One
The plus in Sarie Turner: a minus for the widower’s youngest boy. An accident, it was, in the bright Kikanga neighborhood of seaside Vunjamguu. For the unseen, sudden child? A
gongo-drinking driver, big blue Tata run amok. Great low rumble and a thrash, metal bending with a wail. A fall—a slip and tender snap—and cries and shrieks and shudders from those close
enough to see. Next, the tremors of a riven street, belated shatterings of glass. A squeal, an interrupted skip. What else? Among others and perhaps the very least, but, still, one thing: at
some distance from the fray, unexpected and intent, a simmer and a bubbling in a tall, ungainly woman who had not bubbled before.
Sarie Turner did, like others in that nest of high-housed, sooty streets, hear the rich commotion as it happened. But because she didn’t see the Tata shedding its old brakes, taking its hard
teeter, didn’t see the stumbling boy’s quick pitch, was still coming round the corner, she couldn’t fathom what it was. In fact, she thought, C’est quoi? The bright perfume of burnt and
bleeding things came flooding up her nose. Aware of Agatha’s small hand tightening at her own, Sarie felt that she should hurry. But she’d gone very still, her eyes and mind a blank.
Her daughter’s fingers fell away and Sarie next experienced in her knees a looseness that, traveling up her hips and thighs, nearly caused her to collapse against the stationer’s window—where,
behind the oily glass (shocked, too), a steno pad threw off its dust and several ink pens rolled slightly to the side. Sarie felt the window hot and smooth against her shoulder and wondered why
she couldn’t see. She brought herself upright again and noted then that her own eyes were closed. She opened them.
Sarie squinted in the light but could not see her child (Agatha, while her mother’s eyes were shut, had run on to find things out). As the street came into view, Sarie’s stomach tilted in its
house. She swallowed, turned the corner, too. She identified a crowd but, slow to see the obvious as she was, still didn’t understand. She wasn’t used to being dizzy, that squeezing in her
chest, a blurring at her temples that took some time to clear. What is it that’s happened? Was that Agatha, just there? When Sarie had caught on that the scarlet-stippled log her only
child sat holding on the banks of India Street was no log but a leg that had been unhooked from its owner, it was too late for her to scream. Somewhere between her collarbone and chin, a
scream-shape came careening to a stop—she gasped.
She was not alone. The others had screamed punctually, just after the bus hit, and now they only stood, unnerved, making tender sounds like mm and oh and haaa. A newsboy, head-cocked, knee-bent
like an egret in a pool of fallen print, stood frozen in the sun. A small round woman the color of a cashew, gray hair middle-parted like a book, eyes as deep as bowls, clutched her racing
chest with two immobile hands. Hovering like a specter from white smoke and toppled coals, a coffee salesman, tongue an arrow, held fast to his curls. In the plump and muted hush—breath-breath,
gasp-gasp, and everything so slow—everyone was still. Everyone, that is, except the boy to whom that log—no, leg—belonged.
But the newly fractured boy, whose accident this was, wasn’t screaming either. Rather, there slipped from other parts of him, as from mysterious insects, a range of thrums and squeaks. There
was: from a shaggy head with opaque hair, a wincing; a creaking from the thin-boy trunk-and-thigh; and a steady, anxious droning from the one leg he still wore, which he clutched as if to keep
it safe with two surprisingly big hands. The sounds his body made, delicate and soft, would have—somehow Sarie and the gaspers sensed that this was so—put further screams to shame.
Sarie, one brown knuckle tucked into the hollow at the base of her tight throat, wobbled on the curb, aware without quite knowing why that she was being called upon to think. To Sarie’s
left, squatting, showing flowered panties, Agatha was quiet, too. Brave child, she had not considered screaming. With care, with eerily professional aplomb, with love, perhaps, she had neatly
folded down the cuff of the blue sock at the end of that lost limb as if preparing the loosed thing for a party or for school. Fingers lightly resting on that wounded, dappled skin as at the
keys of a piano, Sarie Turner’s daughter calmly oversaw the stranger’s separated flesh in a square of city shade. Behind her, the split doorway of an alley lolled open like a blouse.
