Africa outline with a heart on the upper back

He wanted to pass with a wall map wrapped in oilcloth, the kind schools hang above the blackboard. She unrolled one corner on the bonnet of her desk. Someone had drawn the whole continent in a single black line, clean as wire, and above its eastern edge, where a lake might sit, there was a small open heart. 'My granddaughter drew that,' he said. 'She is seven. She says it is where we are from.'

Ama had a form for goods and a form for persons, and neither had a box for a child's sense of geography. She checked the duty tariff, then the weight, then the old man's stooped shoulders under his jacket. The queue shuffled. A goat bleated somewhere behind the hut. She could feel the stamp pad drying in its tray, the rubber gone stiff in the heat.

In the end she wrote 'printed matter, educational' and tore the carbon copy along its perforations. 'Take it to her before the rain,' she said, and pressed the stamp to the corner, away from the line and away from the heart, so the ink made a small dark bruise in the margin where nothing mattered. He thanked her in a language she had not been taught at school and walked off with the map held out in front of him like something that might spill.