Precious Colette Kemigisha

Grace’s breathing wakes me before the roosters, which means I’ve been listening for it even in my sleep. I don’t remember deciding to do this, to keep one part of my mind always alert to the sound of her lungs fighting for air. That tight wheeze, not the normal sleeping sounds but something thinner, like air being pulled through a crack in a wall, has become the metronome of our nights.

She’s awake too, staring at the ceiling where the iron sheets meet the wooden beams. A gecko runs across, stops, runs again. Our mattress, just thin foam on the double wooden bed, has lost its shape in the middle where we sleep pressed together. The curtain that separates our space from Mama’s doesn’t reach the floor anymore and through the gap I can see her feet already moving. Mama never sleeps past five.

“Nkooye,” Grace whispers. I’m tired.

At twelve, she shouldn’t know this particular kind of tired, the one that sleep doesn’t fix.

“Sleep more then.”

“Can’t. The smell is too strong today.”

We call it that because we need to call it something, but ‘smell’ suggests something temporary, something you can escape by moving to a different room or opening a window. What we breathe is not a smell. It’s a presence, almost a tenant, paying rent in the form of Grace’s deteriorating lungs and the metallic taste that coats our tongues by noon. On days when the wind shifts and gives us a few hours of clean air, I realise I’d stopped noticing it..

I get up, my feet finding the cold cement floor. The cracks spread across it like rivers on a map, widest near the door where water runs in when it rains. I used to trace these cracks with my finger when I was Grace’s age, imagining they were roads leading somewhere else. Now I just step over them.

Grace’s yellow dress hangs from a nail, the one that used to be mine, that came from our cousin Patience before she moved to Mbarara. In the grey morning light coming through the gap in the curtain, the fabric still looks bright, though I know by afternoon the dust will have settled on it again, the way it settles on everything here without preference.

I push open the window. At this time, it is difficult to tell if the sky is waking up or still deciding whether to bother. Across the valley, the landfill rises. When I was younger, I used to think of it as a sleeping giant from the stories Mama used to tell. Now I know it’s not sleeping. It’s very much awake, breathing out its poison breath, growing taller every day as trucks bring it offerings from the city’s better neighborhoods—their waste becoming our landscape.

“Mary,” Grace says, sitting up now. “Today can we go to Aunt Nakato’s? She said she would show me her baby chicks.”

There’s such excitement in her voice. She still believes in chickens and in promises.

“Mama has the LC meeting. You know Saturday is…”

“I know, I know. But after?”

I look at her, at the hope sitting in her face like it still belongs there, like it hasn’t been evicted yet.

“Okay. But you have to eat all your porridge.”

She makes a face but nods. Small victories. That’s what we trade in now.

Outside, Mama is already by the charcoal stove, blowing on the sap-filled sticks. They fire wakes up, licking the sap and showing gratitude in its bright red flame. The clay of the stove is cracked in places. She bought it three years ago, the same week my father stopped sending money.

The radio sits beside her on the plastic chair, a man’s voice talking about the nominations and electoral commission statements. The words pass over us like mist, present but changing nothing.

She doesn’t look up when I come out.

“Good morning, Mama.”

She nods. “Boil water for tea,” she says. “And check if we still have Blue Band. The visitors will want something to eat.”

I collect the kettle from where it sits with our three jerrycans by the door. Yellow for drinking water, blue for bathing, cracked red for washing dishes. Even our jerrycans have a hierarchy.

“Which visitors?”

“Dr. Kaggwa from the District Health Office. And maybe that Muzungu woman, the one from the mission. They want to talk about the clinic expansion.”

I fill the kettle. The water splashes on my feet, cold enough to make me gasp. For a second, I’m completely present in my body—the shock of cold, the smooth rubber of my sandals, the sound of water hitting metal. I close my eyes and when I open them, everything is as it always was.

“Expansion where?”

She stands up, dusting ash from her hands onto her Kitenge. Today it’s the blue one with yellow stars, her LC uniform that she wears like armor. Or maybe like a costume. “They want to talk about funding. Partnership. Development.”

My father used to say ‘development’ all the time before he got that government job in Jinja. I was old enough to understand what his absence meant but too young to have the words for it. Now I have the words, but they feel insufficient.

The coals glow red and I put the kettle on. The Muzungus arrive in their Land Cruiser just as I’m sweeping the front of our small compound, pushing dust from one place to another. Two of them this time; the mother with hair like dry maize silk and a young man with a camera hanging from his neck like a weapon. They’re wearing matching blue t-shirts that say LIVING WATER in white letters.

Living Water. The borehole they drilled last year produces brown water that makes your stomach dance. But I suppose living is accurate; there’s definitely something alive in it.

“Good morning!” the woman calls out, waving and smiling.

Mama comes out, her face arranged in what I call her chairperson smile—the one that doesn’t reach her eyes but looks polite enough to pass.

“You have reached safely. Welcome, welcome.”

They settle on the plastic chairs at the side of our home and I bring the tea in our best cups, the ones without cracks. The young man with the camera keeps looking around, and I know he’s recording us in his head, turning us into a story he’ll tell when he goes back to wherever Muzungus go when they leave. In his story, we’ll be resilient. Hopeful despite our circumstances. Proof that poverty hasn’t destroyed the human spirit.

“Grace,” I call into the house. “Come greet the visitors.”

She comes out slowly, holding onto the doorframe. The wheeze is louder now, a sound like wind through a broken window. I watch the woman’s face change when she sees Grace. There’s that look adults get when they think children don’t notice them noticing.

“Oh my,” she says. “Has she been to the clinic?”

“Many times,” Mama says. Her voice is still polite but more so. “The doctors say it’s asthma. From the…” she waves her hand vaguely toward the landfill, “from the air.”

From the air. Not from the mountain of rot.

“We have inhalers,” the woman says quickly. “In the car. Let me…”

“We have inhalers.” Mama’s smile doesn’t move. “What we don’t have is air that doesn’t make her sick.”

The young man coughs and starts talking about their program, about health education and community partnerships and sustainable solutions. Their voices float around us like the bubbles filled with words in the comic section father used to read in the newspaper.

I take Grace inside before the meeting starts properly. I sit beside her and start plaiting her hair into small sections the way she likes.

“Banange, those people,” she says. “Always coming with small things when we need big things.”

“Yes. But free is free.”

“Free like prison is free.”

She laughs at her own joke, then coughs. The cough rattles in her chest like something trying to escape. I keep plaiting, my fingers moving through her hair with the muscle memory of years of Saturday mornings doing this exact thing.

“Mary, when you become a doctor, you won’t be like them, right? Coming to help people and then leaving them the same way you found them?”

“When I become a doctor, I’ll fix the things that make people sick.”

“Even the mountain?”

My hands stop moving.

“Even the mountain.”

Through the window, I hear Mama’s voice rising slightly, that edge coming into it that means she’s tired of being polite, tired of performing gratitude for crumbs.

“With respect, madam, we don’t need more workshops. We need trucks. We need the government to close the landfill or move it far from where people are living. We need…”

The radio cuts in, louder now. A jingle about ruling party bringing progress. Vote wisely. Build Uganda together!

Grace closes her eyes. “Can you sing something?”

I hum one of the songs from church, low enough that it mixes with the sounds outside. Mama’s voice, the radio, the muzungus’ promises, the trucks groaning up the road toward the landfill with today’s load. All of it blending into the soundtrack of our lives.

By the time the meeting ends and the Land Cruiser drives away trailing red dust, it’s almost noon. Grace has fallen asleep after finishing her porridge as promised and I slip out to find James and David. Mama sits outside still, looking tired already yet the day has barely begun.

The boys are where they always are on Saturdays, behind Mr. Ssali’s shop where the ground is flat enough for football.

“Eh, Mary!” James calls when he sees me. He’s seventeen now, graduated from senior four last year but couldn’t afford the fees for senior five. So he’s stuck, like most of us, in that terrible space between childhood and a future that requires money to enter. “Jangu! Come! We need one more person. That guy Bosco says he can beat us and you know my leg is paining me.”

“Your leg is always paining when you’re losing,” David says. He’s James’s age but still in school; his father owns the hardware shop and can afford the fees. This makes David both one of us and not one of us, existing in that strange middle place where you’re poor enough to live in Kiteezi but rich enough to imagine leaving.

“Gwe, I’m serious this time!”

I pick up a stick and draw a line in the dirt, the way we’ve been doing since we were children. “Okay, but I’m on David’s team. You and Bosco can suffer together.”

“Nedda! That’s not fair…”

“Ssebo, take it or go cry to your mother.” David is already moving into position, grinning.

We play hard, the way you play when the game is the only thing standing between you and thinking too much about your life. James is limping for real now but won’t stop. David and I pass the ball between us without talking, just knowing where the other one will be.

“Gooaaal!” David screams when I kick it past Bosco’s feet and it rolls between the two rocks that mark the goal.

“Nedda, I have refused! You people cheated!” Bosco is breathing hard, hands on his knees. “How can Mary even play? Girls don’t…”

“Girls don’t what?” I step closer to him.  “Say it. Girls don’t what?”

He backs up, hands raised. “Mary… I was just…”

“He was just being stupid,” James says, coming to stand beside me even though we’re on opposite teams. “Like always.”

I turn away. From here you can see the landfill fully, trucks lined up like ants carrying food to their hill.

“Naye guys,” David says, sitting down heavily. “You ever think about what will happen when that thing gets full?” His eyes are on the ants.

“It’s already full,” Bosco says. “My father says they just keep piling and piling. One day…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“One day nothing,” James cuts in. “They’ll just find somewhere else to put the rubbish. That’s what governments do.”

“Your government,” I say, and everyone laughs because James’s uncle is some small NRM chairman who stands on corners giving speeches about development coming, about roads and water and schools.

“Anyway,” David says, “after election maybe things will change. My sister says there’s a candidate promising to close all the bad landfills.”

“They always promise everything!” The words come out sharper than I intended. “Then they win and forget they even know where Kiteezi is.”

Bosco picks up the ball. “One more game?”

“Can’t,” James says. “I have to go help my mother at the salon. Saturdays are too too busy!”

“Me too,” David adds. “My father wants me to mind the shop.”

We say our goodbyes and I start walking back home. James follows me, limping slightly but trying to hide it.

“How is Grace?” he asks when we’re further away.

His voice has that careful quality people use when they’re asking about something serious but don’t want to make it too serious by acknowledging how serious it is.

“Same. Breathing is still hard.”

“My mother says Grace should go to Mulago. That the doctors here don’t know what they’re doing.”

I stop walking. Turn to face him. “Your mother should give us the money for the taxi then.”

The words come out hard but I don’t apologise.

“Sorry,” I say anyway, because James is just trying to help and it’s not his fault that help and insult are sometimes the same thing. “I’m just…”

“I know.” He kicks a stone, watches it skip across the ground. “But this place. Sometimes I think if we had been born somewhere else…”

“But we weren’t. So…”

We walk in silence for a bit.

“You know what’s funny?” James says. “Those bazungu come with their inhalers and their workshops, acting like they’re saving us. But they live up there…” he points to the hill where the mission houses sit with their solar panels and water tanks, “where the wind blows the smell away from them.”

At the path that splits toward his place, James stops. “Next week? There’s a game at Kasubi. The coach might scout some players.”

“I’ll try. If Mama doesn’t need me.”

He grins. “You know when I become a famous footballer I will just forget all of you fast fast!”

“You! Get lost,” I say, shoving him lightly.

I watch him limp away, still trying to hide it, still smiling.

Back home, Grace is awake. I notice the Muzungu’s box of things on the table. Inhalers. Bandages. Water purification tablets. I hadn’t seen them before I left. I turn away. This is like a song that has grown old after hearing it too many times.

Mama is by the radio again, turning the dial slowly. The voices fade in and out—news about rallies, registration, youth unemployment and economic growth. She stops on a station playing old kadongo kamu music, that slow sad kind that makes you remember things you weren’t even alive for.

Grace appears in the doorway, the yellow dress rumpled from sleep. “Mama, can we still go to Aunt Nakato’s? You promised Mary would take me.”

“Go. But be back before dark. And Grace…” she touches my sister’s face gently, “if the breathing gets bad, come back immediately. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mama.”

We walk slowly. Past Mr. Ssali’s shop where the Coke sign hangs crooked and women sit on benches selling tomatoes from basins. Past Mrs. Tendo’s compound where laundry flaps on the barbed wire fence—school uniforms and Kitenge and someone’s good Sunday shirt.

The path itself is soil packed hard by feet and bicycle tires, with stones that shift when the big trucks rumble past toward the landfill. There’s a drainage ditch running alongside it, dry now but I remember last month when it rained. How the water ran brown and fast, carrying things nobody wanted to look at too closely.

Aunt Nakato’s compound is on the far side of our zone, where the land slopes down toward the valley and you can almost pretend the landfill doesn’t exist if you don’t turn your head. Almost.

Her house is smaller than ours but she has a proper garden—tomatoes, spinach, even some flowers that she says are just for beauty, not for eating or selling. I love this about Aunt Nakato. That she makes space for beauty even when beauty doesn’t serve a purpose.

“Eh, my girls!” she calls when she sees us. She’s outside seated on a short round stool, dehusking beans. Her headscarf sliding back to show grey edges in her hair. “Grace!”

Grace’s face lights up in a way that makes my chest hurt. Not because I’m sad but because I’m aware, suddenly and sharply, of how rare it is to see her face do this.

Grace goes to her and kneels down. Aunt Nakato’s familiar arms wrap around her.

“Bambi, this one. You’re thinner since the other week. Is your mother feeding you?”

“She hasn’t been eating well.” I say quickly, before Grace can answer. “Because of the…”

I don’t finish the sentence.

“Mmh.” Aunt Nakato’s face closes in that way adults’ faces close when they understand something they don’t want to understand. “Well, let me show you the chicks before they sleep.”

Behind her house, in a corner protected by wire mesh and old iron sheets, six yellow chicks stumble around their mother, who watches us with one suspicious eye.

Grace bends, careful not to get too close, and makes those soft cooing sounds that usually only work on babies. The chicks respond, peeping back, and for a moment everything is simple. Girl, chickens, afternoon light.

“That one is mine,” Grace announces, pointing to the smallest chick. “When I grow up, I’m going to have many chickens. Like, one hundred.”

“One hundred?” Aunt Nakato laughs, but it’s a gentle laugh, the kind that doesn’t mock. “Where will you keep them?”

“In my big compound. With a proper fence and everything. And Mary will be a doctor so she can treat them when they get sick.”

“I’m not treating chickens,” I say, playing my part in this familiar script. “I’m treating people.”

“Same thing. You just give them medicine until they’re better.”

Aunt Nakato goes inside and comes back with a thermos of tea. “For Grace. With milk and sugar, the proper way.”

Grace drinks it slowly, using both hands to hold the cup. I watch her throat work, swallowing, and think about all the ordinary miracles we don’t notice until they’re gone. Swallowing. Breathing. Believing in one hundred chickens.

When she’s done, she leans against my shoulder and yawns. “You need to rest again?” I say.

“Just five more minutes. Please.”

We sit there, the three of us, watching the chicks. The mother hen has settled down now, her babies tucked under her wings. The sun is starting its slow slide toward evening, painting everything in that gold light that makes even Kiteezi look almost beautiful.

“You know what I heard?” Aunt Nakato says suddenly, her voice low. “At the market. They’re saying after elections, they might finally relocate the landfill.”

“They’ve been saying that since before I was born,” I say.

“True. But this time there’s pressure. That journalist, the one who did the story about the water contamination, she’s pushing the issue. And some of the opposition candidates are making noise.”

“Making noise is not the same as doing something.”

I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I do.

Aunt Nakato sighs. “No. But sometimes noise is where change starts.”

Grace has fallen asleep against my shoulder, her breathing slightly easier.

“Aunt,” I say quietly, “do you think Mama will win again? The LC elections?”

“Why not? She’s done more for this zone than any chairman before her. Even the men have to admit it.”

“But some people are saying she’s too… I don’t know. Too much trouble. Always pushing for things the City doesn’t want to give.”

“That’s exactly why she should win.” Aunt Nakato’s voice is firm now. “We need people who push. Who make trouble. Otherwise we just sit here and wait to die quietly.”

The words cling to the air and refuse to leave even with the breeze.

In the distance, I can hear the evening sounds starting. Radios turning on, children being called home, pots clanging as people start preparing dinner.

“I should take her back,” I say. “Before it gets dark.”

Aunt Nakato helps me wake Grace gently. She presses a small paper bag into my hand. “Mandazi. For tomorrow’s breakfast. Tell Mama Mary I’m praying for her campaign.”

We walk back as the day bleeds into evening, the light painting everything in warm orange. Grace is quiet, tired from the visit. The smell from the landfill shifts with the changing wind, sometimes strong, sometimes almost gone.

At home, Mama is still at the table, papers spread out in front of her like a map of a country that doesn’t exist. Photocopied flyers with her photo and promises: Better Health Services. Clean Water. Safe Environment. Hope grows in her a fresh every morning like an unwanted weed or maybe a cultivated seed.

“You’re back,” she says without looking up. “Grace, go bathe and change. Mary, help me count these flyers. I need to know how many more to print.”

Grace goes inside without arguing, weariness weighs her head down. The radio is on, of course. Now it’s the evening news. More about elections. A story about flooding in a rural village. The youth are still unemployed. The President is still there like a familiar disease.

“Mama,” I say, not looking at her, “do you think you’ll win?”

Her hands stop moving. In the stillness, I can hear the radio announcer’s voice, Grace moving around in the bedroom, the distant sound of trucks on the landfill road.

“Do you think I should?”

“I asked you first.”

She smiles slightly, and in that smile I see something I haven’t seen in a while—amusement.

“Clever girl. Yes, I think I’ll win. Not because I’m better than the others, though I am, but because people here know I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

“But you promise things you can’t do alone. Like the safe environment.”

“I promise to fight for it. That’s different.” She leans back in her chair, rubbing her eyes in that way people do when they’re tired not just in their body but in their soul. “Mary, you know what your grandmother used to tell me? She said women like us don’t get to choose between being brave and being safe. We just choose whether to fight standing up or lying down.”

“What did you choose?”

“You’re here, aren’t you? Sitting at this table, asking hard questions.” She reaches across and touches my face, rare tenderness. Her hand smells like onions, tomatoes, and printed paper. “I chose standing.”

I want to ask her if she thinks it’s worth it. If all this fighting and losing and fighting again amounts to anything. But I already know what she’ll say.

Inside, Grace starts coughing. Not the normal evening cough but the bad kind, the one that sounds like something breaking inside her chest, like her body trying to expel something that’s been growing there for millennia.

Mama is up immediately, moving toward the bedroom. I follow with the inhaler from the box the Muzungus left.

Grace is sitting up on the bed, her small body shaking with each cough. Mama holds her, one hand on her back, whispering things I can’t hear.

I hand over the inhaler and watch as Grace uses it, the coughing slowly subsiding into that wet wheeze that’s somehow worse because it’s quieter. Loud coughing means her body is fighting. Quiet wheezing means it’s losing.

“Better?” Mama asks.

Grace nods but there is a shifting alarm in her eyes, it comes to the front then retreats when we see it.

“Sleep,” Mama says softly. “I’ll stay here.”

“No, I’ll stay.” I settle down beside Grace, pulling the thin blanket over both of us. “You have work to finish.”

Mama hesitates, then nods. She touches both our heads. A benediction, perhaps, or a goodbye? I watch her back as she leaves. Through the wall, I hear her moving papers, the radio voices rising and falling, the sounds of a woman trying to save a community that’s slowly drowning.

Grace’s hand finds mine under the blanket. Her fingers are cold despite the warm night. “Mary?”

“Mmh?”

“If I die…”

Again the words just float and refuse to land. I want to interrupt, to say she’s not going to die, to perform like we all have learned to do. But Grace deserves better.

“You’re not going to die.”

I say it anyway. Not because it’s true but because some lies are necessary. Some lies are love.

“But if I do, you’ll still become a doctor, right? For other people’s sisters?”

My throat closes. Not with tears—I cried all my tears years ago—but with that feeling you get when you can’t breathe not because there’s no air but because there’s too much truth.

“I’ll become a doctor. And you’ll be there annoying me, asking me to treat your one hundred chickens.”

She laughs, soft and wheezy. “One thousand chickens.”

“One thousand.”

We lie there as darkness fills the room completely. Outside, life continues—dogs barking, someone playing gospel music, the far-off rumble of trucks. The mountain that is not a mountain, growing taller while we sleep.

Grace’s hand goes loose in mine as sleep takes her. I stay awake, listening to her breathe, counting the rhythm that has become my lullaby: one-two-three-breathe.

In the next room, Mama has turned up the radio. A new voice now, a woman singing about faith and mountains moving.

I close my eyes and think about Aunt Nakato’s words: Sometimes noise is where change starts.

One-two-three-breathe

Tomorrow is Sunday. We will go to the early service where the pastor will talk about God’s plan and how suffering builds character. Grace and I will nod and shout “Amen.” Later, maybe James will come by and we’ll play football until the heat gets too much.

One-two-three-breathe

Tonight we are still here. Still breathing. Still hoping in the way you hope for something you have never seen. I press my face into Grace’s hair and whisper the words I couldn’t say to Aunt Nakato, couldn’t say to Mama or to myself in daylight: “Please. Just let us have tomorrow.”

The music plays on. The night deepens. Grace breathes.

One-two-three-breathe.

One-two-three.

The rhythm breaks for just a moment—that space between breaths where anything could happen, where her lungs could simply decide they’re done fighting. But then the breath comes again, and I release the one I was holding.

I ask again. For the grace for Grace to breathe again tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and the tomorrow after that, until there are no more tomorrows or until something changes. Though change seems as distant as the life my father found in Jinja, as theoretical as the government trucks that will never come to move our mountain.

We will breathe again tomorrow.

We have to.                        

One-two-three-breathe.

Precious Colette Kemigisha is a Ugandan writer.