They named the boy Malik before they placed the burning heart in his chest. His father hoped the strong name would ward off that which trailed this heart; his mother knew better than to assume a single frail word could change generations of history. Still, the men rolled the sound across their tongues as they gathered in the room dense with childbirth and settled Malik’s great-grandfather onto the bed.

Kingston shook his head at the sight of the babe lying unearthly still beside him. “He’s an unfortunate one.” It was as close to a blessing as the newly crowned Malik would get. “Get on with it, Pascal,” he said, and turned his face to the ceiling.

Malik’s father lifted the heart from Kingston’s chest. It was firm and wet, and it seared his fingertips as he coaxed it into the cavity within Malik’s own. As the boy grew older, he’d tell his father that it felt like the blush of coals under his skin—but for now, all the infant could do was wail for the first time as the heart sank into him and his rib cage grew brittle and sharp around it.

Kingston slipped away with little fanfare, and so it had always gone. The family of men sharing the three hearts among them, each passed from great-grandfather to great-grandson, births and burials on the same day. They made collards and catfish to celebrate and to mourn, and the grease-specked air followed the men from the womb to the tomb.

Malik grew up in an impassive cradle of fertile green land nestled at the base of a mountain known as the Belly. Brief monsoon seasons spat warm rain over the land at regular intervals, at which time Pascal would tell Malik and his cousins the story of how the Turner family had arrived.

“The old lands got crowded, so we left with twenty families and our canoes.” Malik’s father regaled the cousins sitting captivated around the table. Malik sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the counters. The long vessels of Pascal’s stories were made of rawhide stretched across buffed redwood, and the one belonging to the Turner family stood on its end in the center of the village marketplace. Its tip pierced the rain clouds that sank across the sky during the monsoon seasons. “The people of this land had been haunted for generations by an old hurt that nested in the earth and feasted on their people. The first heart led us here and accepted the charge to heal on behalf of us all.”

“That was Malik’s heart!” one of his cousins crowed triumphantly.

Pascal nodded. “Malik’s great-grandfather four times over was the only one strong enough to lead us into this new life as one.”

“The only one cruel enough.” Malik’s oldest cousin, a boy with a permanently raised eyebrow, elbowed another and both boys cracked up. Malik dug his fingers into the disintegrating grooves of the tiled floor. His cousins were all on his mother’s side—they weren’t Turners and would never know the soft scorch of an old heart against the breastbone. Sometimes he hated them for that. Mostly he envied them.

Malik left his father gesturing and walked out into the nearest vegetable field under the sheeting rain. He knew this tale like his own aching chest. The hearts had always been too insular to tolerate the close quarters for long, so the twenty families separated when they landed. They’d scattered across the barren land and set about drawing the hurt from its population. The Turners settled at the foothills of the Belly and a thriving town sprang up around them, its people growing whole and healthy while their hurt sank poison claws into the hearts of the Turner men.

The boy opened his mouth and screamed for as long as he could. The heavy rainfall swallowed the sound with long gulps. Just seven years old and already Malik hated so many things.

At ten, Malik’s grandfather Bastian took him to the school in town for the first time.

“You’ve coddled him long enough,” Bastian told Pascal. “He’s got to learn how to use that heart sooner or later.”

A fight broke out on the playground that first day. Four older boys with young muscles bulging and no place to go. The teacher pulled Malik from where he’d been lingering inside over the little library of dog-eared books and shoved him to the front of the ring of children. He cowered, expecting one of the boys to turn those angry fists on him. But as he watched their hard faces, something squeezed inside of him. His heart throbbed painfully. The boys blinked and the fists came down in relaxed submission.

“What you lookin’ at, new kid?” one of the boys said. He shouldered Malik aside before he could answer.

Malik walked home alone with the Belly looming over his shoulder and thought about how good that childish rage had felt in his heart—hot and light and gone in moments—and he craved the sensation again.

He found it at the market days later, when a boy pushed his older sister into a ditch and the fury of the firstborn seared Malik’s insides. He felt it on harvest days, when the whole town turned out to strip the fields of maize, squash, and broad butter beans, and men snapped at their sons to move quicker or get out the way, boy. Malik peered from a row over as the fathers shook their heads and their old hurt trickled into his heart like water onto parched lips. As his heart gulped, he remembered his grandfather’s words, spoken roughly as they’d walked to school that very first time: “Your job—you watch and you listen. You don’t offer advice or try to fix the thing. You just listen. You burn up the bad stuff so someone else can get to the healing beneath.”

It wasn’t just people. His grandfather sat with the land for hours on end, watching the wind rage and the grass tremble until the pressure gave way and storm-gray clouds brought much-needed rain. And there were the animals. Colicky horses and untamable goats, and once their neighbor brought a dog to the house just as Malik was dressing for school.

“The bitch won’t stop biting me,” the man said to Bastian, who crossed his arms and looked down at the muzzled creature.

“Pascal is over with the Davis cows. Leave her and he’ll take a look tonight.”

Malik emerged from his room, pulling his jacket on. “I can do it, da-Bas.” He hadn’t watched animals before, but he’d seen the way Pascal crouched before hostile cats and resentful cows and came away looking sated. Malik’s heart ached for that, too.

“Not your job, boy,” Bastian said, but the neighbor looked him up and down.

“Getting restless, kid?” The man chuckled. “He’s sounding like your da-Kingston.” Bastian’s laugh was forced. The neighbor went on. “My cousin’s having issues with his wife. Come watch them.”

So they left the animal yelping in the field and crossed town, passing through the square with its big canoe and a handful of boys setting up stalls for the afternoon market. The village beyond was denser than the area around the Turner compound. Kids played chase, ducking around the washing strung between the sloping roofs of neighboring houses. Here and there, Malik could see a man standing over an outdoor cooking pit. A strong breeze carried mouthwatering smells across their path.

The man stopped before a tidy, lived-in-looking house with a handful of women sitting on its stoop. One of them looked up as they approached. “Your cousin’s out of line, in there talkin’ bout ‘This not my kid’—on the hearts themselves, who else gave the babe a forehead like that?”

The women roared with laughter. The man spat into the dirt. “Off my case, woman. I brought the Turner kid.”

All eyes turned to Malik. He straightened and tried not to squirm, but his palms were damp.

“Well then.” The woman sounded surprised and suddenly reticent. “Go on in, boy.”

Inside the single-story home, Malik found an empty sitting room with a well-worn sofa and a bedroom with a crisply made bed. Voices came from the back of the house. When he pushed a sliding door open, he found a man leaned back in a kitchen chair and a woman with a babe standing across the room. Both of them were yelling.

Malik cleared his throat. The man dropped the chair to all fours with a clatter and stared at him.

“See, fool,” the woman said. “Your stupidity so big the Turner kid felt it from across town.”

Malik’s heart yawned in his chest and swallowed the first wave of rage flowing from the man. But for the first time, nothing outside of him changed.

“I’ll know my kid when I see it, and this ain’t it.” The man turned his wrath back on the woman. A second wave, hotter than the first, flooded Malik’s chest. His heart pulsed and ached. Malik liked the heady rush it gave him, heat lighting him up like a glowbug. But then they were shouting again, the fires in their words tearing through Malik like dry wood, and he thought of his grandfather’s words: “You burn up the bad stuff.” Malik pressed the heel of his hand to his chest and bent over. Heat rose beneath his skin. He gasped for air and wondered if this bad stuff was too much even for the fire that writhed inside him.

Something shriveled inside Malik. His heart roared and when his ears had cleared, the yelling had stopped. The woman sighed. She lay the infant on the table next to the man, who was looking up at her with an expression Malik didn’t understand.

“You know I love you baby.” The man’s voice was hoarse. He reached out and palmed the woman through her thin cotton shirt. She bent towards him.

Malik stood frozen. The babe was mercifully silent on the table.

“Come on, kid.” The neighbor’s big hands descended on his shoulders and steered him away. Out on the stoop, someone whistled in appreciation. “You did good. Go on home now.”

That evening, Malik’s mother Zola held ice packs to his bruised chest as Pascal kneeled before the neighbor’s dog. Its raised hackles came down and its growling turned into panting, and Pascal brought the creature inside with an easy smile. When Malik asked Zola why he wasn’t allowed to work with the animals, his mother rubbed his shoulder.

“The hearts need different things.” She always spoke of the organs as if they were separate from the men who carried them. “Yours needs something stronger than what the animals can give.”

“Because the animals can’t get angry like humans do.” Malik was barely eleven by then.

Zola looked stricken. “That’s right, Mal. They can’t.”

Malik went back to school when the burn on his chest had faded. That first day, an older boy told everyone Malik’s mama had pulled him out because he was too dumb. The fire burned bright along the edges of Malik’s heart. At break, under a broad and bruised gray sky, Malik slammed the boy’s head against the metal swing set so hard it dented the pole.

“He’s got his da-Kingston’s heart all right,” Malik heard a teacher whisper as his grandmother Brielle escorted him out of the school. Her lips were pressed into a hard line. Malik didn’t think she’d smiled at him once in his entire life.

“What do they mean?” he asked.

She shook her head. Her voice was curt. “Kingston killed a man when he was barely older than you. He’d apparently insulted King, but who really knows what happened.” Malik’s grandmother looked down at him from over her wire-rimmed glasses. “That heart is more of a curse than a blessing, if you ask me.”

Over the weeks that followed, as Malik trailed Pascal around the herb garden and his teachers watched him closely at school, the burning in Malik’s chest solidified into something like shame. His resolve hardened and his heart smoldered and swelled, and in this manner seasons passed.

Malik met Koru on the slopes of the Belly the season he turned twenty. Koru was twenty-four and new to town, his family drawn by the bustling marketplace and reliable rains that turned the ground green every few months. His father was a weaver, his mother a baker, and Koru was big and muscular in a way that made Malik hot inside his clothes. At the edge of the watering hole nestled among the trees, Malik stole glances as the other young men jostled and wrestled and shoved each other into the water.

The setting sun cast long purple shadows across the plains as they walked back down to the village that evening. Koru joined Malik behind the rest of the boys, who whooped and ran in circles.

“Water like ice today, huh.” Koru’s hair—long and dark and slicked straight from the swim—was starting to escape its confinement at the back of his head. Malik’s fingers tingled.

“Every day,” Malik said. “They say the snows are year-round at the Belly’s peak.”

Ahead, a punch thumped and a boy howled. Malik’s heart sipped happily. He grimaced.

Koru gripped his arm. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” Malik lied automatically. But Koru was looking steadily at him, not at his chest, and his ears started to burn as well.

The next day, Koru showed up at the compound at midday and impressed Malik’s mother with his deferential flattery.

“Come see my workshop,” he said when Malik came in from the herb garden. Malik blinked. His grandfather frowned down at last season’s seeds on the kitchen table. Zola flicked the back of Bastian’s head and smiled at Koru for both of them.

Koru’s family had built their home on the edge of the village facing the Belly. Inside a building almost as big as the living house, Koru showed Malik a pottery kiln with a yawning maw. Clay was caked along the base of the wheels and the tables full of tools. A set of shelves held neat rows of unfired bowls.

“Help me wake the flames,” he said, handing a poker to Malik. “Those pieces are plenty dry to go in.”

Malik stabbed the coals as Koru slid great logs into the side of the kiln. When the other man sat him down in front of a small wheel, their fingers overlapped on the slick clay and Malik breathed harder. Koru’s smile was quick and bright. When Malik’s heart thumped unhappily against his chest, he bit the inside of his cheek to ruin and smiled back.

The monsoons passed. Malik tended a feverish child and then shouted his own father to tears. Koru told him stories about the town he’d grown up in, with no hearts and dwindling rains. Malik broke up a fight and then broke his knuckles against a stone wall. Koru guided his good hand across exquisitely shaped pitchers and his fingertips lingered against Malik’s wrist. Malik settled a dispute between unhappy farmers and then pulled the farm hand off the tractor and beat him unconscious. Koru sat next to Malik in the workshop and frowned at him.

“I know it’s hard,” he said cautiously.

“You don’t know anything.” Furious tears ached in Malik’s eyes. His heart raged and the burn was familiar and delicious.

“What if it had been me on that tractor?” Koru clasped his clay-whitened hands together. “That heart isn’t all of you, but you’re letting it turn you into someone else.”

Malik left Koru sitting alone in the darkening workshop and took a circuitous route home. Yellow wildflowers bloomed along the edges of shallow animal prints. In the herb garden behind the house, he trailed his fingertips across the hard nubs of the early chamomile plants and stared into the distance. A pack of night horses, twice as tall as the regular ones and shadowy in the fresh darkness, passed just beyond the farthest fields. Malik watched them flow across the distance on whisper-thin legs and wondered what kind of hearts their colts might have.

Malik went in through the back door and found his father and grandfather sitting at the kitchen table. Pascal was staring at the heavily grained wood, mouth flattened to a grim line. Bastian glanced up at Malik as the door squealed shut. A pitcher of fermented fire wine sat between them.

“We’ve found you a wife, since you clearly have no interest in it.” Bastian tossed back a cup of the smoking liquid. “Ceremony is in three days. Sunrise.”

Malik stared helplessly at his father.

“Tradition, son. You knew it was coming.” Pascal stood and squeezed Malik’s shoulder. He tried a smile. “It won’t be so bad. Your mother helped.” Fire whispered in Malik’s ears as his heart tried to eat his own fury and failed.

The mornings were bright and damp with the promise of the coming rains. Malik harvested valerian from the garden and treated his grandmother’s headaches with lavender. Three days later, he dressed in the same dark red suit all the men of his family had once worn and stood with his father and grandfather at the far edge of the herb garden.

His wife-to-be, Sanaa, wore a fire-bright dress that cut high across her chest. The family gathered behind her snatched glances at the Turner men as she blinked coyly at Malik. He stared off at the clouds of light gathering in the east.

Bastian chuckled mockingly. “Don’t waste your time honey. No charm of yours strong enough for this one.”

Malik’s father spoke the words that bound them together. After, Malik’s new wife led him to the cottage they used for grain overflow. It had been tidied for their union—they were meant to share the bed there until she was with child. Her grip was firmer than Malik had expected.

She unzipped her dress and let it fall to the dusty floor. “I’ll ask for nothing after this. Will you let me fulfill my duty?”

Malik was mute. The air smelled like sweet hay and something rotting beneath that. He was only twenty-three.

They shared that bed seven times in as many days before Sanaa sent him on his way with a sisterly kiss on the cheek. Koru found him sitting at the edge of the watering hole.

“Congratulations.” Koru dropped down next to him and tossed a rock into the pool below. “Whole town’s a-talking. You’ll be a father soon.” The ripples were violent things on the slick surface.

Malik dropped his head into his hands. His heart reached for something to burn and, finding nothing, it turned inward and started to devour him. Koru leaned his shoulder against Malik’s own and Malik swallowed his boiling tears. When the sun had passed overhead, Koru drew him to his feet and took him back to the Turner compound. The other man waited until Malik opened the front door before turning on his heel and walking briskly back the way they’d come.

A week later, Malik bought a necklace of rounded river stones in the marketplace and knocked on the open door of Koru’s workshop.

“I only know how to be what I am,” Malik said. 

Koru sat before a big wheel, clay drying on his forearms. He shook his head. “I think you’re wrong.”

When he offered his neck to Malik, the fire in Malik’s heart jumped differently. Somewhere deeper than his heart, Malik wondered.

In the little room behind the workshop, Malik noticed the crisply made bed and the pottery stacked in corners—chipped cups and irregular pots and a dusty heap of hooks and utensils. Koru’s sleeping mat was thin, and Malik fumbled over the ties on Koru’s clothes. The men came together wordlessly and then the silence fled from long-held gasps. For a few bright moments, Malik was just a man burning with desire, and he knew this to be far beyond the reach of his heart.

The months passed and Sanaa’s belly grew round. Malik circled the town and fed his flaming heart on jealous parents and aching children and buried the violence deep before returning to Koru. At the compound, Bastian withdrew into silence. Brielle ignored Malik entirely.

“The end is hard,” Pascal said to Malik as they weeded the herb garden together. The rains had stopped days earlier. The soil was crumbling beneath its own weight. “Even a life as difficult as this one is precious.”

Malik eyed his father, who had paused to watch his own sitting quiet-eyed on the back porch. The fields unfurling at their feet were bursting with ripeness. They’d have to harvest soon, Malik thought distantly, or the squash would split along the seams and their flesh would be good only for the scavengers.

Malik woke abruptly one morning. Koru slept on beside him in the room off the workshop, not waking when Malik curled towards him seeking shelter. The little window above their heads brightened in degrees of gray.

Someone knocked on the outer door. “Malik Turner?”

“What is it?”

A pause. “Your son. He’s coming.”

At the farmhouse, Pascal braced himself with both hands against the table. Wailing came from the next room, accompanied by a low murmur of women’s voices.

Malik nodded at the closed door. “How soon?”

“Not long now.” Pascal closed his eyes. Malik glanced through an open doorway, where he could see Bastian and Brielle sitting together. Their lips moved as if in prayer. Malik wondered if there was a god older than the hearts who might hear them.

The sounds of childbirth ceased eventually. The door opened and Zola emerged with three other women, supporting Sanaa in their arms. None of them looked at the gathered men.

Inside the birthing room, the linens had been changed and the windows thrown wide. The new boy lay on one side of the bed, as still as death.

“It’s time,” Pascal said to no one in particular. Malik stood at the end of the bed and looked down at the body that was to become his son. Bastian settled on the other side. He grabbed Malik’s wrist with fingers that were still strong for a man at the end of his life.

“Teach your son to burn hotter than this heart,” he said. His voice was hoarse. Malik flinched away from its heat. “Don’t let me down, boy.”

Robins chirred outside the window in rising crescendo. Malik touched his son’s still chest, then his grandfather’s, and held his breath as Bastian’s ribs pressed against his skin and splayed his chest open. In the cavity there, the fist-sized organ pulsed violently. When Malik’s son drew his first jagged breath, Pascal covered Bastian’s face and Malik opened the door so the family could bury his grandfather.

The Turner household adjusted as old-growth forests do, new growth sprouting in unexpected places. Malik’s son, Yari, was a quiet babe. Pascal and Zola moved into the largest room in the house, Brielle put on black mourning rings, and Sanaa started bringing home a man called Tiran. Malik returned to the compound only rarely. He preferred the long quiet days alongside Koru in the workshop, where he starved his hungry heart and fed other parts of himself.

“Yari misses you,” Zola said to him one afternoon. They were in the herb garden together, the boy playing in the dirt at the end of the row. Malik glanced at him almost involuntarily and looked away with a wince.

“He’s hardly old enough for that.”

“He understands you don’t like him.”

Malik shook his head. “Got nothing to do with like.”

“That boy has your grandfather’s gifts. He’ll calm the storms and cultivate good harvests, but his heart can be only as peaceful as you teach it. He’s already losing his temper when he drops something.”

Malik thought of the stories of his grandfather’s father, the man who had carried Malik’s heart before him. Kingston’s unpredictable temper had left Bastian with shiny scars from belt buckles and his own insatiable fury.

“I stay away, don’t I?”

Malik’s mother sat up and brushed dirt from her hands. Her hair was silvering. Malik didn’t know when that had begun. “Harm is more than just physical, son. Don’t act like you don’t know that.”

Brielle passed away shortly after Yari took his first steps. At the end of the mourning period, Sanaa came to find him in Koru’s workshop for the first time. “I’ve asked Tiran to build an addition onto the house,” she said. Malik watched her warily. After a pause, she added, “It’s a big job for one person.”

Malik looked at Koru over the edge of the wide bowl on his wheel.

“You’re looking well,” Koru said to Sanaa. Then, calmly, to Malik: “I’ll finish that.”

Malik walked with Sanaa back through the village. It had grown since Malik’s childhood. They stopped several times for Malik to watch and his heart to burn. He’d tried to conceal this part of him around Koru lately, but Sanaa had never known his soft sides. His heart yawned hungrily towards those newest to town, still throbbing with hungry rage rooted deep. And there, halfway between his two homes with his son’s mother strolling beside him, he wondered if he could ever grow his heart big enough to hold the pain and his son apart from one another.

That afternoon, Malik measured and sanded planks beside Tiran. The following morning, they hefted straw bales into the timber frame for insulation. Yari watched silently from the porch. Malik noticed how Tiran tousled the boy’s hair on his way inside for a drink, and he wondered at the hollow feeling around his heart.

After they finished the next day, Yari approached Malik in the herb garden. He held out his hands, cupped like flowers.

“What’s this?” Malik peered into his palms and found a wet, worm-like creature.

“Found it over there.” Yari was six and stiff with his father. The monsoon rains were coming, and the sky was bright behind the clouds.

“It’s a bluewater lizard. They like the rains for the moisture, and the flies.” Malik thought of Koru, and mimed a tongue darting out. Yari giggled. “Do you know where it lives?”

Yari shook his head. Malik abandoned his work and they walked between the fields to a stream at the edge of the farthest lot. He waded into the water and held an arm out to help Yari. His son’s eyes grew huge.

“It’s not deep,” Malik said.

“I’ll get wet.”

“Me too. Nothing we can’t face together.”

Yari waded in on his own. The lizard slipped away between the ripples. Yari laughed delightedly before remembering himself and glancing up at Malik. Later, dry and holding a hot mug, Malik watched Yari tell Sanaa about the lizard and the stream.

In the room behind the workshop that night, Koru put an arm around Malik’s shoulders.

“You’re soft today,” Koru said. Malik only nodded.

Malik moved home as the monsoon ended. Koru came with him. At dinner that first night, the air fresh and clear beyond open doors, Sanaa took Koru’s hand and looked at Malik.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Zola sighed and Tiran grinned one of his big grins. And when Malik’s heart throbbed, he swallowed the pain and watched his son fumble with his carrots.

Yari turned ten and Malik learned the boy was afraid of thunderstorms. When the sky tore itself jagged with lightning, Yari scrambled into bed with Malik and Koru. They held him between them and Malik told stories about ants who crawled into the lightning to become the stars scattered across the night sky. He slept badly those nights, as Yari tossed in his sleep beside them, and he didn’t mind at all.

Malik came to like the way Yari tugged on his hand when he wanted his father’s attention. He noticed how his son sang to the plants and called both Koru and Tiran Uncle. And when he saw Yari dig his fingers into the dirt and claw the soft grass away one hot afternoon, he knelt to rest a tentative hand on his son’s back.

“It hurts, da.” Yari’s eyes were big and shiny with tears. “The land hurts and it hurts me.”

Malik wished he could take his son’s pain into his own hardened heart. “Does it help, to hurt something else?”

Yari nodded. Malik lifted his chin and wiped away the dirt on his cheek. He thought of his grandfather telling him to burn, and he thought of Koru’s steady coolness, and he thought of choices he wished he could have made earlier.

“Come on.” He pulled his son to his feet and pointed across the fields that shivered with cornsilk. “Bet I can beat you to the end of the row.”

They ran back and forth together. Yari beat Malik each time. When the boy collapsed in front of the porch, he was laughing breathlessly. His tears dripped unnoticed into the dirt. Malik hugged his gangly son to his sweaty chest. And when he woke early in the mornings to soft sobs, he would rise and they would race across the dewy grass until together they’d made space for the hurt that sometimes got too big to hold alone.

After some time, when Malik left to circle the village, he thought of Yari as he took the fire from the people and made it his own. He smiled through the blaze in his chest and the villagers nodded tentatively back.

Yari fell in love at seventeen.

“Isn’t it a bit early?” Malik asked Pascal. They sat together and watched the sun climb the sky. Pascal’s knees were stiffening, and they now spent mornings on the porch instead of in the herb garden.

“You were late,” Pascal reminded Malik. “It’s usually before twenty years. These hearts weigh too much to carry them for a full lifetime.” Pascal reached for Malik’s hand as if he understood the direction of his son’s thoughts. “I’ve had my time, and more. Look at this life.” He gestured at the growing fields before them. The sky was broad and bright above. In the house behind them, someone turned the stove on. Malik heard Yari’s voice rising in a question. They hadn’t needed to run together in years.

Malik squeezed his father’s hand. They sat together like that until Koru called them for breakfast.

Yari’s union took place on a similarly bright morning a season later. His bride’s family laughed with the Turners as they waited. Malik stood between his father and his son, his heart beating its familiar ache, his smile reaching for everything before him.

Malik and Pascal took to sitting in the market square at the base of the towering canoe after that. Koru met them after his mornings in the workshop. The villagers called greetings as they passed, the older ones stopping for the company more than Malik’s heart. Yari joined them occasionally. More often, he could be found wandering the brushland around the village, wild and cultivated plants alike bending towards his gentle hands.

“Heard good things about your grandson’s union,” an older man said to Pascal one afternoon. In the market nearby, a boy scream-laughed as his sister play-wrestled him to the stones. “Your in-laws never shut up about how pleased they are.”

Pascal chuckled and rubbed his knee. “All thanks to Malik,” he said. The man looked curiously at Malik and then nodded in acknowledgement.

“Well done, son,” he said. Malik ducked his head and smiled.

Yari’s wife Yewande gave birth less than a year later. Pascal held Malik’s mother’s hands until the door opened and the women left.

“It’s time, da,” Malik said softly. He ached in more ways than he could name. The boy on the bed beyond was small and perfect.

Malik held his father’s hands and Yari lifted Pascal’s heart into the chest of the next generation of Turner men. His tears dampened the bedspread as his father’s fingers cooled against his. He listened to the fire whisper in his heart and let the heat press against his skin and, as Yari picked up his son for the first time, Malik knew he could hold this grief without bursting into flame.

Yari called his son Jamal and the boy grew up unafraid and laughing. He drew the hurt from animals before he spoke full sentences. Yari taught him to stay calm around agitated creatures even when his fists itched to strike, and they could often be found on the land together, Jamal tending to the farm animals and Yari humming to the earth.

Malik and Koru walked more slowly along the familiar path between the compound and the workshop now. When Zola died, they took the flattest path up the Belly and floated hibiscus flowers across the waters that pooled there in her memory. Malik let his tears flow until his head ached and he felt emptied out and tender inside.

“Do you remember when we met here?” Koru gestured up the mountain, where the watering hole they’d jumped into so long ago still fed the streams rushing down the slopes. “The men told me to stay away from the Turner family. But you were a sun.”

“Burning and deadly?”

Koru chuckled. “Terrified of yourself. And aching to help the people you loved.”

Malik found he hadn’t run out of tears just yet. He took Koru’s hand, and they sat as the air cooled into dusk around them.

Koru died a season later. The burial and celebration were affairs of tears and laughter, and Yari sat with Malik the whole time. Most of the village turned out, many wearing the ceramic hair ornaments Koru had started making as the strength in his hands had waned. The men danced as Koru had taught them, and Malik watched and wept for the man who had asked him to become better.

After, Malik went alone to the workshop and looked around at the pots waiting to be fired. Clay had been abandoned on one of the wheels, shaped into something that seemed like it wanted to be a jug. Koru’s thumbprint was visible on what might be the handle.

“Grandfather?” Jamal stood in the doorway. He was just nine years old. His bright eyes darted around the room. “What is this?”

Malik sat his grandson down at the smallest wheel and dipped their fingers into water together. “Koru’s workshop. He made our favorite bowls here.”

Jamal frowned down at the clay becoming hollow beneath their fingers. “This feels gross. He really loved us, huh.”

Malik laughed and let the wheel spin to a stop. On their slow walk back to the farmhouse, Jamal greeted the villagers easily. Malik thought about the gentleness his grandson hadn’t needed to learn.

At the compound, the women were on the porch with a pitcher of roselle juice. Yewande sucked her teeth at the sight of clay streaked across Jamal’s chin. Sanaa burst out laughing and Malik’s chest tightened with tears, and Yari sat with him and held his hands until the dusk crawled across their feet and it was time to put Jamal to bed.

When the stars came out that night, Malik leaned against the columns of the back porch he’d watched Koru and Tiran repair a season earlier. He rolled a small ball of clay between his palms and listened to the fire whispering along the edges of his heart, Koru’s presence no longer a balm to soothe it. But when his thoughts turned to Yari and the songs he sang at high noon to their crops, and to Jamal, who quieted the animals with lightness and laughter, the flames sank to an ember. Malik’s scorched heart beat tenderly along the inside of his chest, a weight he could finally hold himself.

© 2024 Naomi Day