The Curse That Shoes Can Break - Issue 31: Stress

Mintamir makes sure all five of her children wear shoes, so that they don’t share her fate. She wants to protect their feet from magic.

She lives in the corner of a cornfield in Northern Ethiopia, in a straw-thatched hut. The walls are framed with eucalyptus branches, plastered over with layers of mud and dung. Inside the hut, pasted on one of the walls, there is an old calendar, with a photograph pinned in the upper left corner.

The photograph shows Mintamir holding a child. She wears a faded blue dress and a black headscarf. A second scarf, with hues of red, green, and blue, is tied around her waist. An intricately fashioned crescent tattoo runs across her lower jaw and over her chin, stopping right below her earlobes. She looks away from the camera. Her face is expressionless.

Two men stand beside her, looking into the camera. Their faces are also expressionless. The man on her left is her brother, dressed in a light brown shirt and trousers. The man next to him has the upright posture of a soldier. He is Mintamir’s husband, bald, in army khakis, with a black belt and a green coat. Palm trees against…
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