she said. “Let them go. They’re in God’s hands. We all are.”

      It could have been a platitude—in God’s hands—but the way she said it made it sound like a fearful threat.

      The woman knelt in the sand in front of the bush that the boys had attacked with their rocks. She studied the scene of carnage—the shattered eggs, the broken nest.

      “Men destroy everything,” she said, talking to herself. “Why do they have to destroy everything?”

      Carefully, as if the nest was made of glass, the woman lifted it off the ground and tucked it into a tree. Then she bent down again and covered the broken eggs with sand. She did so quietly, reverently, as if performing a sacred burial ritual. The mother bird flitted down to the sand, looking for her lost babies.

      “Try again, Maman,” the woman said to the little bird. “Try again for me.”

      He looked at her face, and saw tears on it. Tears over a broken nest and a baby bird.

      Fuck Manhattan. And fuck the entire world.

      Haiti had just got very interesting.