He stood outside a hut. The high sun lit the ground with brilliant reflection that risked over-exposing the film, so he readjusted the shutter speed. Inside the darkened doorway a woman lay on a mat, her feet, stretching into the sunlight, were light on the bottom, calloused and sunburned. Her eyes, like eggs in her head, flashed at him through the darkness. Behind the hut, stretching away for miles, the sickly yellow land wavered in heat.
    Later Brady found two men sitting at a rusted card table. One man held his face in his hands, his elbows resting on the table-top. The other motioned for Brady to come. The man stood to greet him, using the shaky table to prop himself up. Brady tried to remember the Dinka word for ‘Hello’, but his heart was racing and he could only think of the English and Serbian. The man smiled but waved a fist in Brady’s face, loosening his fingers to reveal three grains of rice resting in the folds of his palm. Brady lifted the camera and snapped a picture. The man motioned to Brady to take the rice, even grabbing Brady’s hand to try to force him.
    “No,” Brady said in English, “I can’t help you.”
    Cupping the rice back in his hand, the man sat down. He looked up at Brady, said something in Dinka, and held both hands to his face like he was taking a picture. He turned an invisible camera this way and that way, pushing an imaginary button with his right index finger. He lifted the palm with the rice in it to his mouth and pretended to eat the dry grains. Then he mockingly pantomimed the camera again and looked away.
    Brady tried to get away—he needed a breath of fresh air—but on the edge of the village he was distracted by movement in the low lands of dried swamp. He had learned to recognize clues about the world that lead to a picture. In this case it was the stretching of a wing, like a yawning of feathers.
    He turned to see the bald head of a vulture bent at preening itself. It held one wing aloft, rearranged its feathers with its beak, and then tucked the wing back into its body. Then, closer to Brady, something sat doubled over in the tinder-dry weeds. At first he thought it might be a rock, but as he got closer he recognized the unusually large head, the knuckles of spine protruding through taut, leather skin. The child’s stomach was bloated and its shallow breaths seemed to stretch the ribs to the breaking point. It’s legs curled underneath its body as if snapped from the weight. He knew as soon as he saw it that this was the picture, that one shot that told the story. He bent down to find the frame, but it wasn’t right—the bird was still too far away, perched just out of the camera’s eye. “Come on, come on, come on,” he said. He waited in the sun for twenty minutes, his eye pressed against the eyepiece of the camera. He thought the child was a girl, but it was difficult to tell. It was a thought he preferred not to have. The child seemed to try to stand once, just a little flexing of wasted muscle, but sank back down. He almost set the camera down; he couldn’t stand watching much longer, but then the bird moved--three quick hops towards the child and stopped.
    The frame: the thatch-huts in the background, just a hint of them to emphasize the distance, the aloneness. Just to the left of center, high in the frame, and barely out of focus, the vulture. The blurriness giving the animal a metaphorical quality, its head turned slightly away in patient boredom. Just to the right of center and low in the frame, the child, breathing slightly, head bowed, forehead touching the earth. Straight center in the picture, the parched space between bird and child.
    The shutter flashed open, letting in all the light of the world, and condensing it into a one-inch square, then shut again. The click of the shutter seemed very loud to Brady, but then the silence crept in again. He pulled the viewfinder away from his eye and the frame was gone and the child sat there, very small beneath a magnificently large blue sky. The whole landscape crowded him, pushed on him, the heat turning into a fist. He wondered, briefly--a dangerous moment--if the child had heard the clicking of the shutter. An assignment, he remembered. The picture’s the thing. In and out.

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