In the sweltering mid-afternoon Jerome caught the wind. In his arms, he held two buckets of water. The heat had been beating down on his boil-ridden back for hours as he walked from the well back to the village where his family – his father, mother, and two sisters – were waiting, parched. He resisted the impulse to wash his dusty skin clean. He declined to take even a sip. He walked on. And the heat was terrible, this aching drone on his pores that wouldn’t stop, like a horde of bees in a windowless room. And when the sun had swung highest, sitting perched atop the sky in the midday hour, he had felt closer than ever before to stopping. But the wind had come, just a gentle breeze, and relieved his tired eyes of dust and swept away the dirt from his leathery arms and aroused a soft smile.