What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 33



December 30, 2007, Kibera—Leda

EACH MAN’S HANDS on Leda’s skin felt like desert sand. Hot. Gritty. Rough as splinters of glass.

She ricocheted around their circle, a lotto ball in the air mix machine, fate holding its breath. Behind the lunging silhouettes of the men, the slum exploded—fire licking and climbing, spitting at the world. There was another sound, too, mixed with the whooshing sound of the inferno. Wood, metal, bodies, children—all crumbling, cracking, hissing and screaming in the flames. A symphony of loss.

The men, who were boys really, yelled incomprehensibly, but Leda knew their intentions.

They ripped the buttons on her shirt.

They yanked the hem of her skirt.

A cloud of reddish dust rose from their feet, as though trying to hide her. But the dust dashed away as Leda was flung to the ground.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then it was like vampires at the sight of a wound. The men converged—kicking, poking, laughing. They tugged at all her protruding parts. Leda was a centipede in the dust, trying to fold in one hundred legs. Trying to protect the things that mattered, the things that could not be undone.

Maybe they will just beat me and go away. This is not my fight. I came to help. Leda wanted to shout in their faces. I came to help.

But then she heard it, jumbled with the clatter of their words. Ita. Another one said it. Ita.

So they knew who she was.

She was a fish flopping, a tree fallen. A spider in the wind.

She was Ita’s love.

For an instant, Leda thought it would save her. But as their voices rose, she knew it had doomed her instead.

When the boy dropped down on top of her, the force of it was like a metal roof pinning her in a hurricane.

Instantly, all Leda could smell was him—sweat and dirt, but rancid, like musk and cheese rusted over with blood. He used his trunk to flatten her into the ground, his rib bones stabbing into her sternum, her bare skin ground into the rocks and trash. His legs and hands scrambled for Leda’s flailing limbs. The man-boys above laughed and hollered.

All she could do was flail and scream.

Leda called out for the man she loved, the only person who’d ever really loved her.