Another grabbed her hair, halting her march.

He buried his nose into her neck, lamenting the length of time since he had smelt the fragrance of a woman’s skin.

Saba was sure she smelt exactly as him, as them. She was sweating too. It appeared odd to her that even in this camp, a woman in these men’s minds remained unblemished. Womanhood uplifted, endlessly floating above the harshness of reality, untouched by tragedy.

The other men brought their noses closer to take in this womanly scent.

Saba let out a fart.

The wall of men collapsed and Saba sprinted to the river.

An announcement came through a megaphone. The English aid coordinator spoke, his assistant translated. Now that we have distributed clothes, doctors will come tomorrow, for quick check-ups.

And the doctors came, as he promised. But by the time they had finished seeing the long queue of children, dusk had fallen. Saba’s mother, queuing with the midwife, was seen late at night. Most patients were made to take the same pill, like the sardines, the same-sized huts, the air they breathed, the river water they drank, this single pill that was meant to cure all their ailments.

But many, like Saba and Hagos, towards the end of the queue, weren’t seen by the doctors. Next time, the aid coordinator promised. The doctors will come back soon, God willing.

Even the Englishman learnt to evoke God in everything he said.

DISGUST IS AN ACQUIRED TASTE

The family of three sat to eat dinner.

Three silences.

Hers.

Her brother’s.

Her mother’s.

They were empty of things to say to each other. And Saba wondered how the camp took one’s language too as if it was flesh attached to bones. She could visualize the haemorrhaging of her words, everyone’s words. No one without a language is alive.

Saba lay in her blanket and was awake when footsteps tapered into silence.

She left the hut. Lately, she had started walking around the camp by night. Saba felt less impatient then. The horizon that she scanned by day, that open sunlit bright space that stretched into infinity, the empty space she filled with her dreams, that space was reduced to nothing at night.

Life, and all its possibilities, became obscured by darkness. And night offered her freedom by giving her invisibility from herself (from the coloured wound on her thighs), from men, from the midwife, from her mother who inspected her for signs of puberty, from her brother who sought her body as a blackboard for a language he lacked.

Night was a better time to live in the camp, Saba decided. It was also when she masturbated in the open toilet, where she orgasmed as well as urinated and defecated.

Saba inhaled her orgasm. It had the smell of her insides. A garden. The garden of climbing flowers her grandmother had planted to break through the barrier separating her from her lover, full of pepper plants, lemon trees and that sour tasty orange. Saba smuggled this garden, the desires that bloomed every spring with the flowers, into the camp in her womb, without her mother watching, and without the smuggler, who charged for every single item, ever finding out.