Usually the room was empty, except for Monday mornings when babies were draped into canvas swings attached to scales to be weighed. Sometimes a visiting dentist from Mbabane, the capital city of Swaziland, would come and clean the teeth of patients waiting for the medical doctor. If there were no babies or dentists, the room was silent and desolate and cold, even on hot days. But today I heard familiar voices waft out of the room, and I saw my friend Bekithemba standing behind the half wall facing me. He was shouting and whipping his younger brother Mphendulo with the long rubber shambock that their family used to herd the cows. Mphendulo was my age, ten, and Bekithemba was fourteen. Mphendulo was tied around his ankles and wrists with coarse brown twine, and was lying belly down on top of the half wall. He was wailing, and between wails he pleaded in high pitches to his brother.

     "No, Bekithemba! Stop! I don't want to play anymore! It hurts!"

     "It doesn't matter. We're playing Jesus, and Jesus didn't get to stop when he wanted." Bekithemba hit him again, and Mphendulo wailed again. Just then, Mphendulo saw me sitting below on my bicycle.

     "Skye! Tell him to stop! He'll listen to you, and he's HURTING ME!"

     "Bekithemba, maybe you shouldn't whip him. I think it's hurting him." Bekithemba didn't even look up, but focused on his target. "It doesn't matter, Skye. Jesus was hurt too. And he's the one who wanted to play Jesus." The shambock thwapped onto Mphendulo's rear end, sending up a tuft of dust from the khaki shorts of his school uniform. Mphendulo would not be used for inyanga medicine, so he was allowed to go to school. Bekithemba was not going to stop. If I rode my bike up the ramp, I was nearly certain to catch a stray shambock whipping. I decided to try different stairs.

      Next door to the room where Bekithemba and Mphendulo were playing Jesus was the hospital reception. Like most of the hospital, the reception had no walls on the sides, and I could see the room from my bicycle perch below the Jesus game. Often, the simple concrete benches were overfull with patients so that some also waited on the floor or the ground outside the reception. But now the room was deserted. Even the receptionist was missing from her space in the little concrete box that housed the office. I decided to ride my bike through the reception even though the hospital administrator had yelled at me the last few times I rode in the hospital. I scooted my bike to the waxy cement cliff where the dust ended and the reception started. The hospital floor was too high to ride up, and the wheelchair ramp was close to the wards where the nurses or administrator might see me. So I hoisted my bike into the reception. It clanged and scuffed against the floor, but Mphendulo was still wailing, and I didn't think anyone would notice this noise. Usually, adults wrap noises into a big clump when children are playing and ignore as much as they can.

      I wove in and out of the cement benches on my bicycle, then rushed in a straight line off of the reception floor. My exit was much closer to the ground than the side where I had loaded my bike. I was airborne long enough to feel brave and short enough not to destroy my bike, which clanked and rattled when it landed on the dirt road that passed the front of the hospital. Then I rode my bike around the room where my friends were playing Jesus. Sometimes I heard the thwack of rubber against shorts, or painful wailing, or holy reprimand. Once I rounded the Jesus room, I hoisted my bike up to the reception floor and started another loop. My fifth lap was interrupted when a tiny, late 1970's model Toyota pickup pulled up the road and stalled in the opening next to the reception. The truck was lopsided from mismatched tires, and I could not tell what color the paint once was. Now it blended with the dust that stuck to its side in clumps and mixed with the dull dirt road of its backdrop like camouflage.

      After the truck stopped and the sounds of engine and gears faded, sounds of yelling and confusion came from the little cab. Somebody popped the handle of the passenger door; then somebody slammed it shut before it was all the way opened. Two slurred, muffled men's voices argued about something I could not hear, then the door opened all the way, and a very bloody, very drunk man was shoved from the car seat to the dirt I had been using as a runway to land my bicycle. He landed like a puddle. He wore traditional clothes, and his goat skins and lihiya fabrics settled in ripples around his crumpled body. After a moment, he had not moved, and I thought he had died in his exit. Then he groaned and tried to yell something, except he seemed to lose track of his words, and they tapered off into a gurgle.

     I was afraid of very drunk men, and I smelled the marula beer in the man from all the way inside the reception where I was perched on my bike. So I did not help him, even though I thought I should. Instead, I watched him plant his hands into the dirt in front of him. Then he moved his knees under him so that he was kneeling, bowing to the little hospital. He swayed a little on his knees, then plopped one beefy, bare foot down on the ground, then the next, and he stood up. He stumbled and grumbled to a bench against the back wall of the room, and the whole room smelled of alcohol. Once he was sitting, he glared at me. Usually girls in Swaziland do not ride bicycles, and usually girls at Emkhuzweni are not white. I think I looked very strange to him. He was not so strange to me. I had seen similar men in the same place.

      He started to say something, but instead he chuckled a deep, rattling, horrible laugh. Blood dripped from the side of his head over his neck and shoulders. Blood drenched parts of the lihiya fabric around his chest and made the cloth sag against his body. On his shoulders, most of the blood had started to dry into little roots and veins on his skin. His head was shaved, so I could see cracks in his skull. It looked like shatters in glass. A dimple the size of an orange carved the side of his head where whatever had hit him had hit him.