The Last Piece of Bread
The rain had been falling since noon, a thin and patient drizzle that found every gap in the thatch above the Mumo house and turned the packed-earth floor to a dark, glistening map of puddles. By the time the sun sank behind the acacia trees at the edge of Mavuno, the light inside the one-room dwelling had dwindled to the weak orange glow of a fire that was more memory than flame. Adrian sat cross-legged before it, feeding it twigs he had gathered that morning, though he knew there were not enough of them to last the night.
He was ten years old, small for his age, with knees that seemed too large for his thin legs and eyes that missed nothing. He watched his sister's hands as she worked at the low wooden table that wobbled on three good legs and one chipped stone. Amelia's fingers, though only sixteen years old themselves, moved with the careful precision of someone far older — someone who had learned that precision was the only thing standing between her family and despair.
She was cutting bread. Not a loaf, not even half a loaf — a single heel of bread, dry at the edges and soft in the center, the last of what old Mama Nzisa had given them in exchange for a morning of weeding…