Far from Mother’s hut is the cactus patch. She walks for kilometres that way each and every day because that is where she gets her food. Cacti is her only sustenance. She has to eat cactus or risk not eating at all.
To be clear, these fields of cacti are not in little clusters like bush. They are forests upon forests rooted deep into the dust. There was once forest of the other sorts of trees and bushes, but the south of Madagascar has become dry, and because of this dryness nothing else grows.
Mother holds a wide and thick tree branch, using it to scrape at the cacti, pricking the ones that are easy to beat out of the bush into a pile. Mother is not the only one picking for food. There are other women just like her in the cactus fields that go on for kilometres. Mother doesn’t see any other woman today, but she can hear the scrubbing sound of branch against cacti, so she knows she is not alone. Sometimes when she sees the other women, she walks back to the village with them. She hears stories about how their granddaughters no longer have milk in their teats to feed their babies and feels glad that her son did not grow up during a period of such resource shortage.
It is a hot and sunny day, but Mother is glad the wind is not picking up. She needs to make a fire. She has to burn the cacti so that the needles blaze away and she can carry the green flesh over her head. Although Mother partakes in this journey every day, today she is feeling tired.
It is not because she is hungry. She is familiar with that sense of nothingness in her stomach, like a hand clenching her in the middle of her spirit, like she is quicksand chewing on itself, like her body is eating her own organs and muscles. The pain is slow, it is staggering, but this has become her normal.
Mother watches the fire as it burns the cacti. When it is done, she snacks for a little bit. The watery taste of the cactus immediately satiates the dryness that she feels in her mouth, often as much as water.
Mother closes her eyes. And when she does, she feels like the world around her is topsy-turvy, that something inside of her is crashing down.
She could keep her eyes closed and tumble down and become one with the dust.
Mother opens her eyes to remind herself that she is still standing. Mother opens her eyes to remind herself that she will stand, time and time again, no matter what.
Mother piles the cacti over her head and walks back to her village.
She is hungry to eat, but she is also hungry to live on, and it is that hunger for survival that she prays will last for the sake of her family, and for those whom she lives for.
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