Alexi Tsorba

The floor shines with the exaggerated confidence of something recently wiped, a mirror pretending to be humble. A surface so polished it reflects light upward as if eager to announce its cleanliness to anyone willing to trust it. Nothing could possibly go wrong on something this clean.

Nearby, a pair of yellow folding signs stood politely announcing their concern about moisture, but the attention of the aisle belonged elsewhere, to a freshly baked donut, still warm, glowing quietly behind glass, calling to be grabbed. A shoe lands with admirable innocence, carrying the certainty of rubber and habit, and begins to slide just enough to convert certainty into motion. The body follows the foot’s betrayal with polite delay, leaning forward while the hands lift, still holding a modest gray carton made of pressed paper pulp, light and practical, the descendant of a hundred-year-old idea meant to end arguments between farmers and hotel owners, meant to stop eggs from arriving cracked and conversations from arriving loud, and now sending the container briefly aloft, its lid blooming open like a small mechanical flower introduced to air for the first time.

Eggs rise.

They hesitate. They spread out. They tap gently against one another with the polite clicks of porcelain, white ovals suspended, their trajectories wide and hopeful, attempting something ambitious, as physics decides to entertain the idea of orbit. For a moment the scene holds—shoppers watching, gravity paused to observe, calculating whether these objects might qualify as satellites. But speed weakens. Curves fail. Eggs, despite their elegant shells and excellent packaging history, are loyal to gravity. Carrying inside them something that, under better circumstances, would contribute to a tasty and fluffy omelet, they begin to descend.

Below them, shoes protest against the floor’s polish, making sharp sounds. A knee bends and gives way. The body angles, arms describing large, unnecessary gestures through space, while Aisle 14—lined with boxes, labels, and witnesses—becomes a small amphitheater where physics clears its throat. The carton collapses in the air, and the first egg descends, striking the forehead precisely above the space between the eyes with impressive accuracy, achieving a triumphant landing.

The shell breaks with dignity. Warmth escapes. Another egg misses and bursts below, spreading into a yellow disc that gleams like a fallen emblem, claiming territory. The body meets the floor in stages—knee, palm, hip—each contact punctuated by the growing geography of slickness.

Then comes the liquid.

Freed from its elegant enclosure, it chooses a path of honor, flowing downward between the eyes, taking the slope of the nose like an Olympian skier committed to a black-diamond run, curving confidently across the cheek, accelerating, branching, reaching arms and legs in a final, generous spread, as the last egg completes its journey and the scene settles into stillness, glossy, quiet, and complete.

Everything stops. The floor remains spotless in principle.

You are born, and this already is the problem — not the birth itself, which you will not remember, but the expectation installed in you from the first year onward that there is a correct way to mark the passage of time, that the self requires ceremony, that the distance between who you were and who you have become deserves, annually, a flame.

The candles go in before you are old enough to understand fire. Someone carries the cake toward you in the dark and everyone sings, badly, in that particular key that exists nowhere in music but only in rooms where people feel obligated to mean something together. You are supposed to close your eyes. You are supposed to want something badly enough to ask for it from the universe through the intermediary of a small wax column burning over sugar. Nobody explains why this should work. Nobody will ever explain why this should work. And yet you close your eyes, every year, as if the ritual were a contract, you had no hand in drafting but are nonetheless bound to honor.

For a while, it works. Or it appears to.

This is when the ritual becomes complicated. A language, once you discover it can be used to lie, is never quite innocent again. Neither is a wish.

There is a birthday — you are somewhere between ten and the rest of your life — when you first notice, across the room, the specific face of someone who will become the standard against which everything else falls quietly short, and your heart, for the first time, loses its place, and you forget completely what you were going to wish for. The candles go out. The smoke rises. Everyone is waiting for you to come back from wherever you just went, and your mother says your name, and the lights return.

You carry the birthday forward through the years like anything that matters and cannot be put down: awkwardly, with occasional resentment, pretending sometimes that the weight isn't there. You are twenty and the candles seem ironic. You are thirty and they seem geological, markers laid down in strata you can no longer reach without effort. The people in the room change. The song stays the same. This is its own kind of instruction, the song stays the same because it is the one thing that requires nothing of you, no update, no revision, no accommodation of what the year has actually done to you.

And then, without the courtesy of a clear beginning, the funerals enter the calendar alongside the birthdays — as if they had been scheduled there all along, waiting patiently in a column you had simply never looked at. Somebody's brother. A friend from the early years who was, everyone agrees, far too young, which is the way of saying that the arrangement has been violated, that the implicit schedule by which people were supposed to leave your life in a dignified sequence has been ignored. You attend. You say the things. You return to your ordinary days with the knowledge, which you cannot unknow, that the people who sing at your birthday are not, as it turns out, permanent features of the landscape.

This is what the candles now contain. This is what you are actually doing when you close your eyes.

You stand at the cake and the room goes dark in that familiar way and they sing, slightly wrong, with love, and somewhere in the distance between the wish and the blowing-out, you are holding the entire weight of it — every year, every room, every face that was once present and no longer is, every version of yourself that stood in this same position and wanted something simple and was sometimes given it. The wish has long since stopped being a request. It has become something closer to a reckoning. An annual audit of the distance between what you hoped for and what arrived, conducted in the only ceremony the culture gave you for this purpose, between the lighting and the dark.

You blow out the candles. The applause is brief and genuine. The world continues at its usual speed.

The cockpit door opened and the captain just walked out. The other two copilots followed him. We sat in silence for several minutes, until the stewardess appeared and told us we would be here for a little while, and walked down the aisle murmuring in Amharic and then in English, handing us water and crackers. She had the composure of someone for whom this was not the strangest afternoon.

A woman across the aisle leaned toward me. Ethiopian, middle-aged, a colorful shawl folded in her lap. She said "their tire. Our pilots went to help." and tilted her chin toward the window. I looked over her shoulder. Out on the tarmac, one of our pilots was rolling an airplane wheel toward a plane parked crookedly at the far end of the runway, like it was nothing, like this was a Tuesday afternoon in his backyard. Later they let us go down the stairs to stretch for a bit. A low concrete building shimmered at the edge of the tarmac, and beyond that, nothing but ochre earth and sky so blue it looked painted.

Two and a half hours later we finally landed in Lalibela.

A man with an old land cruiser — cracked windshield, a rosary hanging from the mirror — was serving as taxi to drive four of us from the small airport toward the village. The cruiser groaned and squeaked as we pulled onto the road, every rut in the red dirt rattling through the chassis. The air was humid, thick, close to tropical. The area had patches of green at higher elevations, but was mostly covered in red volcanic rock that seemed to sweat with the moisture, dark in the creases where it gathered, bright at the faces where what little light there was hit directly.

As I was watching the landscape when I noticed, far ahead, figures on the side of the road walking in a line. The land out there had no interest in human presence. I observed them, trying to figure out where they were going. Then we got closer. Women and children moving steadily in the same direction we were traveling. Wood balanced on backs, flat stones carried under arms, the weight absorbed into posture, into the slope of a shoulder. They seemed to have been walking for many hours. No one was carrying water. Their clothes had been washed thin over years, faded to the pale side of blue. The road dotted with figures stretched far into the distance, each one carrying something.

I was still watching them when the Coca-Cola sign appeared on the right. Red and white, enormous, planted in the red rock and scrub like a flag on the moon. Coca-Cola.

Before we reached the village, still in the cruiser, it hit me through the window — warm, deep, faintly smoky. Berbere. The smell of it had claimed the whole street before I could see where it was coming from.

When we came into town the driver slowed. We passed a woman crouching at the bank of a narrow channel below the road, washing fabric in water the color of weak tea.

I got off at the center of the village, in front of a small hotel — the only proper building in sight, clearly there for pilgrims and the occasional traveler. Around it, open-fronted stalls of corrugated aluminum nailed to timber frames, the merchandise visible from the road. A light rain had started, drops tapping against the aluminum roofs in a random rhythm.

I asked the driver about water before he left. Clean water was precious here, he said — don't drink from the tap, don't use it even to wash your face. The hotel usually keeps some for visitors.

Walked into the small shop anyway. A teenage boy behind the counter, unhurried. Behind him, two things on the shelf: small pouches of berbere — that deep rust-colored spice that has been the fingerprint of this country's table for centuries — and Coca-Cola. Rows of it. I stood there a moment looking at those two things next to each other.

No water.

I bought two bottles, cold somehow, and stepped back into the thin rain. Berbere still in my nose, a bottle of Coca-Cola in my hand, I looked up and saw what I had crossed the world to see — eleven churches, not built up from the earth but carved down into it, pulled from solid volcanic rock by human hands, centuries ago.

I could not, for the life of me, understand how.

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