All the years you’ve had your big brother––thirteen, if you’re counting those three before memories crystallised––Yankho has been brimming with stories. Even his name is a narration of your mother’s lifelong unblemished parish attendance, a living witness of her efficient rosary recitations, rewarded finally when her first son was delivered six long years after she graduated from Miss Asante to Mrs. Soko.

Mum’s adoration is a dish reserved for the son for whom the heavens gaped open, not for you, the son who was an extra surprise when Yankho turned four, selfish in the manner of newborns, demanding fresh care when Yankho already needed all of it.

When neck deep in conversation with Yankho, Mum mimics the flashing dance his fiery eyes involuntarily do, whereas Mum’s eyes glaze over you. And buried at the bottom of every single handbag she owns is a tiny container of aloe vera jelly, kept as if she wears his sun-intolerant skin and not the honey wood brown, which absorbs golden sparks of daylight.

Sometimes, when Yankho talks, his words do this thing of chipping in places they shouldn’t, and he’s forced to revisit syllables, his tongue turning, becoming like one of Dad’s overplayed Sade CDs. You watch him stumble through sentences and struggle to hide a small smile, hoping Mum will find a little less perfection in him and incline herself just a little more in your direction. But Mum’s smile is enduring, not a shadow of annoyance darkening her delicate features. And who can blame her? Not you. Not even with those reliable spasms of envy that seize your chest every so often. Even you will admit that your brother does have this way about him, doesn’t he? This talent of carving the spectacular out of the plain. Remember how, one breakfast, he suggested adding chilli flakes to the peanut butter before spreading it on the toast? Remember how you’d choked while laughing because who ever heard of something so moronic––mixing breakfast with dinner’s ingredients? But Mum did as he’d suggested, flecking them until the toast looked like mud covered in Christmas lights. She closed her eyes to taste it and monikered him, ‘My brilliant boy’ as soon as she swallowed. Remember your laughter splattering on the walls and sliding to the floor? Who could fault her incandescent pride? Not you. Because Yankho telling a story, any story, is like that heat peppered into the sweetness of peanut butter.

And if that listener is Mum, she follows along, enthralled as he spins his way out of missing homework, school shoes left unpolished at the door and rewards him with one of her euphonious laughs. And so, you’ve nestled into your place as his shadow. Maybe one day you will grow into him.

As long as you’ve had Yankho––nine years if we’re starting from your oldest recollection, with his whisper weaving a story over your bed long after you should’ve both been sleeping––you’ve wanted to be just like him, from his fro of luminescent hair to that generous splash of freckles that blush fuchsia in the middle of the day, to the slight bow of his legs just perfect for new jeans. But you’ve accepted that until the gods amend the rules of the living and you can crawl into your older brother’s skin, you’ll have to settle for revelling in his stories, which, after all, he generously gifts you daily.

Let’s fault blind adoration then, for you not begrudging Mum when her affection slanted further in Yankho’s direction after the 2001 election. Let’s fault the change triggered by the election victor’s impassioned speeches every night that January. The new president was a big, unsmiling man with too much white hair for the few lines grooved into his forehead. His government, he proclaimed, had Clean Hands. They’d wipe corruption from every corner of Zambia, once and for all. Before each news cycle, Dad told Mum not to worry. Dad told Mum that he sat right next to the new president at yesterday’s cabinet meeting. That his voice caressed the inside of the president’s ear. But each time President Clean Hands came on the news, announcing the firing of yet another minister caught with sticky fingers in the government coffers, Mum rubbed Yankho’s shoulders while her eyes flitted from the TV to Dad. Meanwhile, Dad clenched like a fist on his recliner, waiting.

When the broom of corruption swept into your yard one morning, Dad said nothing. The dismissal letter was delivered by Mr. Wanga, a driver who loved Mum’s chocolate cake so much that she’d taken to baking him an extra one, complete with ganache and a cloud of coconut flakes, rather than just offering him a slice. Mr. Wanga handed Dad the letter through a slit in the window without turning off the car. The beeping of the reverse gear rang in the air before Dad opened the sharp white envelope.

When that night’s news featured a video of Dad glaring at the envelope next to the bed of marigolds outside the house, you wondered out loud if the photographer was hidden in the car and maybe that’s why Mr. Wanga had backed out so fast. Yankho knocked the top of your head. Don’t be an idiot, Amon, he said. Mum did her Dad–TV–Dad eyes while Dad sat straight-backed, tight-lipped.

Nothing will change, Mum promised. A truth, in the way of the ‘It won’t hurt’ cooed by nurses before they plunge a vaccine into your arm. A truth that resided in that splinter of time when Dad still emerged from their bedroom in a starched suit every morning. When he still checked his wristwatch as if maybe Mr. Wanga was just late and hadn’t been snatched from him along with the white GRZ number-plated car that had been Dad’s personal-to-holder so long that you and Yankho had your chosen sides of the back seat. Nothing changed until the needle pierced flesh, mere weeks after Dad lost his Ministry of Foreign Affairs position.

The maid, Ba Velipa, was the first to be let go. I can clean my own house! Mum yelled at the walls, floors, and window sills.

Ba Lennox, the gardener who kept the lawn and flowerbeds alive, was told he’d be recalled once Dad came out of retirement.

You and Yankho started making the four-kilometer trek from home to your fenced-in private school. And on you, that half-hour walk was nothing, what with your skin the colour of Mum’s hair after a relaxer. But Yankho’s pretty freckles toasted chestnut at sunrise and were singed by the time you knocked off. Mum replaced her aloe rubs with Vaseline, tsk-ing as the pads of her thumbs tried to soak away Yankho’s inevitable sunburn. She insisted on an umbrella, a bucket hat, sunglasses. But in the end, the sun won.

Thick slices of polony in your lunch boxes were replaced with margarine, then bread-on-bread sandwiches with zero fanfare. In your juice bottles, pulp-filled orange drinks morphed into something bittersweet, which Mum diluted with too much water, then zigolo if you had the sugar, or else just water. Much healthier, anyway, Mum tutted. The pieces of meat in your stews shrank, then disappeared. Next to the nsima sat wilted cassava leaves with a watery excuse for soup.

Your family moved out of the house five months later, just in time for the final letter your school would send reminding your parents to pay that term’s fees.

Then the needle was pulled out, disregarding any squirming discomfort you might display. Your house was rented to a suited man in a sleek, black BMW. Real men drive Mercedes, Dad muttered as the BMW drove off noiselessly.

Somehow, the four of you managed to cram all your furniture into the four rooms leaning against the fence Mum had intended for a brood of chickens that she never did purchase. The 40-inch TV loomed awkwardly close to the settee set, which gathered so much dust without a ceiling between the corrugated roof and floor that it seemed olive instead of the dewy grass green of before. Yankho’s bed and yours were now only three footsteps instead of an entire corridor from each other, which you secretly loved.

The following school term found you enrolled at a government school nearby.

At night, your parents brawled over when Dad would find another job, and why couldn’t Mum be like other modern women who worked and took care of the families?

Had he forgotten that he forbade her from working when they first met because employed women were whores? she asked.

Yankho, well versed in the art of banishing the noise of their fights, knitted you stories. Glorious little retellings where Cinderella was a common neighbourhood girl who broke her skuna at the disco. Giggle-inducing tales that stuck like syrup to your brain and sweetened your dreams. This part of your family, at least, remained unchanged––like skin after the needle is drawn out.

When 2006 rolled by, and with it the next election cycle, the trees were dressed branches to trunk in orange, purple, or black flags made of chitenge embossed with the faces of the three leading candidates. The markets followed the same pattern, as did buses, their drivers, and conductors who spat hostilities at each other as they swerved potholes. Your house donned a coat of orange. A man of the people, Dad called the gruff-voiced candidate in orange. He had a few more lines on his face than Clean Hands and a guttural laugh that took over the room, even through the screen.

After another venomous fight between your parents, Yankho left for a campaign rally wearing an orange hoodie. Mum’s Not my son, and Do you want to kill me by becoming a carder? and You know what politics does to young men? rammed right into his steely gaze. She leaned back, drinking in this iteration of her firstborn son, taller than her, calling manhood with the whispers of hair on his chin. Normally, he would bend, do what she wanted, but this time, he didn’t yield.

Fine, she whispered. Please, nyamula umbrella and a hat.

Yankho ignored her, patted your shoulder, and left.

You manned the gate all that afternoon, your only shield for what politics might do to the young man that was your brother. But he returned, covered in dust and a voice like ash and bursting with stories.

The following Saturday, Dad told Yankho that political rallies were a pointless venture for the inexperienced, but Yankho went anyway. He returned with bags of rice and flour, mealie meal, a packet of sugar, and enough cooking oil to last a month. Mum used the supplies to start a vitumbuwa business, which your parents will fight about because What will people say, seeing a former minister’s wife selling fritters pa road? But from his silence after Mum’s next question, you guess Dad didn’t want his family to starve and did indeed remember that all his high-flying friends had forsaken him, and wasn’t this better than nothing?

The third time, Yankho escaped through a window when he thought you were sleeping. He wore the same orange hoodie of days before, black denim that clung to his thighs, and his favourite white sneakers, so clean they glowed. It was lunchtime before Mum noticed. She stormed into your room, shouting about Yankho stinking the house and sleeping like a rich man, a joke he would laugh at if he heard it because Mum just liked to see his face in the morning. The shock which stilled her face soon wrinkled her forehead as she started pacing the house, eyeing the gate. A prayer soon sat on her lips, a frantic feather of words. Dad, meanwhile, explained his plan to discipline him. Sneaking out, albeit to scavenge groceries at political rallies around Lusaka, was unacceptable, he said. They were still his parents. He still owed them respect. A belt wouldn’t do. Dad would have to use a stick. You were sent to snap one out of the mulberry tree out back. You giggled at the idea of Dad attempting to fold Yankho––at least a half-ruler taller than him, chasing the tail end of his teen years––to thrash his bum. Mum pretended not to hear him, mumbling instead––Save him. Save him. Those places can turn violent just like that. She snapped her fingers to indicate the turn from holy peace to hellish stampede and glued her eyes once more, to the gate.

By news time, though, your parents’ murmurings curdled into distress. Amon, why didn’t you tell us that your brother left? Mum turned to you.

You wanted to tell her you’d considered it. You wanted to cup your hands, hold them up to her and show her your options: Telling on Yankho and watching them obsess over him (again) or a day (just one) of basking in your mother’s affection.

Mum raised her eyebrows––Well?

Heat fanned across your cheeks––your gaze dropping to Mum’s feet, where glossy red Cutex curtained each trimmed toenail. Dunno, you shrugged.

And you? Dad wagged a finger at Mum. What kind of a mother are you, surely?

Eh? She skinnied her eyes at him and slapped her chest. Ask your mother, not me!

The subject of these kinds of altercations was usually you:

––for snatching the ruler from your Geography teacher and whipping her back

––for refusing to mop the overflowing toilets afterwards

––for starving yourself the first time Mum packed boiled sweet potatoes in your

backpack, and, and, and.

But, this shift in the target of their disappointment did not endear the sound of their arguing to you, and you were once again wishing Yankho was home to thrust out their shouts with a story.

The news cloaked the house in a welcome silence. The camera zoomed into an empty football ground littered with cracked Mosi beer bottles. A reporter stood at the centre of the havoc. The words from her mouth fluttered like moths into the dense air. Rally––No Police Permit––Public Order Act––Tear gas––Opposition party violence––Five reported dead.

Mum’s face twitched, and the pigment of her skin fogged into something terrifying, a look she’d wear until Yankho’s last mass. While the air was swathed with all that shared crying, Mum floated toward his coffin at the mouth of the chapel. She crossed herself and recited him a rosary. Only, instead of Amen after Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, she wailed, Look what you’ve done to me, you stupid, stupid, boy and slapped Yankho hard across the face. Her sisters, standing by, watched, stunned.

Behind her, your body pinned and needled. When angry with Yankho, Mum tended to share the rage equally between her sons. But someone nudged you forward and told you to say goodbye to your brother.

In his coffin, Yankho’s head was elevated on a silk pillow. The neighbourhood whispers said Yankho had been trampled; his body turned into a bed of red bougainvillaea on that pitch. You examined his face; the latest sunburn marks flaked over now, quivering in the wind like dandruff. His mouth wore the smirk of moments before he reached the climax of a story. Other than the imprint of Mum’s palm, Yankho looked perfect. You smiled back at him and winked. Hello, you whispered, brushing a kiss on his forehead, which riled up the crying again.

A private news crew accompanied the orange-chitenge candidate to the house that night. One of their journalists asked Dad how he felt, and Dad replied Well, in the oiled tone once reserved for very important phone calls and press conferences, the family will need money to help us recover.

With the first notes of the recovery money, Dad bought a copy of The Truth newspaper, which featured a full-page picture of Yankho as a faded hero. The ink rendered his eyes hibiscus red, his skin and hair haloed around his face. Nothing like him. But Mum cut out the warped rendition, framed and hung it next to the praying Jesus in the sitting room.

The rest of the money, well, two-ply tissue, reconnected DStv, a heating element in the bucket, fatty T-bone steaks for supper, soft drinks by the crate, and Dad suggesting that Mum reinstate Ba Velipa. It tapers off before the last item becomes a reality, like a figment of your collective imagination.

Yankho returns to you the night Mum serves the nsima with a side of chopped onions boiled into green tomatoes. Your parents are arguing about a rally, Dad insisting he can go, Mum calling him a foolish old man, him reminding her there will be provisions. What about your back? Mum shrieks, and Dad chortles. But do you pity this back at night, enh?

Be serious, Mum is screaming when Yankho cuts through your worry with an Amon, as if he’d been in his bed moments before.

Your grin is wide, your voice a squeak. I knew it! Because who could forget that story he told once about the village trickster who’d won the princess’ affection by drinking boiling water as demanded by her father? How no other suitor had been successful, and the village people who’d come to witness what would no doubt be a gruesome end to the trickster didn’t take note of his delaying tactics––his prolonged and numerous goodbyes so that by the time he drank the water, it was the tepid temperature of cow milk. Even death couldn’t contain that kind of imagination. Not with incantations of Ashes to ashes by a priest or scattered dirt into a wound in the ground at the New Leopards Hill cemetery.

Shh, comes Yankho’s windy reply.

You pull your blanket to your chin and comply.

Yankho chuckles at the word died when you ask. He was just squirrelling supplies, he tells you. The news crews didn’t capture everything. There was a presidential copter rescuing the bravest boys. Us five were the ones who stood for all the good things like Constitution, and Human Rights, and SDGs.

What kind of supplies?

Everything from before. Mixed fruit jam and bags of purple grapes. Spaghetti and fatty T-bone steaks.

Polony?

Cases and cases of it.

Imagine it––this house holding sausages of polony comparable to the cold foods section at Shoprite.

And biscuits?

Yes. With the tart lemon cream in the middle you like.

Why don’t you tell Mum then?

His silence warps the walls and elongates the shadows across the concrete floor until they graze the edge of your mattress and feed your approaching nightmares. Not yet, Yankho says finally. Otherwise, you know.

Mum will never let him cleave from her again. But––

But nothing.

Does he know that the circles around Mum’s eyes had puffed up and swelled? That the blacks are as much a part of her face now as the mole on her cheek and the growing collection of chin hairs. Does he know she’s picked her cuticles raw? You swallow this concern and ask, Do you have aloe vera there?

Don’t need it, he snorts. And that, you know, is that.

You can’t tell Mum yet. The family meeting by the fire had left her drenched, muttering her exhaustion to herself, Nalema ine, nalema ine.

Just one more story, a thought tumbleweeds through your mind, then I’ll tell Mum.

Tonight, Yankho, you whisper just as he slips back into your room. Tell me a story.

All the nights preceding this one have taught you that he will appease you by twisting a familiar folktale into something magical. In Yankho’s mouth, will Kalulu and the tortoise be brothers? Will the Jackal howl, or does she sing lullabies to coax out the moon because he’s actually her husband who never returned? Inside the walls of Yankho’s stories, you can forget everything–– the dappled, gaunt thing Mum’s laughter has become, the stench of beer that now lives inside Dad’s mouth, and the voices, God, the voices.

But, Awe, Yankho snaps at you instead, tone as eager as a fresh blade. Which isn’t how it’s supposed to go at all. Not tonight, Amon, he says. I have an important day tomorrow. Just sleep.

You investigate the silhouette of your brother and check it for inconsistencies. No, this is the same Yankho of thirteen-year-long affection. Brotherhood cannot just be erased like the scribble of a child fighting boredom in the middle of the school day. You did not need to see Yankho’s head pillowed near the top of his bed. Or his knees, drawing a sky-facing triangle under his covers. Or the hilling and plateau of his breathing. Or the music of his svelte feet, rubbing to find warmth in his extremities, to know this was your Yankho, not a cunning phantasm.

But when morning comes, Yankho leaps out of his bed, plants a chilly kiss on your forehead and slinks out through the window.

You stiffen.

Every night prior, at least since he’s been gone, you simply slip into slumber and wake to the flatness of his bed and the rush of crickets’ choirs erasing the quiet.

In this final difference in Yankho’s behaviour, an idea bubbles in the crevices of your mind.

Soon, Mum will come. Time for school, Amon, she’ll say, shaking you gently.

While you bathe, she’ll rearrange Yankho’s bed and forget her other chores. You’ll find her cradling Yankho’s pillow like a newborn. She’ll start, say Oh, without the luster of genuine surprise and stifle the rest of her sobs. She will place the pillow back on the bed and leave the room.

It is now or never, ping pongs in your head, and the idea clings swiftly like Mum’s chocolate ganache to the crumbly chocolate cake. Before fear overtakes recklessness, you follow him.

You pursue Yankho toward the gate through the arm-licking wind and the cruel chill in the air. You dart between the windbreak of trees, headed to the new shopping complex. You dodge traffic at the lip of your street, ignoring the horns and insults from the drivers. Through the roundabout, over the drainage between the locked market stalls and supermarkets. Into the taxi rank, barren but for a lone bus and a throng of people gathered beside it. Your heart grows fizzy, and your eyes cataract. When you catch your breath and stop just shy of the crowd, they are abuzz with repeated calls and responses of Abash Clean Hands––abash government! And the excitement matches Yankho’s the morning he left. You squint. Each hazy outline is too short, too plump, too dark to be him. Panic shoots hot tears in your eyes. But then, just before you turn back, you locate the glow of shoes sandwiched between the ground and black jeans. The air balloons in your lungs. You find the cracks in his voice where too many vowels are clustered together.

The bus door slides open, and you trail the heady scent of bodies, squeezing past them so Yankho won’t see you, and secure yourself a seat in the back row.

Mum will be up now, you think. She’ll be opening windows and slapping dust out of cushions. But if you shut your eyes, forget the rising smell of sweat and diesel, you’re in bed again, just Yankho and you, separated by only the floor and a wicker basket of dirty clothes.

The bus sputters to a start and jerks forward. It makes a half-loop and bends right onto Independence Avenue, recognizable from the delicate contours of the road devoid of blisters and potholes. You don’t need sight to know you’re whizzing past the Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company, which sends those letters Mum rips up to start the brazier or St. Andrews church and then the State House, with its low row of metal bars and small forest housing mischievous monkeys. The steady row of street lamps slightly illuminate your self-imposed darkness, then pigment it red, amber, and green at traffic lights that lead to the University Teaching Hospital on the left or the row of pristine office blocks on the right.

The city grows noisier as the bus bursts from the seams of the suburbs into the central business district. The Abash Clean Hands chants are supplanted by rumblings about unruly bus drivers and cleaning up Lusaka. A gradual turn indicates Cairo road, which the bus travels in spurts, weaving through beggars, parked cars, vendors and traffic police. Your knowledge of the city ends when you turn into a gravel road. You open your eyes to the full rage of Lusaka’s sun. Every passenger is donning a sizzling orange, even you, in Fred Flintstone pajamas.

The vehicle parks next to a line of identical buses. The Abash Clean Hands are now at a vibrating crescendo as more jeers and chanting spill through the windows.

Everyone stands, and panic flickers in your chest even as you mirror their unison motion. Through an orange hoodie, Yankho aims his body in your direction, and the panic becomes a fire.

The Amon? from him is just a hot breath that wafts into your ears.

Oh, God. This would be like that time you trailed him to a bar, watched him play pool and swore you’d tell Mum how Yankho hadn’t really gone to a Bible study. But then, behind a beaten construction drum turned cooler box, pride had bloomed in you as Yankho swaggered towards the loser and claimed his prize. A woman shimmied from the counter and congratulated Yankho by making a dance floor of his crotch. Yankho’s opponent used the moment to spit, aim a finger at him and hiss Chidangwaleza. You leapt from your hiding spot and screeched a shaky It’s albinism, not chidangwaleza over hip-hop streaming from the speakers. Something nefarious sizzled in the opponent’s eyes, and he erupted into an ugly guffaw. You’d seen children stare in Yankho’s direction in the street. You’d seen mothers slap them with warnings that they would bear albino children if they weren’t kind, and you’d wondered what unkindness your mother had released into the world before she had Yankho. But even then, you’d never seen it aimed directly at your brother with the unbridled intention to bruise. You whimpered, the mewling cry out before you could wield control over it.

Yankho had cut you a look before crossing the room to drag you outside by the shoulders. Amon, iwe, what the hell are you doing here?

You’d sniffled.

Did you drink anything?

The accusation slid off his tongue with the rank notes of Castle. But he was asking you if you were drinking?

Around your shoulders, his grip tightened in your silence. Answer me, he’d seethed.

No. The terror in your voice had certainly surprised you.

But not as much as Yankho’s Then go home! which sprung stunned tears into your eyes.

You spun around, and by the time you arrived home, your face had dried along with the brewing grudge to report Yankho’s deception to your mother.

Listen, Yankho, you start now, excavating your mind for words to excuse your presence this time.

But the Amon that floats from him to you next is a tender validation, and though you can’t make out his face, you know: Yankho is smiling. There is his head leaning right as it does when he smiles, and that weightless feeling in your chest which accompanies it.

You exit the bus with him and follow his lead toward a line of barriers where orange uniformed guards scan the crowd.

Abash government! the one waiting at the end of your line, says to every person. Abash Clean Hands! The password. The guard who inspects you must not catch the tremor in your voice or the flighty movement of your eyes when you answer because he says Welcome, comrade and waves you right through.

The belly of the stadium is a swamp of rippling orange. The bleachers are packed, so you and Yankho squeeze into the open ground in the middle. From there, the stage is vast and white, pillared by four unsure-looking sticks. The screech from the speakers mounted on each corner rings deep inside your head, and the bodies go on forever, except for the spaces where electric poles shoot like trees from the ground.

The presidential candidate from the orange chitenges, squat and dressed in crisp clothes, bounces to the front of the stage, punches a fist to the sky and bellows My fellow countrymen into a handheld microphone. The crowd explodes into applause, and the man takes wide, brisk steps from one side of the stage to the other, swivelling his head from side to side and stopping squarely in the middle. Abash government? He roars.

Abash Clean Hands! You all respond.

In grade seven, you’d learnt about the cha-cha-cha protests, about the pre-independence secret meetings and frontline freedom fighters. If those Social Studies lessons had been broadcast on a screen so you could follow as you are now, maybe you’d have scored higher than 47 percent on the exam. You smile, leaning closer into Yankho, understanding his defiance now. This is none of the danger Mum prophecies. This is church, only better.

The presidential candidate holds something bright and unrelenting in his eyes, and it’s like––like every word he uttered was brand new, constructed right in his throat mere seconds before. Look at the skyrocketing fuel prices, he says. And the high cost of living, all the youth unemployment, no medicines in the hospitals, and your pension funds have been plundered. If we don’t rise, they will kill us all. Word for word, Clean Hands' victory speech.

Abash Clean Hands? He trades lines with the crowd that time.

Abash government!

He flashes a row of tiny teeth, a near smile that never completes the journey into those brilliant eyes. And why must our children still learn on the floors in rural schools? He’s saying when the first bang, a firework? ripples above you.

He reels back from the sound, brings his microphone to chest level and surveys the crowd. A bodyguard scurries forward and swoops him out of view.

Three more boom out.

Yankho? You waver on the fourth bang. But is that him in that hoodie? Or that other one? Or that one?

Police! someone shouts, rousing splintered voices scattering in different directions from the bodies containing them.

Yankho! Too many white sneakers, none of them Yankho’s, scamper.

You crouch to the ground, darting your eyes. Yankho, please?

Yankho! You wheeze as someone makes the ground of your fingers. Something peppery assaults your nostrils, becomes an abscess on your eyeballs inside your throat, and the coughing forces your entire body to the ground. The stampede takes the shape of birds fleeing the electric lines. Beautiful, you think, even as heads merge with shoulders, that become blood gurgling in your throat.

The last call for your brother is garbled, a sound which mirrors Mum’s whenever grief plunges her into indecipherable pleas to her prayer beads. Yankho, you whisper––a prayer and an answer.