CHAPTER THREE : THE JOY OF SIMPLE THINGS
1413 Words
The dust rose first — a thin gold cloud kicked up by sandals and bare feet — before anyone even saw the car. Then came the shout, one voice cracking into ten, ten into thirty.
"Brother Damien is here! Brother Damien is here!"
By the time Damien parked under the old acacia tree, the children were already at the door, pressed against the glass, peering in like he was carrying treasure. In a way, he was — a bag heavy with warm bread and bottles of cold drink, bought from the shop two towns over because the village had none. He hadn't even turned off the engine before small hands were tugging at the handle.
Aria stood a little apart, arms folded, laughing. "You'd think you were a king," she called out, "the way they abandon me the second your car turns the corner."
"Jealous?" Damien said, stepping out and immediately disappearing under a pile of children fighting over the bag.
"Deeply," she said dryly. "I've been replaced by bread."
He laughed — really laughed, the kind that came easier here than anywhere else in his life. Nobody in this village looked at him and saw a surname, a company, an inheritance. They saw a man who brought bread and let them climb on him like a jungle gym. It was, he was starting to realize, the only place he felt like just Damien.
That feeling did not survive on the football field.
The children dragged him there before he'd even finished a piece of bread himself, insisting — no, decreeing — that he play. Damien protested that he was terrible, which turned out to be an understatement. The first kick sent the ball nowhere near the goal and somewhere near a startled goat. The second attempt ended with his feet tangled beneath him and his entire left side skidding through a patch of mud that seemed to have been waiting specifically for him.
The field erupted. Children shrieked with laughter, rolling on the ground, pointing. Even the goat looked unimpressed.
"City boys," Aria said, walking over with her hands on her hips and a grin she wasn't bothering to hide, "were not built for village football."
"I noticed," Damien said, mud dripping from his elbow, laughing at himself. "Any tips?"
"Yes. Stop playing."
He didn't stop. He played until the sun dropped low and orange, missing the ball more than he hit it, and somewhere in the mud and the noise and Aria's merciless commentary from the sideline, something in his chest loosened that had been tight for months.
The days that followed became a kind of unofficial curriculum, with Aria as the reluctant, amused instructor.
"You carry it on your head," she said, watching him attempt to balance a water jug the way he'd seen the women do it effortlessly. It slid off within two steps, soaking his shirt. "Not like that. Like you actually respect the water."
"I respect it. It just doesn't respect me."
Peeling cassava went little better — he nicked his thumb twice and produced a pile of misshapen, half-skinned roots that made Aria laugh so hard she had to sit down. Lighting the charcoal stove took him four matches and a scorched eyebrow hair he swore he'd deny to his dying day. And bargaining in the market was, by unanimous village consensus, his worst skill of all.
"You paid how much for tomatoes?" Aria demanded, staring at his bag like it had personally betrayed her.
"They seemed like good tomatoes."
"Damien. They saw you coming from the car and doubled the price before you even opened your mouth."
"I have a trustworthy face."
"You have a rich face," she corrected, and he laughed loud enough that a passing vendor turned to look.
It was strange, how much he didn't mind being bad at things here. In the city, failure had consequences — shareholders, headlines, his mother's disappointment settling over a room like weather. Here, failure just meant Aria would tease him and hand him another cassava root and tell him to try again. Nobody here needed him to be impressive. They just needed him to show up.
He kept showing up.
The evening under the mango tree became a habit neither of them named. They'd sit with their backs against the trunk, the sky doing its slow burn from orange to violet to a deep, star-scattered blue, and talk about things that felt too easy to say out loud anywhere else.
"Have you always lived here?" Damien asked one evening, watching the last light catch in her hair.
"My whole life." She picked at a blade of grass. "I used to want to leave, you know. When I was younger. I had this whole plan — study in the city, become someone important, never come back to a village with no reliable electricity." She smiled, a little rueful. "Then my mother got sick, and the plan didn't matter anymore. And somewhere in taking care of her, I stopped wanting to leave at all. I think I was always going to end up loving it here. I just needed a reason to stop running from it."
Damien said nothing for a moment, turning that over.
"What's it like," Aria asked, nudging him with her shoulder, "Living in a mansion? Rich boy problems. Tell me."
He almost laughed it off. Almost gave her the easy answer — the pool, the staff, the ridiculous number of rooms nobody used. Instead, something truer came out.
"Quiet," he said. "Too quiet. A big house doesn't make noise the way this village does. Nobody runs to the door when you come home. There's no one demanding you play football badly in the mud." He looked down at his hands. "I used to think having space meant having peace. It just means having room for the silence to get louder."
Aria didn't tease him for that. She just sat with it, and with him, in the way only someone comfortable with silence could.
He almost told her, then, about the letters from his doctor still unopened in his glove compartment, about the words his mother didn't know yet, and he wasn't ready to hand them to anyone — least of all her. But the moment passed, quiet as it came, and he left it.
The festival arrived a week later, drums first, then lanterns, then the whole village folded itself into the clearing to dance. The elders spotted Damien trying to hide near the food table and would not accept his excuses.
He was, predictably, awful — stiff where the dancer wanted looseness, half a beat behind everyone else. Aria took his hands without asking permission and simply moved, letting him follow the rhythm through her instead of his own uncertain feet. Somewhere between his second and third mistake, he stopped worrying about getting it right and just laughed, and the laugh became a dance, and the whole circle of watching faces softened into smiles at the sight of the city boy finally, finally loosening up.
Driving home that night, headlights carving a path through the dark, Damien realized he was already counting the days until he'd see her again. Not the village. Not the bread, or the football, or the festival lanterns.
Her.
Across the same dark, in a small house with a tin roof, Aria lay awake with a smile she didn't examine too closely, thinking about a man who couldn't carry water or peel cassava or dance in time, and finding that she didn't mind at all.
Neither of them said the word. But it was there now, unspoken, sitting quietly between the mango tree and the football field and the space under the stars — the way the best things always arrive, without announcing themselves.
At home, Damien sat in his car a moment longer than necessary, scrolling to a photo he'd taken in secret — a blur of laughing children, Aria mid-turn, himself covered in mud and grinning like he hadn't in years. He was still smiling at it when his phone rang.
His mother.
"Where have you been," she asked, "every weekend lately?"
Damien opened his mouth. Closed it. The silence stretched a second too long.
It was enough. On the other end of the line, his mother's voice went very still — the particular stillness of a woman who already knew her son was keeping something from her, and had just decided to find out what.
- Writer
