The first thing Achieng noticed was the stillness. Kimbule had once hummed with the ordinary music of village life—roosters crowing, hoes striking earth, laughter weaving through maize stalks. But now, even the wind seemed to whisper cautiously. The trees no longer rustled; they stood skeletal, brittle as memory. The riverbed, once the lifeline of her childhood, lay stretched out in silence—cracked, sun-whitened, and dry like an old tongue. She stepped off the rusting matatu, a faded duffel bag slung over her shoulder and grief hanging from her back like another burden. The driver barely acknowledged her; he had seen this return before—urban children coming home when the city had taken too much or when the village was dying just enough to need them again. It had been seven years since she left Kimbule, diploma in hand and hope in her throat. She had worked in Nairobi, in Kigali, even briefly in Delhi—writing proposals about food systems, attending summits that discussed hunger in terms of graphs and acronyms. But it was here, at the edge of forgotten earth, that she felt the weight of those words in real hunger. The air tasted of dust and rusted promises. “Achieng?” She turned. Mama Tero, her late mother’s neighbor, stood beneath a withering neem tree, her face a map of lines carved by time and worry. She wore a kitenge faded by sun, with a basin balanced on her hip. “You’ve come back,” the old woman said. Not a question. Just a fact. Achieng nodded. “I heard… about my mother. Too late.” Mama Tero sighed. “The land is not the only thing that buries without permission.” They walked together down the dusty path that led to the house. Once, there had been fences of sisal and blooms of hibiscus. Now, only stones and dry stalks remained. The house looked smaller than Achieng remembered. Grief always shrinks the familiar. Inside, the silence was thick. She set her bag down, opened a window, and let the sunlight in. It revealed a shelf of dusty notebooks, a broken radio, and a photograph of her mother smiling in a field that no longer existed. Later that evening, she walked to the edge of the village, where the old women still gathered—only now not to shell peas, but to whisper survival. “Everything comes in sacks now,” said one. “Maize with logos from nations we’ve never seen.” “And not enough for everyone,” muttered another. Achieng stood quietly, listening. No one asked her why she had come back. No one asked what she planned to do. Because in Kimbule, asking meant hoping. And hope was a luxury long left to die beside the cassava. At night, she wrote in her notebook by the flicker of a kerosene lamp. Day 1. The river has forgotten us. The land no longer speaks. The people do not mourn aloud. I am home. But it feels like trespassing.