Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker

clumps, giggling. They followed us from here to there as Wasterfall showed us around. I saw several young boys kicking a ball back and forth. I joined the game and was quickly surrounded by a cluster of three-foot-high children, all clamoring for me to pick them up or take them home. As Wasterfall said, many were sick, stunted, or suffering from scabies. Vita was talking with several little girls, many of whom were smiling but shy.
    We stopped back in Wasterfall’s office an hour or so later.
    “Did you see any children you liked?” she asked, raising her eyebrows in almost exactly the same way as the previous matron.
    “All of them,” I replied, mustering a smile. I explained that this was our first day, and there were still other homes we had promised to visit. I made another donation, the cliché of throwing bricks into the Grand Canyon bouncing through my head, and we left. It was impossible not to be sobered by what we had seen. Dinner that night was subdued; we ate in silence, not speaking at all.
    The next morning we drove to the south of town, to Chinyaradzo. The roads in the nearby industrial park were jammed with huge trucks belching out stacks of smoke and pollution, forming a brown haze. We honked at the gate, and a young girl came out of a one-story concrete-block building to unlatch the padlock. The interior of the compound was an open-air playground, with brightly painted yellow and red seesaws, a pair of slides, a swing set with chairs for small children. The backyard featured larger equipment for older kids. The classrooms had posters on the wall, cutouts of birds and bunny rabbits, even Winnie the Pooh and Santa Claus. It was well kept, with some rooms not appearing much different from something you might expect to find in small-town America.
    In the infant ward, there were two narrow rectangular rooms of cribs. There was an erasable board that listed the feeding schedules for each child. At the back of the first room was a partition, and behind it were stacks of old furniture, rocking chairs missing an arm or curved leg, dismantled cribs, and baby toys. There was a small kitchen on one end and a changing room at the other, connecting to a room for toddlers.
    In one crib was Christian, a chubby two-year-old in a pair of blue overalls. He was nicknamed the Old Man for the comically serious way he seemed to overlook the other children. There was a tiny infant named Robert, one of a pair of twins, who rarely awoke. Yemurai, who had recovered from her hospital trip, was a biracial baby with an endearing smile and a bad case of eczema. Tsongai was a chunky little girl who liked to bang her toys around.
    I wandered back over toward the door and down by the windows. There were four cribs. The only one that held a child was the second one. I reached under the clothes and picked up the infant, looking at the card on the wall to get her name.
    “Chipo,” I said.
    She was wrapped in a bundle of white cloths. She had dark brown eyes and delicately curled eyelashes that were so long she seemed to blink in slow motion. She kept three fingers of her right hand in her mouth. Her toes looked like little erasers on the end of miniature pencils. She seemed to weigh nothing at all. I tickled her chin. Nothing. “Hey, pretty girl,” I whispered. She blinked. I playfully bumped the end of her nose with mine. She blinked again. Then she reached out with her left hand and, in a wobbling gesture, wrapped it around my little finger.
    It is difficult to say what happened to me then. I had reported in a lot of places a lot worse than this one. I once spent the better part of a day in a slum hospital in Baghdad, a desperate place where the temperature soared above 120 degrees, the infants subsisted on less than fifty calories a day, there was no medicine, and a fifty-two-day-old infant named Maram Hassan lay on a feed sack that passed for a bed sheet. She was starving to death, even as her mother waved flies away from her mouth