I had just come back from school when Mummy sent me to fetch water from the next town. I grabbed the empty 25-litre keg and jogged all the way, happy to be out of the house.

At the tank, a long queue waited. Across the compound, small children played with wet sand and plastic bottles, shrieking with laughter. I stared at them, wishing I could be carefree, until the boy behind me nudged me.

"Hey, move on, it's your turn," he said.

The tank was rusty and almost as tall as me. The water gushed out so hard that cold splashes soaked my skin. When the keg was full, I dragged it aside and stared at it. I did not need much. I only needed someone to lift it onto my head. One pair of hands.

I searched the faces around me. Each time, my mouth opened and nothing came out. So I stood at a lonely corner, wishing, just once, that somebody would understand without my having to say a word.

Nobody did. The queue thinned. The light turned orange, then grey, and the tap's slow drip grew loud in the quiet. I sat on the keg until the compound was dark and empty. I dragged it to the gate and watched strangers walk home, so many that I could have counted them. Please, help me lift this. The words stayed behind my teeth.

My legs ached. I went back inside to ask the owners. I heard their chatter and the clink of pots in the backyard kitchen, but no one answered me.

When I returned to the gate, the keg was gone.

I searched everywhere. Nothing. Sure that it had been stolen, I burst into tears and dragged my feet home along the road that had felt so friendly in daylight.

 

At our gate, I pushed it open just enough to peep inside. The keg sat on the stairs, half empty, its cap off.

Then the ground tilted.

The sound went first. The night insects, my own sobbing, all of it fell away, as if someone had shut a door on the world. The rust under my palm turned warm and rough. My fingers, small and shaking a moment ago, were long now, cracked, and they smelled of smoke. The gate that had always loomed over me sat at my hip.

I was on the inside.

 

I felt heavier.

Not the tiredness of a child, but a tiredness that lived in the bones, as though the weight of the world had settled on my shoulders and decided to stay. My neck throbbed with a deep, familiar ache. Smoke stung my eyes. The firewood was not properly dried and refused to burn, and I coughed until my chest hurt. My palms were cracked and rough around the spoon, my wrapper tied tight over a waist that had carried too much for too long. Two children to feed, a pot that would not boil, and I had not sat down since dawn. No one had asked if I was tired. No one ever did.

I went to scoop more water from the keg on the stairs. My arms knew its weight. They had lifted it alone, onto my own head, in the dark, only minutes ago.

That was when I noticed her.

A small girl, wet and trembling, hiding behind the thick rusty gate that had served our compound for years. She was crying. I looked at her, then turned away, because something in my chest had gone tight and I did not know what to do with it.

 

"Mummy," she whispered.

And everything this body had been holding rose up at once. 

"Where have you been"?

I had walked in the dark, past the market, past the bush path, every minute painting a worse picture. Fear is a hot thing in a mother's throat. It does not stay fearful for long. It turns into shouting.

I looked at her face. Honest and frightened, a child telling the truth with no way to prove it. Part of me wanted to believe her. But the fear in this body was bigger than belief. My hands remembered a cane before my mind did, its weight, its sound, as if they had learned the lesson long ago. My arm began to lift.

Don't, I tried to say. Don't. But the arm was not mine to command.

A hot, stinging slap landed on my face, and I was small again.

 

"You fool!" she howled. 

"You left this house to fetch water for night cooking and went somewhere else, abandoning your errand halfway. I will deal with you today" she continued 

"Ma, I..."

Before I could finish, hot lashes of cane that seemed to come from nowhere were already marking my cold skin. I screamed. The accusations did not stop.

"You went to see a boy, right?" she bellowed. "None of my children will get pregnant as teenagers. God forbid!"

No one had ever explained to me what she was so afraid of. She was afraid of it without explaining either.

I ran as fast as my tiny legs could carry me, but I stumbled on a rock and fell flat on the ground. She stood over me and lashed me one last time before turning away.

"You won't eat this food. If you were hungry, you would have been back by now. I had to go down to that place to look for you, and I met my keg in a dusty corner with you nowhere to be found."

Her voice cracked on the last words.

I lay there, tasting dust, and for the first time I looked at her properly. I did not see hate. I saw a woman worn thin by work and by everyone's hunger, who only wanted to cook dinner and rest. A woman losing herself while keeping everyone else alive, who had not been raised any differently and was reacting with the only thing she had ever been given.

And I understood the keg. She had lifted onto her own head the very weight I could not ask anyone to lift. She had carried it home in the dark without a word, and without anyone to help her either.

It still hurts. Understanding her did not take the pain away. Both things were true at once.

That night I lay awake, the smell of smoke still clinging to my hair. It was the smell of her wrapper, her hands, her whole life. My stomach ached louder than my back.

Near midnight, the door creaked. I shut my eyes. Footsteps stopped beside me, stayed a long moment, and left.

When I opened them, a plate sat by the mat, covered with another plate, still warm. She had said I would not eat. She had never said she would not feed me.

Neither of us ever spoke of it.

The next evening, I watched her bend for the keg at the doorway. I walked over without being asked, put my hands under its rim, and lifted it with her.

She did not look at me. But she did not say no.