teeth. Immediately I
think of the telegram in my pocket that I haven’t read yet, that I
won’t
read now. Maybe it is better that way.
“You’re going to pay for that.” I dive, trying to push Neo under. We wrestle as the
mud plasters our clothes to our bodies and Lesego splashes behind us.
Neo is stronger than I am, but I am determined. I struggle and push against him until
he is lying beneath me, my arm braced over his chest, my weight pinning him. In my
free hand I hold a heaping scoop of sludge, which I let drip slowly onto his forehead.
I realize that my skin is as brown as his is now. That we match.
“Say uncle,” I urge.
He grins. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” I suggest.
And he does. His arms come around my waist and he knocks me completely off balance,
not with brute strength or sheer force but with a kiss.
His hands are in my matted hair and his mouth presses against mine, a validationas sacred as the seal of a king. And then suddenly a wall of water sprays me in the
face. We spring away from each other, guilty. Lesego’s fountain separates us like
a river that carves through a continent, leaving the landscape irrevocably changed.
One day when I was seven I came home from school to find that my mother had redecorated
my bedroom. My shelf of stuffed animals was gone, replaced with all the books on math
and science she had used in college. The small table where I had tea parties for my
dolls had likewise been cleared, and was now a laboratory—covered with a broken toaster,
the guts of an old desk phone, a screwdriver, a wrench. But the jewel in the crown
was a microscope, complete with preprepared slides. There was fiber and blood and
cork. Salt crystals.
“Take a look,” my mother said, showing me how to peer into the microscope. She slipped
a slide into place—the small brown fleck that was onion skin, stained with iodine.
I gasped and jumped back from the eyepiece. Up close, that little sliver of nothing
became a wall, each brick a cell surrounded by others. “What do you see?” my mother
asked, her voice falling like a secret into my ear.
“It looks like cars,” I told her. “Stuck in traffic.”
She laughed. “Does each car have a driver?”
“Yes, a brown dot.”
“That’s the nucleus,” she told me. “It’s like the command center for the cell. And
it’s floating in fluid called cytoplasm. And the cell membrane, that’s the brown circle
around each one.” She watched me marvel over each slide and then, abruptly, said it
was time to set the table for dinner. “Make sure you put everything away neatly,”
she told me. “That way it will last.”
But I didn’t, because I was using the microscope every free moment I had. Magnification
was a miracle to me. I wondered what I was missing with my eyes, just going about
my day; I couldn’t believe that some scientist or doctor hadn’t invented contact lenses
or glasses that allowed us to look at our surroundings as if they were underneath
a microscope at all times. I began to regard the world differently. Simplybecause I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had dreams where I
opened my eyes and saw everything larger than life—magnified ten times, a hundred
times, a thousand times. I could look at any organism and know what made it behave
the way it did, because I could scrutinize what lay hidden to ordinary people. I imagined
this was what it felt like to be psychic.
About a week after I got my microscope, I was itching to see more than the slides
that had come with it. I ran into my bedroom after school to find my mother reshelving
all the books I’d left open specifically to the pages of organisms that I hadn’t yet
seen under a microscope—mold and strawberries and hair cells. “This room is
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