A nurse sees the huddle and runs out of the dispensary. He is prepared to handle a broken arm, a concussion, even a snakebite, for my parents smuggle anti-venom for the clinic. Each time they visit Kenya, they carry back vials marked viper, mamba, cobra. The men are grateful to turn responsibility over to someone who knows what to do. The nurse directs one of the men to gather up the girl and carry her into the clinic. He lays her on a cot stained with urine. And that is all anyone can do. She died before she hit the ground, they will later say in soft voices, a refrain that will be repeated from house to house. Somehow this fact gives the story its urgency. Other children die and will die, but hers is the death we all remember.

The girl was bitten by a green mamba, a lovely snake — sleek-skinned and graceful. She was bitten several times, machine gun bites that leave a row of punctures on her dark, angled arm. It seems impossible that marks so small could amputate slender bones from breath and sinew, impossible that the green ballerina, gliding from branch to branch, bears death as well as beauty. Yet there lies the child, a girl whose mother will later kneel on dry earth, arms outstretched, lashing the air with the songs of her grief.

…Those were the lessons, clean and simple, but my sister and I will not learn them. We are children, fearless in the tradition of all children, and there are many interesting matters.

You are never safe. You are never too young to die. Those were the lessons, clean and simple, but my sister and I will not learn them. We are children, fearless in the tradition of all children, and there are many interesting matters. There is the starfruit tree to climb and dirt pathways to press into the jungle floor. There are friends to swap stories with and a Fisher Price record player with five unbroken records, and there is the neighbor’s cat who just had kittens. For days, we have been longing to see them. It’s all we can talk about.

“We’ll see,” my mother says. She holds a rubber band between her teeth and slides a brush through Sonja’s nut-brown hair. Sonja sits on a stool between our mother’s knees and scowls. She has a tender scalp and long, slippery hair that my mother pulls back into merciless ponytails and braids, a ritual I’m spared for my hair is cut short at the chin. My sister often dissolves into tears, sobs my mother has little patience for.

“Hold still,” she says now. “Good grief, I’m not trying to kill you.”

And then, unexpectedly, my mother shrieks. The nearly completed braid slips from her grasp, unraveling like a living thing. My mother pays no heed to the plait as she lunges for the screen door. We sit in astonishment, mouths agape, eyes alert, our whole beings wonderfully interested in whatever phenomenon has interrupted our morning. We watch as our mother hurls out the door and down the steps. She shouts again, but it is too late. A monkey has run off with her tomato.