Amina approaches a Mopane tree outside the village next to an old house. Father says he sold the house to a kind man, an important man, a man to please.

 

     Amina picks up a colorful leaf believing it will serve an injured butterfly as a prosthetic wing, much as the clumsy device attached at the elbow serves Amina as a forearm.

 

     Amina rests under the Mopane and hopes it will make a dream come true and imagines Mother and Father and sister and brother, the whole family, will go to a country with fruits and vegetables and water, away from machetes and rape and thirst and starvation. Father says the sale of the house will make wings to fly.

 

Art: The Morphane Tree by Judith A. Lawrence, Watercolor on Card, 2022