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  • What Kind of Children?
  • Tim Bascom (bio)

I’m seven, and I’m on my hands and knees in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, crawling toward a pigeon. It strolls and pecks at the bare ground under a low-lying pine, close to the fence of my boarding school, Bingham Academy, which was named for the first missionary to come to Africa with Sudan Interior Mission. My best friend Danny is beside me in the grass, but I don’t dare glance at him. The pigeon has lifted its head, straining its iridescent neck so that the blue and green sheen of its feathers ripples like poured oil. It goes still, so we go still.

In my fist, I clench a little club that I have fashioned by rubbing a eucalyptus root against the cement tuckpointing of the stone building near the school entrance. When the bird lowers its head, I lift this throwing stick and pull it back slowly, as if my arm is a shadow moving with the sun. I rise to my knees, patient as plant growth. This is not a rare Malachite kingfisher or a scissor-tail flycatcher like the one that pirouettes over the avocado tree at my parents’ station, eight hours to the south. This is an ordinary pigeon of the sort I see all the time, and I want to kill it.

Suddenly, with a dull thump, a rock bounces on the ground next to the pigeon, which causes it to panic. It whacks through the needled canopy of the pine and claps over the school fence.

“Aw, I had it,” I yell.

“Me too,” Dan echoes.

“My friend, how ar-ra you?” comes a voice from the other side of the fence. We ignore this question, too mad to give the speaker even the slight satisfaction of looking his direction.

Thump. A second rock lands near our feet.

“You, my friend. Whad-dis your name?” [End Page 53]

Now we do look, and we see a boy almost twice our size, with one hand on the chain link. From the tall grass at his feet a smaller boy appears, lifting his head slowly and staring at us. He rises to his knees in imitation of our hunting motions, draws back his arm, fakes a throw.

“Mininit lidgeoch,” Danny shouts, as if he is an adult trying to shame the boys with this classic Amharic rebuke: “What kind of children are you?”

“You, my friend,” replies the standing boy, “Come to me!”

The other one, still on his knees, bows his head and reaches to his eyes. When he looks up, both eyelids are folded back so that they show slick and orange above the eyeballs, raw as cut meat.

“I’ve had it,” I say, emboldened by Danny and by the knowledge that these boys are on the other side of the fence. They don’t dare come inside. No Ethiopian boys ever come inside. We are of two different worlds. I pick up the rock at our feet and lob it back, where it clanks into the chain link and sends a metallic shiver down the fence.

The Ethiopian boys are galvanized into action, as if this is the thing they have been waiting for all along. They scoop up rocks and rear back, slinging them over the fence, one two three at a time, so that they rain down through the thin canopy of the trees.

“Let’s get out of here,” Danny yells, and we race away, zigzagging up the hill to the playground.

“They could have killed us,” he gasps.

“I know. I almost got hit in the head.”

We are anxious but excited. What started as imaginary play is now real. “Wanna go back and see if they’re gone?” I ask.

“Yeah. We better.”

Back we creep through the eucalyptus forest, hugging the ground, slithering up to bushes, making quick dashes from one trunk to the next. But when we reach the pine tree where everything happened, we are disappointed to see that the fence is bare, the rough road empty.

“Maybe they’re hiding by the river,” I say, and we go further down the fence, to...

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