He stares at the small wooden bracelet whose small beads turn around my equally small wrist, the two ends tied in an elaborate knot with a few cotton threads.
He imagines dusky savannas and distended clouds, although it was mostly mud huts, I tell him, and children with distended stomachs.
He asks what he can give me for it? the hand-drilled beads are exquisite, he says, and holds out several bills
which is ridiculous, because it is only a wooden bracelet. Two months of digging a well in the Sahara - which ultimately ran dry, like I knew it would - doesn't come with the sale;
only a few small beads whose life expectancy triples that of their maker hopefully pissing into the dusty rows of corn and cradling his bulbous stomach.
Honorable Mention, Grades 10-12 Poetry