The year: 2022.
The place: Rufisque, Department of Dakar, Senegal.
The date and time: Tuesday, June 26. 14:00.
The crime: Fingering.
Commissaire Ba read the first four lines of his report, printed on a white piece of paper, shook his head, shredded it, and started again. Again.
His colleagues whispered behind his back that his shredder was a frivolous waste. They were right. It should be bigger. At times like this, he wished he could push people through it. It seemed like a kind and necessary punishment for having him type this kind of bullshit.
Fingering… He thought, lighting himself a cigarette and heading for his private toilet. No one liked that either, but leadership has its privileges, and Commissaire Ba’s mind and stomach worked in tandem. Clearing one cleared the other, and he happened to be heavily loaded. Fucking fingering…The nerve on them… But Commissaire Ba, 300 lbs and six feet tall, was nothing if not a consummate professional. I’ll get to the…bottom of this… he thought, giggling his way to the privy.
The details of his cleansing bearing no incidence on the tale, e stood up, his mind cleared, to wipe and flush, and there, just as he bent over to pull up his pants, he felt it:
A mild tickle, the distinct feel of a fingernail dilating his anus, two phalanges reaching up into his rectum all the way to the knucklebones, and a very deliberate…wiggle…
He jumped up with a yelp, rushed into his office pants around his ankles, rectum aflame, tripped over his pant legs, and landed dick first in the shredder. Top of Form
#
Earlier that day…
“My ass! Sama boon! Elle a doigté dé! Right there! In front of everybody!”
The man… Mansour Koly, red eyed and toothless, patchy afro sprinkled with sand, hadn’t uttered a complete sentence since running screaming into his precinct in Rufisque. Since then, fifty more men had rolled in, hands on their butts, heads dashing left and right, harrowed eyes defiant and subdued, all shaking nervously on the floor, waiting to unload on Commissaire Ba in much similar fashion.
The man had been fingered. In the bum. By an unnamed invisible woman. Or so he claimed, but no one had seen anything. Two hundred people around, more goats, and not a witness to speak to the violation of his anus. His staff spoke seven languages between them, but none who spoke goat.
“And there are no witnesses?” he sighed as he wiped his forehead.
“She did! Bilay she did! I don’t lie about my ass.” Mansour finished, arms folded.
Wouldn’t you be so lucky… Ba thought, wondering what creature would dare near Mansour Koly’s behind, even just to kick it.
“Invisible, you say?”
“Wow!”
“So…how do you know it was a woman?” try though he might, Commissaire Ba couldn’t help but grin at that. Mansour Koly’s irate eyes striking lightning at the implication. He hesitated…
“The nails! Only a woman has nails that long!”
Ba stared at Mansour’s uncut claws sitting on his desk.
“You mean like those?”
The hands disappeared under the table. Eyes watering in shame.
“It’s ok. Mr. Koly. It’s ok. Thank you for your statement. We’ll… look into it!”
He laughed so hard he farted. There were times when your twenty-year career choice paid off. This was one of them.
“Next!”
#
Meanwhile, across town…
Khasaoutat sat trembling on his burgundy pleather couch, the sweat running down his stomach slowly pooling inside his pants soothing the phantom limbs of two long fingers wiggling inside his butt hole.
He could still feel them. The memory of them. He feared he always would. He hadn’t risen from the couch for two hours, lest he exposed his anus to another speleological dig.
Long and knobby, they were. Gnarly roots stretching from an unfathomable abyss into a smellier one, with all the delicacy of…. Of two fingers shoved up his ass, that’s what!
It was sudden and sweaty. One moment he was leaning over to pick up a coin he’d dropped, and next thing you know, his boubou’s pants still on…
He’d run straight into the women’s prison across the square, shoved his way past the female guards and into the Director’s office.
“Baram! Baram naniouma!”
Aminata Niang, sitting at her desk, a glass of scalding mint tea in hand, dropped it into her lap, jumped up with a scream, and spit the tea from her mouth into his face.
“You’ve been what?!”
“Fingered! Someone fingered me! Right out…” Then he heard himself. Realization dawning, that he was screaming at the top of his lungs, Director Niang’s door wide open to the visitation room, that he, Khasaoutat Samb, son of Oumar and Majiggen Samb, had been….
“The inmates! Won’t! BELIEVE THIS!” One of the wardens peeking in yelled before dashing to the cells.
Perhaps they laughed. Perhaps they didn’t. They were drowned by the roaring hilarity of Aminata Niang, the six prison wardens at the door, the two wardens he’d shoved, the dozen husband, sisters and babies sitting in the hall, visiting their jailed-up wives, nieces, aunts and cousins, cell phones in hand, snapping pictures of him and tweeting them to their WhatsApp groups…
In less than a minute, two thousand people knew. In five, half the country and by the time he got home an hour later, he had been memed from Dakar to Lagos, Abidjan to Agadez. In Dogon villages high in the mountains to small fishing boats in the Niger Delta. They all paused from eating their rice and their suya, from herding sheep and blowing up pipelines to like, comment and share, and share, and share, and share…
Aminata Niang had called him a liar, asked him what he’d done, and who might have done it. What he’d done to invite the…fingering. All with a straight face, while nearby inmates yelled that if he needed more action, they would gladly indulge him…in the butt.
His wife. His WIFE! Had wagged a finger at him, shoved him against the wall with a grin, and said:
“So, you like it up there, do you?” and tickled his asshole!
It was a 50CFA coin he’d dropped, less than a penny on a dollar, it wasn’t fucking worth it.
#
Commissaire Ba bolted upright from the flashes of a dozen cameras.
White walls, green sheets, beeping of monitors. I’m in a hospital…why am I in a… my dick!
His hand darted for his crotch, but a nurse caught him halfway and pushed it back down on his side.
He caught a glimpse of her long, curly nails and almost fainted, his anus twitching furiously.
“Glad you’re finally awake, Commissaire. Don’t worry we were able to reattach your… hmmm…penis. It’s still shredded and irritable, but you’ll be able to use its basic functions within a couple of days. In the meantime, we’ve attached this bag to collect your urine. It’s important you don’t move…”
Click, click, click as the press typed everything down…
“Get them out of here!”
“Oh, yes, sorry.” The nurse grinned as she apologized. “Out with you! He’s fine! That’s all you need to know!”
Commissaire Ba sighed.
His five and a half inches were back, but his pride, his pride had been penetrated, and try though he might, he could never revirginize his asshole.
Alone in his quiet room, the bag on his side slowly bubbling with piss, he could think… a little.
The fingering was real. It could have been psychosomatic, but no. The wiggle. The wiggle was real. The feeling that his rectum had become a playground was real. He would never eat a twix bar again. Never again.
None of the dozens of men pouring into precincts all over Rufisque were lying either.
Laughed at, dismissed as finger teases and sent home with their dignity shattered and their faith in the system broken. Yes. But they weren’t lying.
The penis-theft epidemic of 09. Damn he’d been young and fit back then. Dozens of men claiming they shook hands with a foreigner and woke up without their cocks. He’d been charged with the inspection. All the dicks were right where they were supposed to be. It had all ended well and quite hilariously in fact, yet, mobs had assaulted dozens of people. People had died. All over West Africa.
It was obviously a ploy to beat up foreigners unpunished, yet… here he was. The sweet flower of his puckered ass blown to the four winds. And no one to believe him.
I will get to the bottom of this. He thought. Even if it’s my own.
The urine bag burst under the pressure.
“Nurse!”
#
“Serigne bi!” Khasaoutat’s wife yelled at him from the window.
“Wow, Sokhna si!” He answered, smiling back at her from the street.
“Making sure your butt is properly plugged!”
He bit his tongue and dropped his head. Passerby laughing at him.
“And don’t go flashing your ass to random strangers again you hear?!” she added, slamming the window behind her.
He was a good man. He’d done nothing to deserve this.
It had been three days now, and there wasn’t a single man out on the streets. No passerby, not a cab driver, not a cop, no one. Women and children galore, but not a man in sight.
Three days holding back his poop, pissing his pants and sleeping balled up against the wall, ass out of reach. Three days and he couldn’t take it anymore. He had to talk to someone.
A child ran past him carrying a bowl overflowing with curdled milk, sprinkling small drops on the concrete, lapped up by hissing stray cats.
He ran up to a small corner store, usually manned by Koy Boundao and his teenage boy, but today his wife, Aminata, managed the business, sitting outside the store on a small wooden bench in an orange and green dress. She slipped the boy a thousand CFA bill and poured the milk on a circular, slightly hollow stone until the depression filled up, and started to pray.
Khasaoutat caught her repeating something under her breath as he walked by:
“Mame Coumba Lambaye, Mame Coumba Lambaye, Mame Coumba Lambaye…”
#
Commissaire Ba was back behind his desk, shredder gone, itching not to scratch his healing dick.
Think, don’t scratch, just…. Ahhhhhh!
He ran into the bathroom to pour warm water on the tip.
That’s better, he thought, walking back to his desk. “Now, where was I…”
A tall, skinny man in a green boubou collapsed in his office out of breath.
“Let me guess.” Commissaire Ba said without looking up, “Fingered?”
Khasaoutat looked up at the cop.
“How do you…”
“Sixth sense, obviously. Look, don’t bother with the details. I mean that. No details. I believe you. How’s your ass?”
“But how do you know???!!!”
“It happened to me too. Every man in town. Two fingers up the ass. Now, what do you wa… Wait, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Khasaoutat looked around him at the empty precinct, the giggle of street children riding a wave of grilled meat. He wasn’t alone. Alhamdulillah he wasn’t alone.
He shook his head hard enough to crack his neck.
“No. No. Don’t think so.” He said “Commissaire Ba is it? Khasaoutat Samb. I… I think I know what’s happening.”
#
Commissaire Ba and Khasaoutat followed the jerky rhythm and nasal vocals under cover of darkness.
“Are you sure about this?” Ba asked, crawling between tombs to the middle of the cemetery. “It sounds like a party.”
“Definitely. My wife’s been coming home late these past few days. I just never thought…”
It was a party. A wild one. Women of all ages were dancing around a fire and passing small cups around, filled out of a plastic bottle. Just as Ba and Khasaoutat settled between two sandy mounds, the stereo stopped, and drums picked up instead. The women danced on but opened a circle between them and a young woman walked in, trembling in the humid darkness, frail, her eyes haunted and sad, shying away from the women trying to comfort her, fearing to be touched.
She lay on the ground by a couple of goats, as the other women kept singing, covering her and the animals with layer upon layer of cloth.
Commissaire Ba whistled softly.
“Freaky stuff! With a goat! Women…”
Khasaoutat shook his head.
“Don’t you know anything? It’s Ndeup. They’re trying to heal her.”
“Ndeup? I’m Fulani, sir. I don’t heed your Lebou nonsense.”
“Did it feel like nonsense when she stuffed you up like a skewer on dibi Hausa?! Let me listen.”
Ba didn’t answer but threw up in his mouth.
“Weird, they’re…”
“Yes?”
“They’re calling on Mame Coumba Lambaye to… Mame Coumba is the Rab… the protective spirit here… anyway, it’s weird, they’re calling on her to help the young girl. To help her pass her trauma to the goats… something about getting… Raped?”
“What?!”
“Yes. Something about the quarantine two years ago. Help her, Mame Coumba, they’re chanting. Take revenge on that evil uncle of hers. Strike him as he struck her…”
Ba had a flashback. Something he had neatly pushed deep into the mental caves of denial. A young girl who had nowhere to go back then. Nowhere to confine herself. He had taken her in, and nature had taken its course… or had it? It was the least she could do, right? For him taking her in? Right…?
Thunder cracked out of a quiet sky. Lightning struck the fire, and its stead stood a beautiful woman, black as midnight, hair covered in a blue head wrap, a matching blue dress flowing down her curves into the flames where her ankles disappeared, yet there she stood impervious, dark brown eyes calm and kind, her long delicate fingers ended in nails sparkling with star light.
She reached down to the young girl, threw the sheets off her as the goats ran away, and helped her up.
“Mame Coumba Lambaye!” the women screamed in unison.
She was free to go anytime, Commissaire Ba thought, staring at the flames dancing around the woman’s ankles. Anytime, he hadn’t locked her in when he left the house, hadn’t he? Except I had… She had screamed, he remembered. You don’t wanna die, do you? He would yell back. Show some gratitude! He had yelled.
“Mame Coumba!” A short, stocky woman said, nearing the fire.
“That…That’s my wife!” Khasaoutat whispered in shock.
The apparition in blue turned towards her.
“Mame Coumba.” She continued, “Thank you for helping us, all of us, but…”
“Is there something wrong, sama dom?”
“Nothing Rab. Nothing wrong. It’s just… you’re fingering ALL the men. Not saying they don’t all deserve a little… introspection, and teasing my husband is a lot of fun…but he’s a good man, Mame Coumba, lazy and not too bright, but he’s a good man… maybe you could be a bit more… selective?”
The others murmured agreement.
Mame Coumba’s deep laughter rose from the ground and tombs around her, reaching into the sky to echo in the clouds.
Ba pulled out his service weapon and started rising.
“Wait!” Khasaoutat said “What do you think you’re…”
Too late. Ba sprung up, weapon in hand, rushing towards the gorgeous Jinn.
Khasaoutat scattered to catch his ankle but landed face first in the dust.
“Khasaoutat Samb! You sneaky butt slut!” His wife berated, “What are you doing here?”
“Hands up! All of you! You’re all under…”
Mame Coumba Lambaye snapped her fingers, sending a shockwave across the ground knocking them all off their feet, except Commissaire Ba. He rose in the air spinning and screaming at the top of his lungs, drawn closer to the Rab until he stood close, his feet dangling over the bonfire, the sole of his shoes melting with thick pungent plastic drops.
“Baye meh!” He yelled, sweating and squirming. But she wouldn’t let him go.
Mame Coumba’s eyes danced with small flames.
“I see you Kouldo Reedou Ba.” She said, her voice a cavern. “I see you and all your sins…”
The last of his repressed memories burst to the front of his mind, coming home from the supermarket, and opening the door to find the young girl hanging from his ceiling fan…
“You are a bad man, Kouldo Reedou Ba. A bad man.” She turned to the other women while Khasaoutat buried his head in the sand.
“I did nothing wrong!” he screamed, the flames slowly eating away at his pants. “It was only a couple of months! She had nowhere else to go!”
“And neither do you…” Mame Coumba added. “You are right, my daughters. I will be more… selective…”
“Let me go!”
“… And you Kouldo Reedou Ba will know the full extent of my wrath…”
Khasaoutat’s wife helped him up and to his horrified eyes, the rotund shape of Commissaire Ba, stretched into a wraith thin version of himself, was slowly melting into the nails on Mame Coumba Lambaye’s index and middle finger, her soft smile now sharp with teeth.
“…you will always be the first one in – and the last one out. I hope you enjoy…colon.”
Commissaire Ba’s scream died as he disappeared into her fingers, alive, yet condemned to forever feel all the ‘operations’ she would carry out in future.
#
Khasoutat lay exhausted on top of his wife in their small bedroom, love making consumed repeatedly.
“I can’t believe you were behind all this…” He said, rolling off her.
“Wallahi. Never underestimate the power of women.” She answered reaching under the bed.
“Never again!” Khasoutat exclaimed, contented smile dropping as his wife pulled out a huge blue dildo and waved it in his face.
“Alright, butt boy, now let’s have a little fun!”
#
Mame bougouma diene is a franco –senegalese american humanitarian living in brooklyn, new york, and the us/francophone spokesperson for the african speculative fiction society (http://www.africansfs.com/). You can find his work in brittle paper, omenana, galaxies magazine, edilivres, fiyah!, truancy magazine, escapepod and strange horizons, and in anthologies such as afrosfv2 & v3 (storytime), myriad lands (guardbridge books), you left your biscuit behind (fox spirit books), this book ain’t nuttin to fuck wit (clash media), and sunspot jungle (rosarium publishing). His collection darks moons rising on a starless night published last year by clash books, is nominated for the 2019 splatterpunk award.