Jay

The first thing my grandfather gave me was a stone. Ordinary-looking malachite, heavy in a child’s palm. “This is why this city exists,” he said. He died soon after. Thirty years later, a margin note in a colonial survey—“Do not log separately”—led me back to it. What I found beneath the Copperbelt was not just emeralds where they shouldn’t be, but a light that pulsed. And remembered.