Marketplace

Orovrei is someone I hold from a distance, in a city called Nairobi, and most of what passes between us travels by word alone, no faces, just what gets said and what gets heard underneath it. Lately she has been carrying a great deal, the ordinary machinery of two children and the fear that comes loose and tightens around small things: a fever, a bad night, the long habit of staying braced for what might go wrong next. I know her mostly through this bracing, and through the moments, rarer, when it loosens.