===== What the Well Remembers =====
>Featured in The Copper Press, 3 August, 2041 A.M.

=== Editor's Note ===

The following account was recorded in the village of Nkossa, Guinea, by a traveling correspondent who found the woman sitting outside her home in the early morning. She spoke for approximately two hours without stopping. She did not ask that any of it be changed. Her name is withheld at her request, though she did not seem to believe it mattered much either way.

I will tell you about my husband, Kofi. Not because I think you can do anything with it. Not because telling it will make it sit any lighter. I will tell you because he deserves to have been real to someone other than me, and because the thing that took him deserves to be known for what it is.

Kofi was a cane cutter. He had been cutting cane since he was eleven years old and he was very good at it. In the way that men become very good at the thing they have done every day of their entire lives. His hands were remarkable. Wide and scarred and extraordinarily gentle. He used to say that the cane taught him how to hold things without breaking them, and I believed him because he held me that way for nineteen years and I am still here.

We were not wealthy. We had a house and a well and a garden that produced more than we needed most years and less than we needed in the bad ones. We had each other. I did not think about whether that was enough because it was everything, and you do not measure everything against a scale.

I fell ill in the dry season of my thirty-fourth year. I don't know what it was. The healers had names for it that changed depending on which healer you asked, and none of the names helped. What I remember is this: I went to the well in the morning to draw water, and the world tilted, and then I was on the ground and Kofi was above me and the sky behind him was the particular white of a day that has gotten too hot too quickly. He carried me home. He sat beside me for three days and did not sleep. On the fourth day the healer told him quietly, in the way that healers speak when they want to be overheard but do not want to be accountable for it, that I might not see the week out.

I know this because Kofi told me afterward. He told me most of it afterward, in pieces, over years. Not all of it. Never all of it. There were parts he kept and parts he gave me and I learned which was which by the way he looked when he talked; open, and then not open. Like a door swinging and then catching on something.

He went back to the well that night.

He told me this much. He could not sleep and he could not sit still and he could not be in the house where I was lying with that sound in my breathing, so he went out and walked and ended up at the well because that was where it had started and he did not know what else to do with himself. He sat on the stones at the edge and he talked, he said. Just talked. To whoever was listening. To whatever had decided it wanted me. He said: take something else. Take me. Take whatever you want. Just give her back.

He said a man appeared.

Not from the road, not from the dark at the tree line. Just present, the way a thought is present. Suddenly there, with no moment of arrival. Tall and very still, dressed in a way Kofi could not afterward describe precisely. What he remembered were the eyes. Green, he said, but with something burning behind them, the way a coal looks green at its edge before the orange takes over. The clothing was only there to give Kofi's eyes something to do while the rest of his attention processed something larger.

The man said: //I know what you want.//

Kofi said: //Then you know my price.//

The man smiled, Kofi told me once, like a man who has heard a joke that is funny because of how sad it is. He said: //The price is yours to pay, not mine to set. You have already decided what you will give. You decided it on the walk here.//

Kofi did not ask what that meant. He told me he was afraid that if he asked, he would understand, and if he understood, he would lose his nerve.

They made the arrangement. I do not know the exact terms. Kofi never told me the exact terms and I never asked because I was afraid of the answer, and I think he never told me because he was afraid of it too, and we built our life in the space that fear made between us, which was smaller than you might think and larger than I can explain.

I woke on the fifth morning and the fever was gone.

Not diminished. Gone. The healers came and looked at me and looked at each other and said things about the body's resilience that none of them believed. I ate. I stood. I walked to the well three days later and drew water and carried it home and Kofi watched me do it from the doorway with an expression I had never seen on his face before and have never been able to name since. Not happiness exactly. Something that happiness was sitting inside of, the way a stone sits inside a river. Present, and held, and surrounded by something that was moving faster than it was.

We had six years.

I want you to understand that they were good years. I want that to be in whatever you write, if you write anything. We planted the garden and harvested it and sat on the step in the evenings and I cut his hair badly every few months because the barber in the next village was expensive and Kofi always said mine was better anyway which was a lie but a kind one. We laughed more than I would have thought possible for two people who knew, in the part of themselves they did not discuss, that something was coming.

Because I always knew something was coming. I did not know what. I did not know when. But I had been a dead woman who woke up, and you do not walk away from that without carrying the weight of the question. I felt watched, the way you feel watched when you are alone in a field and the light changes suddenly and you look up and there is nothing there but you keep looking anyway. Not every day. Not constantly. But often enough. Often enough that when Kofi would reach for my hand in the dark I would hold it tighter than the moment required, and he would let me, and neither of us would say why.

I did not ask. I want to be honest about that. I chose not to know, and I would choose the same way again, and I will carry that choice for the rest of my life, however long that is.

He came on a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because we had been to the market the day before and the extra yams were still stacked by the door.

I woke in the deep part of the night and Kofi was sitting up beside me, very still, looking at the door. Not the way you look at a door when you hear something. The way you look at a door when you have been expecting it.

I tried to speak. I could not speak. I tried to move. I could not move. I was awake and aware and entirely unable to do anything except watch, and I think now that this was not an accident. That I was meant to see it, that the seeing was part of the terms, that Kofi had tried to protect me from this part and found that it was not his to protect me from.

The door opened without being touched.

The man who came in was tall and still in the way Kofi had described. I understood immediately what he meant about the eyes. Green, yes. But the pupils were the color of something that had been burning for a long time and had no intention of stopping. He looked at me first, not at Kofi, and the look was not cruel. It was something worse than cruel. It was professional. It was the look of something checking on an investment.

Then he looked at Kofi and Kofi stood up from the bed. He stood up slowly, the way he stood up every morning, with the particular care of a man whose body had been working hard for a long time and had learned to negotiate with itself. He looked at me. His face was open in a way I had not seen since the morning I woke from the fever. The door not catching, nothing held back.

He said: //"You got six good years, Adwoa."//

Not //we//. //You.// I have thought about that every day since.

He walked to the door. He did not look back. The tall man stepped aside to let him pass and then followed him out and the door closed and I could move again and I ran to it and opened it and there was nothing. Not darkness, not footprints, not the shape of two men walking away. Just the night, and the well at the end of the path, and the stars above it doing what stars do, which is shine without caring about anything beneath them.

The healers said he wandered off in the night. The village said he wandered off in the night. A man who cuts cane his whole life sometimes loses himself, they said, sometimes the heat takes something from you that you don't notice until it's gone. They were kind about it. I did not correct them.

I still draw water from the well every morning. I don't know why. Habit, maybe. Or something else. Some need to stand in the place where it started and feel the full weight of what it cost. The stones at the edge are the same stones. The water is the same water. In the early morning when the light is flat and the surface is still, I look down into it and sometimes I think I can see something looking back. Not Kofi. Not anything with a face. Just a watching, patient and without malice, the way a thing watches when it has already gotten what it came for and has nowhere particular to be.

I recovered from my illness nineteen years ago. I have been well ever since. Not a day sick. Not a fever, not an ache that lasted. My body has been a kept promise, and I have lived inside it like a woman living in a house that belongs to someone else. Grateful for the shelter, aware of the terms, waiting for the day the landlord decides he needs the room back.

That day has not come yet. I do not know what it means that it hasn't.

I know what Kofi was. He was a cane cutter with remarkable hands who loved me past the point of sense and paid for it with everything he had. I know what the tall man was, or I know enough. The stories in this part of Guinea are old, and the old stories agree on certain things: that there is a thing which moves through the world wearing the shape of a bargain, and that it does not come unless called, and that it is always called by love, because love is the only desperation absolute enough to make a man forget to ask the right questions.

I do not blame Kofi. I want that said plainly. I do not blame him for a single moment of it. But I think about the word he chose -- //you got six good years// -- and I think he knew, by the end, that the six years were mine and the cost was his, and he had made that arrangement deliberately and I had let him make it and we were both, in our own ways, complicit in the kindness of not knowing.

The well remembers. I am sure of it. On very still mornings the water does not reflect the sky the way water should. It reflects something darker, something that has no name I know of, and when I look at it long enough I stop being sure that I am the one doing the looking.

I draw my water and I go inside. I have yams to cook and a garden to tend and a life that was purchased for me at a price I was not consulted about and cannot repay. I live it as well as I can. It seems the least I can do.

It seems the most I can do.

It seems, some mornings, like not very much at all.