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and December. In order never to take any chances, she refused to leave the house on a Saturday, until once, in April of all months, when a blanket next to the cooking pit in the kitchen caught fire. The flames were ravenous. In a few minutes they had not only devoured the wooden shack but also robbed Mya Mya of the last shred of confidence she had that any place in the world could be safe for her.

     
    N ow, recalling these things, she felt a chill. The fire crackled in the kitchen, and she got to her feet. A thin layer of ice, delicate and brittle, covered the water in the bucket before her. She kicked it and watched the tiny fragments of broken ice disappear into the water.
    She took a deep breath, held her belly with both hands, and looked down at her body. She was a beautiful young woman, even if she had never felt that way and no one had ever told her so. She wore her long black hair in a braid that reached nearly to her hips. Her dark, big, almost round eyes and full lips gave her face a sensual expression. She had long, thin fingers and muscular but slender arms and legs. Her belly was round and thick and big—so big that it seemed foreign to her, even after months. There was a kick, a knock, and she knew: Here they come again.
    They’d started yesterday evening, an hour apart. Now they were coming every couple of minutes. Waves breaking against a fortification, always more and higher and stronger. She tried to get a purchase on something, an arm, a branch, a stone. There was nothing. She didn’t want the child, not today, not on a Saturday in December.
    H er neighbor, who had already brought four children into the world, thought it was an easy birth, especially for a first child. Mya Mya herself couldn’t remember; she had lived for hours in another world, one in which her hands and legs no longer obeyed her, in which her bodywas no longer her own. She was nothing now but a giant wound. She saw fat black rain clouds, and a butterfly settled on her forehead. She saw her brother in the tide. One very last time. A thought sailed by, like a chicken feather carried aloft on the wind. Her child. On that Saturday. A sign? Her brother reborn?
    She heard a baby cry. Not whimpering, but defiant and angry. A boy, someone said. Mya Mya opened her eyes and looked for her brother. No, not this ugly, shriveled, blood-smeared thing. This helpless bundle with its distorted head and face.
    Mya Mya had no idea what a child needed. She came to motherhood empty-handed. Any love she had possessed was gone, had long since been washed away, on a scorching-hot day in August.

Chapter 8
     
    NO ONE COULD say that Mya Mya hadn’t tried during those first days of her son’s life. She did whatever the neighbor told her. She laid him on her plump, full breast and fed him with her milk. She rocked him to sleep or carried him about when he was restless. She wrapped him close to her body when she went to buy things in the village. She lay awake nights between her husband and her child, listening to hear the little one breathe, following the infant’s short, quick breaths and wishing that she would feel something. Feel something when her child nursed, when it grasped her finger with its dimpled little hand. She wished that something would come to fill the emptiness inside her. Anything.
    She turned to the side and pressed him to her, an embrace somewhere between fainting and violence. She pressed more firmly and two big brown eyes looked at her,astonished. Mya Mya felt nothing. Mother and son were like magnets that repelled each other. Press as she might, they would never touch.
    It might have been just a matter of time. She might have had a chance after all, and the instinct to provide might have developed into a feeling of affection, and the feeling of affection into the miracle of love—if it hadn’t been for the incident with the chickens.
    It happened on a Saturday, two weeks to the day after the birth. Just after sunrise Mya Mya walked