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standing. We are home, children, greet your grandparents.” The children each walked to the sides of the elders and awkwardly thrust their little frames forward for embraces. The elders held them as best as possible so they didn’t feel different, but the extra care to avoid their stumps was enough to show the discomfort. As the embraces were completed and smiles resumed, someone’s voice rang in their ears. No one had heard the person arriving because of his dead footsteps.
    “Greetings to my elders and to all of you.” A stammering sixteen-year-old boy spoke and everyone turned to see who he was. The smile and joy on the faces of Sila, Hawa, and Maada extinguished abruptly as soon as they looked at the boy whose right eye was twitching incessantly. His face was less pimpled but still rough, and they remembered him even though it had been some years. There was a heavy silence, which made everyone’s body tighten with fear. The sun came from behind the clouds to replace the lost delight that Sila had brought with him. The sixteen-year-old boy avoided eye contact with everyone.
    “Let us go home and find some water to feed our thirst and wash,” Sila’s shaking voice said to his children, who hurriedly followed, fear in their eyes as they looked back at the boy who had just arrived.
    “My name is Ernest. I don’t know where I am from but I followed them here.” The boy pointed to Sila and his children, swinging his body and placing his hands crossed behind his back. Out of the corners of his eyes, he followed the movement of Sila and his children to see which house they were going to occupy. He didn’t need to say more. The twitching of his eye and his stammering got worse when he spoke of following Sila. The elders could see the story in his eyes. They kept their refreshed faces alive to make the boy feel as welcome as possible, knowing full well that more needed to be done to mend what had been broken. Pa Moiwa told Ernest to go to the house of Colonel and to say that the elders had sent him to stay with them.
    “We have to make sure that no one feels afraid to be here or unwelcome,” Mama Kadie said to her friends.
    “The war has changed us, but I hope not so much that we’ll never find our way back. I could have never imagined a world where the presence of a child brings something other than joy.” Her friends agreed with only hums, looking at the boy as he walked away, his apprehensive shadow seeming to dodge the sun, painting itself in strange forms on the earth.
    Ernest didn’t go immediately to where he had been told to go. Instead, he walked around town looking for a bucket or jerry can. He found two buckets on a veranda and took them without asking, since no one was present, and went to the river to fetch water. He brought the water and placed it under the stoop of Sila’s house. Then he knocked on the doorframe—the home had no door—and ran to hide in the nearby bushes. Sila came out asking, “Who is it?” but there was no one. His eyes caught the two buckets of water and he smiled, surveying the area more, hoping to thank the person for this kind gesture. He patted his own shoulder; this was how he clapped these days, with his only hand, to thank whoever had done him this good. Ernest saw it all in hiding from under the coffee trees. He didn’t smile; even though he had made Sila happy, he felt a twist in his heart—this man couldn’t clap normally anymore. After Sila went back into his house, Ernest lay in the bushes for a while, his hands folded under his heavy body until they became numb and unusable. He struggled to get himself up without the use of his hands, deliberately letting his body roll in thorns and against trees. He did things like this to himself frequently, sometimes wishing his hands would stop working forever. He made his way to the house where Colonel and the others were, his hands still waking up from their numbness.
    He didn’t go inside but looked through the window