In the heart of the City, I stretch out my palms, and offer my deformity to the passing feet. I squat with the hunger gnawing like a rat in my guts. It feeds on my sweet insides, crackling in my ears like a storm. A few coin spill down. The others do no better; we are quite a team here: a club-foot, leper, hunchback, men of boils and scars. Around us steams a stench of our decay. Like my arm, which lies before me like the burnt and withered stump of branch? I am careful not to wash it-my modest asset. In my lap, it sits like a favorite child.

In its third year, the famine purged our village, swept it clean; removed such litter as our crops, our animals, trees. The village grew dry like a body rotting in the dessert. We lived among its white bones. Our mother Town is near to death. Dust powdered faces, our hair, ashen as ghosts. Our sons fled to the city. Soon nothing would be left. To drown would then have been ecstasy.

A man, his wife and children, stop at my village. The road past there was chocked with the walkers, pilgrims, these villages less stumbles. Their thin feet barely troubled the dust. She carried by habit on her head a water pot.

‘You have water?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you?’

‘A little,’ his eyes narrowed to the sight of me. ‘Here,’ he gave me a cup, wet to the depth of a thumb. I drank; the cool water filled me like blood.

‘Where is your village?’ I asked.

He pointed: the little tracks stream into the road.

‘And you? When will you leave your village?’

I studied the cup.

‘What’s wrong with you?!’ anger scraped the edge of his voice. ‘Are you going waste your life, your family’s life? The vultures will eat you before your virtue is rewarded!’ he shook his opinion in my face.

I looked at my feet.

His children watched eyes desolate as the land.

I tended the rock pile where my wife is buried. I comforted her, reminded her of the village, the gossip. We talked as always of our famine. A tree may grow where she lies.

I spoke into the cool earth, longing for her, spoke of daily visits: first for the well, though it echoed like a skull. Then the empty huts, smoothed my hand along their cool walls, spoke with them of the past. This village is made of the mud of people’s bodies, soaked with their blood, built from our bones. And we grew from these huts, new-born, our hearts molded from their clay. Few of us left. Those who did were blown into the air, carried to the sea, scattered like grain to sparse to seed.

With the famine, our eyes grazed the sky for signs of the bird. To hear no birds is to hear your breathing stop. The silence of dead sky. And at sighting, we ran from our cool huts, stood all together, the news like rain on our faces.

‘It came from the mountains.’

‘What color?’

‘Black’
‘Was it alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ahh!’ We raised our arms, and sang together like dust in the wind, our heads nodding with excitement.

Then our drums began, throbbing with the wings of a giant bird. And our bodies rose into the drumming, beating of wings. We circled like a wind, our voices spinning our chant high into the air towards God. We sang for rain. A cat’s blood was all we had, save our own. We offered this blood, a part of our life more real than our life. We sang. . .

At dusk the sky glowed orange- a final sign. There was no doubt now of rain, the oldest men were assured. God remembers us, rewards our trust.

As if snow had fallen, the village became white as the bright flesh of snow. In the white heat, my eyes ran from outline to outline, touching the thick shapes-each object a corpse of itself-holding the dead stone things of my village, searching them for the color: the red of a pot, a green mat. . .

I walked to the end of the village. In the white silence, my ears reached for the shape of a sound. Around my ankles, fingers of sand stretched, slid like snakes, strangely cold in this heat.

At night a cup slept in my arms –a cool, hard thing. And walking, my arms and legs were a bundle of grey sticks. I searched in the well. My face was stretched like a drum on my skull, the skin withdrawn, abandoning my eyes and teeth. Only my stomach swelled with pain. There can be no doubt I was a walking stomach. A stomach without a man. Soon it would rain, the old men were assured.

By the road past my village, I lay against a wall in the mercy of shade, traffic of feet passing my face. I breathed their dust, it burned my eyes. Hunger had cast me aside as a dried-out scrap of meat. Even dogs lost interest.

Beside me stank the putrid mound of a woman, a cloth-bound carcass; I knew of her village, nearby. Most of her people had found the city, collected there like a monument of bones. So many people, blown from the dessert like sand, cover the city, eyeless as sand.

In the drum of my chest my heart thundered, building towards silence. I listen keenly for it. I nursed my hunger like a whimpering child on my hip.

Food came in trucks. There was no system, no warning to the grey trucks. They growled into the market square and were attacked. Many of us were too weak to fight. We stumbled to the back, arms open in prayer. We cried and chanted, ‘Grain!’ And the perfume of grain filled our nostrils, was food itself, a drug we drew into our lungs. The strong filled their pots. Our screams rezoned the air. The empty trucks trumpeted our hunger as they left.

‘Look,’ said the leper. ‘There is no pain here.’ His fetid arms lay his rags, raw as the meat thrown to jackals.

I touched the bone that is my own arm, the disease like a brand on me. ‘Where was your village?’

‘Who knows?’ his face was dry, the eyes like beetles within their sockets.

‘Who feeds you?’

‘The well, the strong. Those with the power.’ He fed himself some bread; his mouth was like the dried-out hollow of a tree. To eat had become a dry habit. ‘In return we are lepers.’

‘And your parents?’

‘Whoever feeds me.?

I took some of the beard. It scalded my mouth, intense as fire, burning like a spirit through me. My head rolled back, and broke itself open with ecstasy of food. I ate.

He rose and joined the road. I ran behind him. Is there good in your disease, master?’ I asked.

What is good? First eat. Then you will know about virtue.’

In its fourth year, the famine has quit us. Hear the voice of the city loud and praise of rain, the crops, the markets, fortunes. In shops, food glistens like luminous jewelry. We have enough; there is even time for charity, the gestures of love.

In rows along the footpaths we sit and beg. My numbness grows gently though me. No feeling touches it, nor do deaths take what it already has. Here, touch my septic arm. See? Among the blind and trance, we dress and live as ghost, you and I.