LITMIR.BIZ

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      Once, after his sister’s death, Zuko sat beneath the trees and ran his palms over the textures of the pine needles on the ground. The thick, barky knot that held each bunch together. He felt the way the needles tapered to the end, like a brush. His brother emerged from the house, and bent to pick up a cone. In the same movement, Ash lobbed it across to Zuko. “Here, catch,” Ash said. Zuko caught the sound, but it remained unconnected to any meaning. He drew a blank as the cone hit him on the left shoulder. His shame in the moment and afterwards caused him to turn to the bark of the tree to hide his eyes. When he heard no further movement, no footsteps retreating, he turned his head back slowly. Ash waited, staring at his brother. Zuko whipped his head forward and studied the complex, swarming patterns in the bark.

      “You can’t catch,” Ash said.

      Zuko lifted his fingers and tried to distract himself, mimicking with their movement the tempo of the wind in the pine needles.

      “You’re eight years old and you can’t catch. You couldn’t even catch a ball if we still had one.” Ash disappeared into the house. He was gone some time. Zuko almost forgot the incident and the shame it fuelled. Then Ash reappeared, his hands out in front of him, empty. “I can’t find it,” Ash said.

      Zuko made no sound. If he had a question, his mouth didn’t know how to shape it.

      “I had a ball. A soccer ball,” Ash said. “I don’t know where it’s gone.”

      Zuko remembered the stranger and the way he’d played with Ash on the river bank on summer days, the grass thick and green and sprinkler-watered. At four years old and not yet out of diapers, Zuko had circled his mother’s legs where she’d sat on a blanket near the water. Ash had kicked that ball too hard. It flew fast and landed in the middle of the river. The tide surged full and strong; it would have carried a man as quickly. The stranger laughed and shook his curls. He put a large hand on Ash’s head and told him he’d get him another ball. Ash didn’t re­mem­ber that. Days afterwards, the stranger had said goodbye to him and never appeared again. Now Zuko wondered if his sudden absence had something to do with that ball.

      Ash stepped into the doorway of the house and called in to his mother. When she didn’t answer, he looked around the front and found her washing a bowl of beans for their supper in the water she’d col­lected that morning. She moved at the sound of his voice, righted her­self and came round the back to where Zuko was. “He can’t catch, Ma,” Ash told her. “Watch this.” He took another larger pine cone from the ground and lobbed it at his brother. It hit Zuko in the middle of his chest, and fell onto the ground. “Watch again,” he said. He picked up a second pine cone and did the same. Zuko was unable to lift his arms, not through lack of will, but at the disconnection that occurred somewhere between that will and its execution. “See?” Ash said. “He can’t catch anything.”

      Yanela wiped her hands on the flowered apron tied around her waist. There were holes in the fabric where moths or barbed wire or some­thing else sharpened by poverty had caught it over time.

      “Don’t do that, Ash,” she said. Her voice was low.

      “Do what, Ma?”

      “Show him things he can’t do. Make him out to be a fool.”

      “I’m not!”

      “Yes, you are. He knows he can’t catch. Why do you have to spell it out to the rest of the world?”

      “The rest of the world! It’s only you, Ma.”

      She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palms. Ash knew it as a sign of her weariness. “It’s me, or it’s a thousand others. You don’t have to say it in front of him.”

      “Why don’t we see other people, Ma?”

      “I’ve had enough of their judgements and their predictions.”

      “Maybe other people could help us.”

      “Other people just talk of me failing the ancestors, or that the trouble started back then. Or how I haven’t done enough, as though my children are not perfect, exactly as they are.”

      “But he knows it anyway. That he can’t catch. You said it yourself.”

      “Ash!” Now her voice rang sharp. “We’re out of paraffin for the stove. You need to get us some wood also, to boil the water for tonight’s meal.”

      “It’s something we could teach him.”

      “What?”

      “To catch! Because he can’t do it now doesn’t mean he never will. If we teach him, maybe other kids will play with him.”

      Her eyebrows arched in a question. “How do you suggest we teach him to catch?”

      “You stand behind him. Hold his hands up. Cup them for him. I’ll stand here, right close to him, and throw the cone. You help him catch it. Teach him what he needs to do with his hands. I know he wants to!”

      Zuko giggled from the direct attention, from his mother’s close proximity with her weight on his back and the serious concentration of Ash’s eyes. He squirmed and wriggled as Ash threw a pine cone from a metre away. His mother approximated the catching movement, taking the boy’s small hands along with her. It was when Ash began to count that Zuko found a rhythm in the motion, a reason to continue. And when Ash called “Another ten!” Zuko found he understood how the series of throws were confined and contained by the numbers. Within these bounds, he could concentrate enough to allow his mother to guide his movements.

      The following day they tried again. This time Yanela stepped back. She still cupped his hands in hers as she stood behind him, but she no longer leaned right into him. Now, as his own muscles learned the movements, she waited a second longer, and a second more. Finally, she stepped back. Zuko held his hands out on his own. At first he barely caught the cone three times out of ten. Every time he tried a little harder. It became a rhythm, one he’d found alone. He immersed himself in the motion, back and forth, back and forth. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. One cycle complete, to start again.

      It became what they did in the evenings before supper and after Ash returned from school, which he’d resumed, before the light faded enough to take their vision. The game made them laugh. Ash stepped back and increased the distance he stood away from Zuko, then he swapped with his mother and they took turns throwing the cone to the boy. Zuko laughed at his own pleasure and success as he caught the cone more frequently and released it again in time for the cone to fly out in the right direction. They formed a triangle between the three of them, and played the new game three ways. Eventually, their mother sat out a lot. She said she was tired. She said she didn’t have the energy any more, to keep up the consistency. She said, laughing, that Zuko had overtaken her in her own throwing and catching ability and endurance. She said next time she got some money, she would buy the boys a real ball to play with.

      8.

      Zuko sat at the breakfast table. His mother did not appear. Ash slouched into the kitchen and placed a new box of cereal in front of him. Zuko opened the box and poured the circles out into a bowl. He added milk from a carton and then ate them quickly so they kept their crunch.

      “Slow down,” Ash said. “You’ll choke if you eat any faster.” Ash made toast in a pan on the stove and poured his tea from a kettle that shot steam into the air. Zuko delighted in the way the steam curled around the sunlight in individual particles. “You keep yourself together today,” Ash told him.

      Zuko tapped the top of his head to show Ash that he was intact.

      “Mama’s in bed. She’s coughing too much.” He didn’t mention the blood he’d seen on the pillow when he took her a cup of tea. “She won’t get up today. You wait for me to come home for lunch, okay? And be quiet in here. She needs to sleep.”

      Ash wore his white shirt and grey trousers and the black shoes he shone with polish and a rag every Sunday evening, a ritual to mark the start of the coming week when the sun

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