“I am Happy Matenje.”

December 1, 2006

Short story by Andrew O’Hagan in the Guardian:

I am 14 today. In the morning I help a neighbour with his stall on the road to Blantyre. He sells tomatoes and charcoal, chewing gum and glass bottles of Krazy Kool. Very soon I want to be a pilot, but I know this means I must go back to school. My brother James Matenje is two years younger than me and he wants to be a lawyer. There is something wrong with his left eye and my mother, when she was alive, said that this should not halt the progress of a good lawyer. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” she used to say. “Yet with your one eye James you will see far.”
The rest here.