Your wife watched a girl die today because the girl had strep throat when she was very young; that previous illness caused permanent heart problems, made the nineteen-year-old girl’s heart burst. Tell your wife it’s okay, and then tell her that you’ve extracted a chapbook from your novel because you can’t make any headway on the larger book because you hope that somehow your struggles with writing will distract her from the pain that surrounds her, because what you are doing is real to you.

Get her out of the house. Take your wife to the market behind the katuko—small fires where families of those admitted to the hospital stay for weeks while caring for their ill loved ones. On your way in, just beyond the House of Hope, you hear wailing. You see a woman in the red dirt.

“She must be the woman whose husband died today,” your wife says.

You walk on.

When you return to the gate, the woman is gone. All that remains is a smooth imprint of an arm, a leg, a hip.

“They must have moved her husband’s body,” your wife says.

You hug your wife and go home. You try not to think about your privilege—how easily you can leave this place, how you can choose what you carry and what you don’t. You don’t know how the woman’s husband died, much less who he was. But does it matter?

Your wife is alive. You are alive.

If you saw that woman again, there would be nothing you could say to her that would make a difference—even if you spoke her language.

Mu-ntu wa fa kale — the person is already dead.

The only thing those words seem to mean, in any language, is:

I am as helpless in all of this as you.