Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou - "The Homeless Wanderer"

I took Meena's son Patrick on a trip across the sea. Patrick was a genial boy, quiet, and like myself at that age, liked numbers and games. There was a daily game of Bingo on the ship, and we structured our days around this. And dinner. And a cocktail when the skies were the right colour of grey. That summer I didn't go to Africa, I took care of Patrick, whose mother, unbeknownst to me, was falling in love.

A friend of a friend invited me one night to a party at Sigmund Freud's house. I left Patrick with Mrs. Pritchett and stopped for a cocktail on the way. It was a dry night in July and I felt like a freed but saddled man, out of prison, but still in shackles. I saw the artifacts that Freud had and I didn't want to tell him but I suspected they were all fakes. I talked to a woman named Carolyn who seemed allergic to eye contact, and a short man kept begging for the room's attention to show some of his rather transparent magic.

Meena communicated to me through Patrick, which was, again unbeknownst to me, the first sign of trouble. Tell Robert hello for me, make sure to hug him twice at bed, once for me. I merely thought it was the kind of sweetness you send to someone you truly love, not needing to tell them directly, and not a way of simply keeping home fires strategically alight.

The nights I would spend. Whole nights when I could have been in Africa, uncovering time itself, spent on the porch smoking into the apple tree and thinking about Meena. Her wrists, her calves in a light dress, her stomach that seemed to prove to the world that simple function was the greatest beauty. A bridge got people across a gap, a bowl served soup to the hungry, and Meena's stomach would swallow that soup and stuck slightly out and all these things were perfect.

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