The Other Hand

the red dust under the rope swing. In those days I believed such things were possible in your country. I knew there were large miracles just waiting for me to discover them, if only I could find the center, the source of all these small wonders.
    Behind the cold glass, the ice cube trembled on its little metal arm. It glistened, like a human soul. Sarah looked at me. Her eyes were shining.
    “Bee?” she said. “I really need to know. Are you ready to talk about it?”
    The ice cube was finished. THUNK, it went, down into the collecting tray. Sarah blinked. The icemaker started making a new cube.
    “Sarah,” I said, “you do not need to know what happened. It was not your fault.”
    Sarah held my hands between hers.
    “Please, Bee,” she said. “I need to know.”
    I sighed. I was angry. I did not want to talk about it, but if this woman was going to make me do it then I would do it quickly and I would not spare her.
    “Okay Sarah,” I said. “After you left, the men took us away down the beach. We walked for a short time, maybe one hour. We came to a boat on the sand. It was upside down. Some of its planks were broken. It looked like it had been broken by a storm and thrown up onto the beach and left there. The underside of the boat was white from the sun. All the paint had cracked and peeled off it. Even the barnacles on the boat were crumbling off it. The hunters pushed me under the boat and they told me to listen. They said they would let me go, once it was over. It was dark under the boat, and there were crabs moving around under there. They raped my sister. They pushed her up against the side of the boat and theyraped her. I heard her moaning. I could not hear everything, through the planks of the boat. It was muffled, the sound. I heard my sister choking, like she was being strangled. I heard the sound of her body beating against the planks. It went on for a very long time. It went on into the hot part of the day, but it was dark and cool under the boat. At first my sister shouted out verses from the scriptures but later her mind began to go, and then she started to shout out the songs we sang when we were children. In the end there were just screams. At first they were screams of pain but finally they changed and they were like the screams of a newborn baby. There was no grief in them. They were automatic. They went on and on. Each scream was exactly the same, like a machine was making them.”
    I looked up and I saw Sarah staring at me. Her face was completely white and her eyes were red and her hands were up to cover her mouth. She was shaking and I was shaking too, because I had never told this to anyone before.
    “I could not see what they did to my sister. It was on the other side of the boat that the planks were broken. That is the side I could see through. The killer, the one with the wound in his neck, I could see him. He was far off from his men. He was walking in the shore break. He was smoking cigarettes from a packet he had taken out of the pocket of the guard he killed. He was looking out over the ocean. It looked as if he was waiting for something to come from there. Sometimes he put his hand up to touch the wound in his neck. His shoulders were down. It was as if he was carrying a weight.”
    Sarah’s whole body was shaking, so hard that the kitchen table was trembling. She was crying.
    “Your sister,” she was saying. “Your beautiful sister, oh my god, oh Jesus, I…”
    I did not want to hurt Sarah any more. I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
    “Near the end I heard Nkiruka begging to die. I heard the hunters laughing. Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. Yes she was a beautiful girl, you are right. In my village they said she was the kind of girl that could make a man forget his troubles. But sometimes it does not work out like people say. When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.”
    Sarah stopped crying and shaking then. She was very still. She was holding on to her tea, like she would be blown away if she did not grip on to it.
    “And you,” she whispered. “What happened to you?”
    I nodded.
    “In the afternoon it got very