Your name is Asake and you can tell that you are being taken south because the wind is in your face and the clayey redness of the soil is slowly becoming a yellow sandiness. The soil is all you see.
Everything else is a blur.
You scream for help in desperate, high-pitched shrieks but it seems there is no one willing to save you. Desperation claws at your belly like unanswered hunger.
You remember that you had only stopped walking briefly, pausing as you navigated your way back from your mother’s farm at the place where the Imu and Buse pathways met. You paused to make the seemingly mundane choice of which route to take when a powerful arm suddenly wrapped itself around your torso, hoisted you onto a sturdy shoulder and began to run. A moment was all it took.
Screaming even louder, you consider that you did not really need to go to the farm today, or any other day for that matter. There was no need for the daughter of the great hunter Ajiboyede, the niece of the Baale of Olubuse, to go to the farms – your family has never lacked anything. Your father’s lands began along the banks of river Elebiesu and ran all the way down to Olubuse’s limits where great big trees stand like soldiers guarding your uncle’s territory. But you went anyway because you like to work with your hands, you enjoy the feel of soil beneath your feet and you relish the sight of verdant life around you. You decided to go to the farm today because the quiet beauty of the rising sun at dawn had spread over the sky, cloudless and taut like a drum skin. You went seeking nature’s touch.
Now, you are being carried along a snaking pathway carved into the reeds that stand beside the river like a loyal spouse – a path that takes you far away from home. You writhe and wrestle and fight with all the might you can muster but it is futile. The hands that have you are iron and do not loosen their grip. You remember the stories that sad visitors from nearby villages would sometimes tell of children who had been kidnapped and sold to strange men from faraway lands, and you wonder if this is what is happening to you. Just then the wind carries the unmistakable briny tang of the ocean air to your nose.
You scream louder.
#
Your name is Newton Brookes and it is your turn to go into the hold and take stock of the slave cargo. But you do not want to go into the belly of this wretched whale where men, women and children are chained and crammed into every available space like beasts. The stench is appalling, even the walkway is mired in filth. Starved of food, kindness and humanity, many of them have little choice but to die.
You tell the chief mate that you were never meant to be aboard this abomination, that you are no slaver. You are just a man who was seeking his fortune, whose brother-in-law offered him free passage to the new world in exchange for your services as a crewman on his ship. If you had known this was his vessel, you would have refused his kindness.
The chief mate spits a gob of something brown and viscous and tells you to stop talking and start counting before he puts a bullet in you. He looks angry, but the clearer emotion plastered across his thickly bearded face is impatience. You choose not to test him.
You clamber down the hatch reluctantly, carrying a lantern and some rope and begin to audit the ship’s misery, counting corpses and trying to ignore the sunken, accusing eyes of the living that stare back at you. You steel your heart, close your mind and try to do your duty, aware that these eyes will haunt you for years to come.
You reach a column and see a young girl lying still on the wooden floor, delicate and angelic, even as she is surrounded on all sides by her own filth. You tally her as dead and turn away but something gnaws at you, small but persistent in its urging. You turn back and walk toward her, set your lamp on the floor and take her hand in yours to feel for a pulse. Her eyes open slowly, revealing brown orbs set in a sea of jaundiced yellow. An alien emotion overwhelms you – a bizarre admixture of tenderness and something not unlike love – that you are frightened of. You decide suddenly in that moment, what you will do, knowing what it will cost and that it will change the course of your life forever.
#
You are twelve years old and you are running through your grandfather’s cornfield, laughing, carefree and wild as the summer breeze. You are being chased by Tom Wiggins, your best friend and the overseer’s son. He is desperate to turn the tide in the game of hide-and-seek that you are currently winning. You bank left, hard, and burst through the curtain of stalks and leaves onto a dirt road. You realize too late that you are going too fast to keep from colliding with the regal man talking with your father and Brutus Wiggins, the overseer.
You crash into him clumsily and he falls to his knees. When you manage to get up and reorient yourself, your father is glaring at you, his caramel skin glimmering in the hazy shine of the afternoon sun.
“Amira Brookes! How many times have I got to tell you not to keep running around this here cornfield like you’re being chased by the devil, child?”
“Sorry Papa. Tom’s running real hard behind me and I didn’t wanna ruin the cucumbers but I was running too fast to stop and I was gonna run into them, so I turned. I’m sorry.”
The man rises slowly, dusting at his trousers with his callused hands. He has a thick imperial moustache and his skin is darker than yours but he reminds you of your white grandfather, whose thick beard and strange mannerisms always make you smile.
“That’s alright,” He says with a smile of his own, “I have two young boys about your age and they run around and knock me down so often, I’m used to it now. You’re the one I came to see anyway.”
He looks directly at you and you decide you like him because he has honest brown eyes.
Tom appears from behind the curtain of corn and is seized by Brutus who takes him by the shoulder and starts to walk with him toward the shed. You hope Tom isn’t in trouble because of you. The regal man with the moustache watches them briefly and then asks, “Tell me Amira, do you like school?”
“Of course! I love it!” You exclaim eagerly, because it is true. You love learning about things and ideas and numbers and how if you put them together in just the right way, they can describe the most amazing things.
The man says, “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Your teacher Miss Emily said you were the smartest girl she’s ever come across.”
You blush and looking more at your father than the man, you say with puffed up cheeks, “Miss Emily is wonderful! She taught me some real fancy math she called differential calculus and it’s just the most wonderful thing!”
“I see.”
You watch the old man’s eyes dance in their sockets, animated and alive with an idea or a thought or a vision that has seized him like a fit of epilepsy. He says something to your father in deliberately hushed tones. You father says something back. Then the old man bends over and extends his hand to you.
“My name is George. George Elijah Culver. From Michigan, up North. Pleased to meet you, miss Amira.”
You take his hand. It is hard but it is warm.
And then he says, “How would you like to come with me to Michigan? We have a special boarding school there for bright young coloured kids just like yourself where you can learn about differential calculus and lots more things they won’t ever teach you in regular school. Would you like that, Amira?”
You smile.
#
You are sitting with Akin in his sprightly ’62 Opel commodore, parked beside Iowa State University’s Lake Laverne. The Temptations’ ‘My girl’ is on the radio, it is two weeks to Valentine’s Day and the heater is on even though the car is not moving. Somewhere in some recess of your mind, you are wondering how much gas the vehicle is consuming just to keep you both warm. He is telling you something in his lilting Yoruba accent and you are staring at his face intently – wondering in another little recess of your mind what your grandmother would have said if you told her you were dating someone from West Africa, from Nigeria. . The words are spilling out of Akin furiously. Then, unexpectedly, he slows down and measuring his words, asks, “Darla Culver-Brookes, will you marry me?”
Your breath catches and all your diffuse thoughts condense like water vapour from a breath blown against a window in winter. His proposal is unexpected but not surprising; you have both discussed the possibility for months now and you have been, in some way, waiting for it – even though you did not know when it would come.
You feel tension in your neck and dryness in your throat because you know that what you say next could close the door on choir practice with the lovely girls of First Baptist, on the weekly dinners with your parents and perhaps, and even, perhaps, on the annual thanksgiving dinner with your large, loving family.
You gaze and you wonder just how much your life will change, having only been to Nigeria once and seen it not just for all its beauty and potential but also its shortcomings. The unknown beckons and you gaze into its eyes in that moment wondering about the new friends and colleagues that you will make, the heat and the food and the potential of the country you will call home and if you will receive the same warmth and love as you have now from the family that will adopt you as their own. And then you stop wondering about things and let yourself be overwhelmed by how happy Akin’s proposal makes you feel. How much you want to hold him, make love to him, bear children with him, grow old with him. You let yourself say, “Yes.”
Akin leans in to kiss you, his soft brown eyes locked on yours. You let him. Then you kiss him back, urgently. Outside, on the lake, the mute swans are gliding along the surface of the water, made vitrescent by the empyrean caress of a full moon.
#
You stare through the observation panel at the planet’s moon – a pale alabaster orb with streaks of bright brown criss-crossing it like the etchings of a great cosmic artist. Up close, with nothing but black space framing it, the vision is beautiful, almost worth the year-long cosmic trip to this satellite that you hope will tell humanity something new about its place in the universe. For some reason you are not entirely sure of, the sight of Jupiter’s moon sends a pang of familial hankering through you.
In your pocket is an old picture of you with your family: brother Femi, father, Akin and your mother, Darla. In it, your father still has his afro, you and your brother are young children and your mother’s hair is dark and braided. She is holding you tight against her chest and your brother is pulling at her skirt, smiling. You have been thinking a lot about your family – there was not much else to do on this voyage. Now, you are about to land on Europa, and the constant thoughts about them have become a longing for them. You wonder if you made the right choice, volunteering for this mission.
Ivor, the Russian navigation officer who has become your friend and lover, is floating lazily beside you.
“Moyin?” he calls to you.
You turn, still thinking about your family, to see him pointing at an electric orange patch splashed against the mostly blue and green background of his display screen. His broad, heavy-set shoulders partly obscure what he is looking at.
“There are active cryo-volcanoes in our primary landing zone,” He begins, “It will be too hot to land there for the next seventy-two hours or so, but…”
He smiles and points with stark, heavily veined hands to something on his screen, “…I already asked Agatha to check for alternate landing zones for the explorer and she found two that are perfectly safe. We can either head for the Conamara Chaos, which Agatha assures me isn’t as bad as it sounds, or we can descend onto the Rima Lenticle which was our original landing zone before Houston redirected us anyway.”
“Agatha,” You call out into the small empty space around you.
“Yes, captain,” The AI responds.
“Which of the landing zones is preferable, given the current and projected conditions over a seventy-two hour cycle?”
“Both have landing safety factors between zero point eight and zero point nine.”
“I already checked, captain,” Ivor says, his face and greying hair illuminated by his display screen. “Basically, once you factor in the uncertainty window, there’s no significant advantage going either way in terms of safety, so it’s really up to you. Where do you feel like going?”
You reach for your own display screen to check the explorer’s metrics and the picture you are carrying in your pocket slips out, drifting away from you and spinning so that in one moment you see yourself and your family, in the next, white emptiness. You freeze and find yourself struck by a kind of clarity. You see yourself for what you are – an aggregation of the choices and decisions of all that have come before you stretching back into infinity and beyond. All of these choices, uncertain and fearful and hopeful as the people who made them were, all conspired with each other to bring you to this place, to this point, to now. Choices, not unlike the one you are about to make. This clarity gives you a comfort you did not know you needed but you are grateful for.
You reach for the picture, take it and smile.
“Right,” you say. “Let’s head for the Lenticle.”
“Aye captain,” Ivor is smiling too. You suspect he already knew your decision before you made it, but he asked anyway.
You swipe away your personal display screens, float to the main control panel and strap yourselves into your chairs. The translucent input surface before you beckons. You key in the landing initialization sequence and begin to descend, rightwards, to Jupiter’s sixth moon, with the fortitude of an eternity of humanity behind you.
#
WOLE TALABI is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor with a fondness for science fiction and fantasy. He currently lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He edited the These Words Expose Us anthology (2014) and his stories have appeared in Liquid Imagination, The Kalahari Review, and a few other places
“There are no miracles on Mondays.” – Amy Neftzger.
Imagine for a moment that you could reach your hand into the very fabric of space and time… and alter it.
I
Dawn. It was Monday again in the town of Kiwuka.
Somewhere in the distance an Imam summoned believers in long melodious chants that broke the lengthy silence of night and welcomed morning. James Mugume slept. Beneath the stillness of his face a torrent of dreams raced. In one of the dreams, she was pacing around the room, index finger sticking out in solemn indignation.
“I’ve had it with you!” she spat out, “Running around town with your pants around your ankles, screwing everything that moves!”
Trousers, Samantha, he thought wryly, Trousers, not pants!
“Well?” she stopped pacing and stood in front of him, glaring down at him expectantly. “Aren’t you going to say anything for yourself?”
He was sitting on a low stool in the bedroom, right next to the bed. He looked up at her and briefly regarded her features: a sharp chin, yellow face, high cheekbones; a beauty. Samantha was wearing a short yellow dress with a big black belt tightened around her waist and her hair was pulled back tightly in a puff.
She was fuming. They had just returned from a party at Bob’s place where all hell had broken loose.
James spoke up, “She came on to me, Samantha. I swear!”
He was lying and they both knew it. At the party, James’ long-standing flirtations with Peggy, a young lady Samantha particularly loathed, had culminated in a frenzy of dry humping on the dance floor and a session of frantic kissing in the ladies’, where Samantha had fallen upon them like Samson on the unsuspecting Philistines.
A brief but vicious scuffle had ensued between the two women, with both more focused on de-weaving each other than doing any actual harm. He had broken it up and dragged Samantha back to the car and back home. Back here.
“She came on to you? You lying bastard,” she said with disdain.
“Look at you judging me like you just love to do!” James countered, “We both know I’m not the only one here with a history of whoring around!”
He had regretted the words as soon as he had said them, but it didn’t matter. Samantha bent down, took off a lethal-looking red heel and threw it at him. It flew straight towards his face and connected dead-on with his nose.
James’ eyes flung open as the alarm on his phone blared to life. With the dream still fresh in his mind, he lifted his arm up and touched his nose. Intact. He sighed. Bloody Mondays!
The alarm was still loudly reminding him that he was late. He switched it off, skipped out of bed and rushed into the shower. A few minutes later, while he was combing his wet hair, closely observing the process in a small mirror he held in one hand, the dream came back to him.
It had actually been less of a dream than a recollection of last week’s events. The throwing of the heel, however, was a new detail. In reality, Samantha had grabbed her purse and walked out, jumping onto the first boda boda that came by. She had not replied any of his texts all week.
James picked up his brown single-strap bag and threw it over his head, letting rest on his hip. He grabbed his keys off the small stool and hurried out of the house.
Half-walking, half-jogging, he made his way to the main road where he hailed a boda. He quickly negotiated a fee and jumped on, and together they sped off into the heavy Monday morning traffic.
Safely established on the motorcycle, he reached into his pocket and pulled his phone out. There were two or three messages from the network operator about this and that offer, a missed call from his boss that made his heart skip a beat, and a text from Samantha. Apprehensive, he opened Samantha’s text.
Hey. We need to talk, it read. The words he had expected all week. And yet, seeing them in reality, he felt a panic start to creep into him. He knew they were almost surely going to call it quits, and he had accepted that, but he did not want it.
I suppose we both knew this day would come, he thought to himself, And who needs such a nagging bitch anyway, I’m better off without…the words were barely formed in his mind when a Tata lorry appeared, seemingly out of thin air, on their right hooting and coming straight at them with deadly speed.
James was certain the lorry would make contact with them, at best knocking them off the vehicle and breaking to a stop before any more damage was done, at worst leaving their brains smeared on the tarmac.
By some miracle, most likely a testament to the boda boda man’s astonishing reflexes than to anything else, they turned off the road a split second before the truck beheaded them, and rode down a grassy slope on the side of the road.
The motorcycle careened down the rise and soon James realised they had escaped one conundrum and rushed into another. The driver seemed to have trouble getting the brakes to work and they were now heading right for a large thicket of bush and thorn.
The driver ducked, trusting his helmet to take the hit and, now exposed to the oncoming bush, James raised his arms to cover his face. He shut his eyes tight and prayed that he would survive with no more than a few cuts and scrapes as they nose-dived into the green mess.
When he opened his eyes he wasn’t in Kiwuka anymore.
II
When he opened his eyes James found himself standing in the middle of a tarmac road that stretched into the distant horizon on either side of him. On his left, where the width of the road ended, grassland dotted with trees stretched far and wide like an endless savannah. On his right, however, was a house. The sun was high and bright and the atmosphere serenely quiet. A breeze ruffled the grass occasionally. Everything was so still, so sunny, that for a moment he felt he had walked into an old photograph.
James stared at the house, which stood out conspicuously from the surroundings, then looked around again, verifying that he was indeed seeing what he was seeing. At length, seeing no other options available to him, he gathered himself and walked towards the house.
It was a modern-style, middle-class bungalow painted in fading blue on the front with a veranda lined by a railing of peeling white paint. James climbed up three short steps to the veranda. The curtains behind the windows were drawn and thus made it impossible to see whatever mystery lay within. He walked to the front door and knocked.
The sound of his knuckles rapping on the door broke the silence around him and he suddenly felt like an intruder – awkward and unwelcome. One part of him expected the wooden door to slowly creak open by itself, inviting him to make acquaintance with whatever entity dwelt therein. The other part, the one less prone to influence from years of watching horror movies, waited for footfalls from the other side followed by a face peering at him from behind the door.
There was no answer, however. After a third round of knocking, James started to fear the loud rapping would awaken some unseen sinister being. You’ve been reading too much H.P. Lovecraft, he admonished himself. Seeing nothing else to do, James opened the door.
It was slightly dark inside due to the effect of the sun glare in his eyes. For a brief moment he failed to make out any objects. Shortly, however, he saw two sofas, one against each wall on either side of him, a small black and white TV on a short stand in the left corner ahead of him, and a stool with a framed black and white picture on top of it in the other corner.
The sofas were red and were pathetically old and torn in various places, exposing the brown spongy material beneath. The one on his right was littered with white spots that James immediately recognised as the droppings of a small animal: a bird or a lizard.
James walked over to the stool and picked up the picture. It was of a young woman in an ancient-looking wedding gown. She was not looking at the camera but rather beyond it. He set it back down and walked over to the other corner.
Hanging on the wall above the TV was a calendar with a large picture of Idi Amin, uniformed in all his military glory and waving to an unseen audience, plastered right in the middle of it. Above the picture, printed in bold characters, was the year 1972.
Next to the dropping-littered sofa was an entrance that led to what appeared to be a dining room. James walked over to this entrance and saw four chairs set neatly around a short table. At the other end of the dining room, right opposite where he stood, was a green door.
The door was slightly ajar and James saw a strange, violet-blue glow coming from the room behind it. James felt drawn to this door and the bizarre glow. It was as if this door beckoned to him, called to him. Come, it seemed to say, come and see!
Intrigued, James decided to go see what lay on the other side of the strange green door but, as he was about to place one foot into the dining room, he saw something dark and shadowy move in the periphery of his vision.
III
James turned and looked down. Relief flooded his whole being when he saw that it was just a cat. Small, black and pantherine, it emerged from under the TV stand, yawned and stretched with impressive elasticity, and sauntered lazily towards him. James observed it with a scepticism that was more superstitious than logical.
The cat reached where he was standing and rubbed itself all over his ankles with an endearing familiarity that made James wonder if he had seen it before. Then the cat left him and walked across the dining room, disappearing through the slight opening of the green door.
His curiosity flaring now, James entered the dining and walked to the door, swinging it open with slight apprehension. He stopped in his tracks as he took in the sight before him.
The room was about the size of an average garage. On the wall facing James was the biggest clock he had ever set his eyes upon. The clock was so large it covered the entire wall like a large circle perfectly inscribed in a large square. The hands were black and metallic, with the second hand ticking along with loud clicks.
On the wall to his right James saw where the glow was coming from. Running the vertical length of the wall was a glass pipe that culminated in a large glass bowl at the top, and in this bowl were six or seven glowing glass globes of different colours, each about the size of a bowling ball.
Their glow was constant and their combined effect was the dim violet-blue light that James had seen from the dining room. Below the glass pipe was a hole in the floor, like a drain of some sort, which seemed tailor-made for the globes.
As James was wondering what to make of everything, a man’s voice spoke up from behind him, breaking the silence that hung in the air.
“Looks like we have a visitor.”
IV
Startled, James spun around to see who had spoken. Standing behind him was a young man, about twenty years old, wearing spectacles and a long white overcoat that gave him the appearance of a lab assistant. He was dark skinned and slightly shorter than James, smiling with a knowing smile.
“Who are you?” James demanded, slightly alarmed.
“My name is Eric,” the young man replied with a smile.
“Where am I? Am I dead or dreaming?”
“Neither. Welcome to Shaha.”
“Huh?”
“Now, now, don’t panic,” the young man reassured him, “Come, have a seat over here and I will explain everything.”
The young man stood aside, making way for James, and gestured back into the dining room. Apprehensive, James walked past him, pulled up the nearest chair and sat. He removed his bag, and placed it on the table. He then looked back at the young man who had been keenly observing him.
“Well?” James demanded.
“What is your name?” the young man inquired.
“James. James Mugume.”
“Well, James, looks like you found one of the portals.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A portal is a kind of doorway between different dimensions…” the young man spoke with an assured confidence.
“I know what a portal is,” James interjected impatiently. “And I also know they only exist in science fiction.”
“Well this is not science fiction, Mr. Mugume – as you can clearly see for yourself.”
“This is preposterous,” James said.
“Tell me, what happened before you found yourself here?”
“I was going to work on a motorcycle but we crashed into some bushes near the road. Next thing I know, I’m in the middle of nowhere…literally!”
“I see. The portal you passed through must have been concealed in those bushes.”
“Are you trying to tell me that I travelled back in time? I saw the 1972 calendar and…”
Eric laughed and waved his hand dismissively. “No, that was left here decades ago by another person. You have not travelled back in time, Mr. Mugume, you have travelled into time.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” James asked, utterly perplexed.
“This place is called Shaha which literally means time. This is where the days and seasons and years are controlled.”
“What? This little bungalow?”
“Yes. What did you expect, a mansion?”
“I don’t know.”
“That clock right there is the driver of time itself! It is the spring that ushers one second behind another, pushing them on and on into the infinite future.”
“And the shiny marble things?”
“Those are the days. There are seven of them. Whenever the big clock strikes midnight, a globe representing the day that has ended slides down into the hole below the pipe. A new globe appears in the bowl, replacing the one that has gone, waiting to slide down the same pipe seven days later. Red is Sunday, Blue is Monday, Tuesday is…”
“What is in that hole?” James cut in.
“Oblivion.”
“Oblivion?” James said with incredulity.
“Yes. Utter oblivion,” the young man responded with an assured confidence. “When a day is gone, it can never be recovered. It disappears forever into nothingness.”
“I am definitely dreaming. First giant clocks and now bottomless pits! Just tell me how to wake up.”
“You are awake, as I have already assured you, Mr. Mugume.”
“James!” he said it with a bit more irritation than he had intended. “Call me James. Enough with the Mr. Mugume business.”
“Apologies…”
“Look, kid,” James cut him short, “I don’t care if this is Kitty Funland or purgatory, you need to tell me right now how the hell to get out of here. I have a life on the other side, a job to get back to, a family, a girlfriend…”
The image of Samantha suddenly rushed into his mind. He remembered the text he had received from her that morning and he found himself fending off tears. A deep sadness welled up within his chest. She would soon be his ex-girlfriend.
Eric seemed to understand what James was feeling, as though he had seen it countless times before, and he reached out and touched his hand reassuringly.
“You are not the first person to come here, you know. People have been finding themselves in Shaha for centuries. Where do you think the sofas and the TV and the calendar came from? Cars crash into this place, bicycles – even cats wander into a portal once in a while… I saw a turkey here once…”
“So how do I get back?”
“You simply walk back the way you came. There is a portal on the road.”
James, who was slowly regaining his composure, was then struck by a new thought. “Where is the boda boda man I was with?”
Eric answered immediately, giving the impression that he had been expecting this question, “While any number of devices and gadgets and items can pass through the portal, only one life can pass through at a time.”
James nodded pensively.
“I see,” he said at last. “Say, do you have any food in this place? I’m famished!”
“Well you are in luck,” Eric said with his seemingly permanent smile, “I just harvested a crop of succulent potatoes that were growing out back. I will prepare something for you before you go.” Eric stood up and added, as he hurried to please his visitor, “Please, make yourself at home. The TV doesn’t work though, so I wouldn’t bother with that if I were you.” He beamed genially and exited the room.
When James was sure Eric was a safe distance away, he leapt from his seat ran back into the glowing room. He walked straight to the glass pipe, looked up at the bowl, took a deep breath and began to scale the pipe like an awkward gecko. It was very hard to get any traction on the slippery glass but James pulled himself up to the mouth of the bowl with a determined stubbornness.
Once at the top, James sat on the edge of the bowl to catch his breath. This close to the big glowing glass marbles, James was at once struck by their beauty. He found himself immersed in their colourful luminescence. For a fleeting second he felt a boyish urge to plunge himself in their midst, becoming one of them for even the briefest of moments.
He shook his head vigorously breaking the brief trance he was in and realigning his mind to the task at hand. Carefully reaching into the bowl James took hold of the luminous blue globe and took it from the bowl.
Blue is Monday, he recalled Eric’s words. Blue. No surprise there. With the globe firmly in his grasp, James took another deep breath and leapt off the edge of the bowl onto the floor. When he landed he saw the cat standing at the entrance of the green door regarding him with distrust. As he approached the door, the cat bared its teeth and hissed threateningly. You are not taking that anywhere, it seemed to say.
James was not prepared to let anything stop him and as he reached the green door he shooed the cat, trying to intimidate it into making way for him.
He waved his leg menacingly at the creature. But the cat, clearly angered now, grabbed hold of his trouser leg and sunk its teeth into him, snarling venomously. Alarmed, James kicked out with a forceful thrust, sending the tiny panther flying straight through the dining room and into sitting room.
The cat landed on the sofa and scampered out through the front entrance. He felt a sting of pity for the animal; he had liked the cat, but this was a matter of life and death.
Once in the dining room he carefully placed the globe into his bag, swung the strap over his head and ran out of the house.
Once in the bright hot sun outside, he took a left on the tarmac road, the direction opposite the one he had been facing when he first found himself in this strange place, and ran as fast as he could.
With the bag bouncing awkwardly on his hip, he turned around to look back at the house and saw Eric – bespectacled and lab-coated – standing on the veranda. The black cat was in his arms and he was calling out to him. As he turned to face the road ahead of him again, James tripped and fell and everything around him went black.
V
The alarm shrieked into life next to his bed and James opened his eyes to find that he was in his bed. Confused, James got his phone and looked at the date on the screen.
It was Tuesday.
A curiosity was aroused in him, however, when he saw his brown, single strap bag on the stool. He got up and grabbed it, immediately feeling a strange weight inside. Opening the zip, he beheld the blue luminous glow within that confirmed his suspicions and sent his elation through the roof. I did it! he thought to himself.
James screamed in delight. As he placed the bag back down, however, a text message came through on his phone. James grabbed the phone and opened the text. It was from Samantha. His elation deflated like a punctured tyre as he read the words on the screen: Hey. We need to talk.
“No,” he whispered in disbelief, “No! I erased Monday! No!”
It was then that the simple logic of his error became clear to him. He had erased Monday, but that had made Tuesday the default start of the week. Monday was gone, but now Tuesday had inherited its gloom and misery.
“Sunday,” he mumbled, “I should have stolen Sunday!”
Overwhelmed with grief, disappointment and failure he threw the old Nokia phone against the wall, sending the cover one way and the battery the other. He flung himself onto the bed and wept.
John Barigye is a 26-years-old Ugandan engineer who loves writing. He has been published in Lawino Magazine and Artsheba and hopes to write regularly in the future.
They say great things are achieved in the dead of night. Montague hoped it was true as he hammered in the next nail with all the life that was left in him. His only illumination was the slice of moonlight shining through the window of the wretched dungeon which had been his home for the last five years.
When the nail was in place, he gripped the piece of metal which was once the corner of a tin food tray, and used it as a wood shaver to smooth out the rough edges of his creation. The sound of the slivers of wood being hewn off seemed to mimic the sickly tones of his wheezing lungs. He paid no attention to that, not now. Now he was fighting his fiercest adversary – time.
“S…S’il vous plait…” He pleaded quietly to no one. A great cough built up from the bottom of his chest and erupted from him. He crouched helplessly as uncontrollable shakes caused him to drop the makeshift tool; he reached out a shaky hand to hold the edge of the work table. As the cough finally receded he eased open his watery eyes. A mist of blood had speckled the bench.
He cursed himself to his feet, using the most colourful profanities he knew to shock his expiring body into action.
Montague glanced at a charcoal sketch on a yellowing sheet of paper that lay amongst his tools. He never kept it far from reach, and now he drew strength from it again. He forced a deep breath and wheezing, he pushed himself up on one arm. He dragged his leg up for support and growled as he was reminded of the cold heavy iron on his ankle.
The sketch portrayed a young woman, proud, bold and stunningly beautiful, gazing ahead with Montague’s eyes – the only things he had ever given her. Her afro hair was twisted into intricate dreadlocks and pulled up in a magnificent bun, like a crown. In her true homeland, he knew she would have been a queen. Perhaps with his final invention she would, at the very least, be freed.
The worn-out prisoner picked up a table leg-turned-mallet, raised it up slower than before and brought it down with less precision, every motion becoming increasingly more difficult to control. He was puzzled when his vision began to blur, and it was only when he blinked drops onto the smooth wooden surface that he realised they were tears. He smeared them away with the back of his hand. He had to finish!
His frustration threatened to overwhelm him but he didn’t stop.
When he put the mallet down he was panting. His whole body pulsed with each breath cut short by the mine dust that had built up in his lungs. The pain meant nothing. He tested his work, gripping the base, the first of three wooden components. It was shaped like a window frame, except there was a gap on the left side, leaving the square incomplete. A wheel was attached to the top right end, which when spun controlled the mechanisms that made his invention work, and a handle was attached to the top so that it could be lifted.
Montague’s wheezing slowed to a sigh. His fingertips ran along every inch of it, the fine precise holes and grooves he had drilled to insert the unique mechanism, and the corners he had spent days smoothing down… which had in turn rewarded him with splinters so imbedded they had become a part of his hands.
Now one more attachment was left, the most fragile component. Even with the risk that it might finish him, he would have to use magic… Over the years he had developed his own brand, some Bantu mysticism he had learnt in the Homeland, long before he and his countrymen were taken, mixed with French alchemy which he had imbibed from his second master.
Moving with care, he straddled the bench, first dragging the chain so he could place his feet on either side. He put his right hand on the bench in front of him, palm facing up. The moonlight had shifted, and now it only lit the edge of the bench. Sweating, he firmly pressed his left thumb into the open palm, and felt the largest splinter at the base of his right thumb. He pressed into the skin, and his head felt lighter from the pain. He feared he would sink into unconsciousness – and perhaps never wake up. Closing his eyes he continued to press along the length of the splinter within his flesh.
His fingers slipped, and he bit down on his cracked bottom lip, focussing more than he had ever done in his life. He was vaguely aware of the familiar tapping of footsteps faintly approaching – the guard rotation. Guards would have questions… questions about how he had obtained the tools and what he was building. They wouldn’t ask him for the answers, they would simply punish him. And he knew he may not survive that.
Montague didn’t allow those matters to concern him just now. He began the incantation, spoken in a grinding mix of French and Chewa. “You who were once a tree became this bench. You who were once my bench became the tool in my hands. Now you will change… from mother tree to father silver. Your life of wood is no more.”
His thumb kept still over the splinter and he concentrated, barely breathing. He felt coldness spread through his capillaries from the back of his head. He willed it to flow into this left hand, willed it to accumulate on his thumb, then into his palm. He felt a sharpening pain but he struggled to maintain control. He gasped and slumped forward using his elbows to support his weight.
His ears were alert to the progress of the footsteps on the stone floor… 15 steps away and counting. They would patrol his floor more frequently than the others, as was necessary for criminals guilty of the most heinous crimes – Les Mechants Hommes. He shifted his hand into the moonlight, examining his palm. There, just the tip of silver protruded from his palm. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and drew it out. His own blood trailed along its slender length, but he let out a sigh of relief. It had retained its perfectly straightened form, as he needed it to be. He held it tightly as if his life depended on it. As he slowly moved it towards the machine, he breathed in and out heavily, his whole universe now focused on the end of the needle, his own heartbeat loud in his ears…
Five steps more and invasive eyes would peer through the small grating in the heavy wooden door. Montague cursed under his breath and abandoned his attempt to attach the pin to its mechanism. He picked up the machine while stifling a painful groan, placing it under the workbench, and moving carefully to ensure that the links on his shackles did not clang together. Once he gently placed the machine onto the stone floor, he positioned himself across the tools and debris as if he were slumped asleep on the table. He didn’t dare to breathe as the footsteps fell silent at his cell door.
The metal shutter snapped open with a reverberating clang. Heavy breathing interspersed with loud chewing filled the quiet chamber. It was Pierre, the head guard whom he loathed as much for his pungent breath as for his tendency to spit at him for personal entertainment. Pierre mouth-breathed into the gap for a moment, then, after a lazy glance, shut it again. This was what Montague had hoped for.
He waited until Pierre’s footsteps were far enough to mask the sounds of his own laborious tasks. He pushed himself up again and the pain in his chest grew tenfold. He groaned aloud, as he clutched his chest, uncertain whether or not he had been heard. He reached under the bench for his precious invention and placed it on top. His watery eyes sought out the pin once more and he pressed it against the table, rolling it to the edge and pinching it close to its sharp end. He ignored his throbbing head, fluttering heart and wheezing lungs. Now there was only this task.
The magistrate who had sentenced him to this dungeon had said there would be no redemption for what Montague had done. Only death, and hell. That was truly all he deserved after what his terrible machines had done to countless children… their blood was his only legacy. Montague’s guilt drove him now. Building this last machine meant he might be spared from that fate. He only prayed he might finish it in time…
In a moment where time itself stopped, Montague’s prayers were answered. Tilting his head low and close to his newest machine, he twisted the pin clockwise then anti-clockwise in the groove he had prepared for it. It clipped perfectly into place with his first try. Afraid to believe it, he tested it, pulling it one way and then another – it stuck firmly to the mechanism.
He fell back, gazing wearily at the completed machine. Its components, including the pin, were wood from the window sill and a bench leg, and metal from the food trays. It had been hammered together using a second bench leg and shaped using a corner of a tray and his bare hands. The remaining pieces of the bench he had torn apart were discarded in the corner furthest from the door and his tools were behind a stone in the wall. His hands were cut and bruised but it did not matter. The last of his duty now was to conceal his invention…then embrace death.
Moving arms that were as weighty as lead, he grasped the handle and placed his other hand on the side of the machine. Just as he had shifted its weight a centimetre off the table, with his joints crunching against each other like dry stone on wood, he heard it. The footsteps of the same guard were now growing louder instead of fading away.
Panic gripped Montague, and he yanked his invention to remove it from sight. Over-calculating, he lost grip of the side, and though his right hand still had purchase of the handle, as weak as he was, he failed to stop it from crashing sideways to the floor and he screamed out as it dragged his arm down at the wrong angle…
His worst nightmare. The steps quickened their pace, someone shouted a call of alarm, and hands and keys started scraping at the door. Panting, Montague made sure he was positioned between the machine and the cell door, concealing his secret, then he allowed his body to fall the remaining distance to the floor with a bone-crunching thud. He pulled his right arm out from under his body and stretched his hand over his creation. In a hurried whisper, he began to cast a concealing spell on it.
“You who are manifested from my mind, shall be revealed to no one else, but one.” Then he spoke the man’s name.
In the same moment, the heavy door was shouldered open by two guards, with a third quickly approaching. Pierre’s snarling face came first, glancing around the cell before seeing Montague lying on the floor – not on his designated sleep bench. This alone was a punishable offence. Stick in hand, he strode to Montague, jabbing him in the stomach.
Montague gasped and doubled over – but then his hand shot out to grab the stick. Coldness spread from the back of his head.
Pierre’s eyes flashed in anger. “Disobedience is still a game to you isn’t it, Dog?” he said in his crude French, twisting the stick deeper into Montague’s stomach. It was Pierre’s smirk that Montague hated most of all. It came with the confidence that he had complete control over his prisoner.
Montague tightened his grip on the stick against his abdomen.
“Not a game,” he snarled, shoving it forward and making Pierre’s hold slip. The handle struck up into the guard’s midriff, hard. Pierre doubled over and recoiled; his eyes shut tightly, his arms over his belly.”It is a way of life!”
Montague pulled the stick with both hands, fully claiming it, and struck Pierre’s left kneecap. The guard’s eyes opened wide as he shrieked. Montague looked up at him and grinned, reminding his opponent that he too could revel in another’s pain.
Pierre held his wounded knee and stumbled away from him, hurriedly whimpering orders to his men. Jacques, the thin one with the potbelly, and François, the short one, immediately dove into action. Against one man, when Montague’s eyes could pierce into the soul and convince him he was nothing, but two men with sticks… He was not young or healthy anymore; the magic he drew on for strength was now weakening him more than it was helping him.
He dropped Pierre’s stick as the blows came raining down, striking his head, chest and stomach – each one a drumbeat closer to death. In the madness and pain, he rolled onto his side and immediately feeling a kick on his back. Unheard by the guards, he said with a broken sigh, “I lived as Montague, I die as Imamu.” His birth name would be his token in the land of the gods. Through squinted eyes, he saw the place under the bench where he had put the machine, then tore his shirt and flung the piece over it, just as they dragged him to the open floor.
Jacques raised his stick high, but Pierre grabbed it before it came down and wrenched it from him. He shoved Jacques back and struck Montague square in the head then pulled up for another blow.
“Stop!” shouted François. When Pierre glared at him he pointed at Montague. The prisoner was still. Pierre looked at the limp body in disbelief. He let the stick drop from his hand and wiped his brow, panting.
“Tell the master that the slave,” Pierre murmured, “is no more.” He limped towards the door in disgust. “And make sure the undertaker collects him immediately. I don’t want his stench in here!”
“I am the undertaker,” said a voice just outside the door. It was coming from a large robed man in front of them.
Pierre frowned at the mysterious figure for a moment, but he decided he didn’t care how the undertaker had arrived before they had sent for him.
“If only the living were served so quickly…” Pierre said as he brushed past the man. He was eager to distance himself from the remains, and any inconvenient sense of guilt that may want to follow him. The other two guards followed with brief sideways glances at the undertaker.
When the guards left, Barthélemy Thimonnier the undertaker entered the cell at a brisk pace and began his search. Grim-faced, he stepped around Montague’s body, giving it just a brief glance. He moved silently from one end to the other, looking all over the floor, until he finally came to the bench. He lowered himself to one knee and peered under it, and a dirty cloth caught his eye.
He lifted the cloth and tossed it aside. In the poor light, he could not tell what it was, but he knew it was what he came for. As he picked it up he felt a slight tingling vibration. Raising his brow he gazed at the contraption, but it drew no more attention to itself. It was small enough for him to hide it, and carry the slave’s body out as well. He placed it within his robes, wrapping and securing it within using a length of cloth.
He began to rise, but then spotted a piece of paper on the floor amongst the makeshift tools. It had been pinned underneath the object. He picked it up and held it up to the moonlight. It was a coal sketch of the woman who was the slave’s daughter. The undertaker turned it over.
There were words written with smudges of dirt and a darker smudge which experience told him was blood: “Pour Elle.” Below that was scrawled: “Je suis deso.”
“Je suis desolé…” the undertaker read quietly, filling out the missing letters. I am sorry. A fitting final message, he thought. From what he had heard, the slave had much indeed to be sorry for. Rumour had it that on his master’s orders, the slave of the house of Montague had kidnapped the children of his master’s rivals and brought them to the underground chambers, to his nefarious machines of torture. As deep underground as they were, the screams of the innocent could still be heard across the moorlands on a quiet night. When they were discovered, the châtelain himself was charged a fine and 3 years imprisonment whilst his slave was thrown into this dungeon for the remainder of his life.
Barthélemy looked at the paper for a moment, rubbing it between his fingers, before stowing it in his robes together with the machine. He rose from the floor and went to the barred window, feeling along it. Before he dealt with the body, he had one final, most important collection to make. Jammed between two stones he found what he was looking for: two silver coins. Lower than his usual fee for smuggling contraband, but he was impressed that the slave had gotten his hands on these at all.
The undertaker pocketed the money, turned and shouldered the remains of Montague, closing the cell door behind him.
Weighing down the undertaker’s robes was the world’s first sewing machine.
~~~
Ekari has a personal blog (http://ekarimbvundula.blogspot.com) where she posts some of her fiction and discusses her experiences performing on stage amongst a variety of topics. She was selected last year as one of the top 10 Malawian writers for a workshop called Imagine Africa 500. From the workshop, Ekari and 19 other writers from around the continent contributed to a science fiction anthology (of the same name) about Africa in the distant future, due for release in late 2015. As a huge fan of urban fantasy, she is currently writing her first young adult novel in the genre.
He brought a glass of cold tap water to his burning lips, and felt the temperature of the liquid heat as it slid down his insides. Nothing stayed cool with him. Resting the empty glass with a shaking hand on the slivered wooden kitchen counter, he retired to his recently ruffled sheets to rest the redness of his eyes. It had only been a few hours since she had run out, screaming. When he pulled the cool sheets over his shoulders, his naked skin tightened and tensed, just like when she’d run her fingers across his chest.
Like the water, the sheets caught the warmth of his skin, and the pleasure of the cool of the midnight hours disappeared as quickly as she had. He tried to rest, but could not. The sheets got hotter and even more uncomfortable. African summer nights did nothing to cool the temperature of minds obsessed with worry and regret. He had never let his skin touch hers, until this night.
“After marriage,” he used say to her, delaying the inevitable, “after marriage.” But it was hope and not religious ruling that made him delay. Hope that somehow, the more he delayed, the more the chance he would change, or that she would somehow become more resilient. And hope that by then, eventually, after marriage, he wouldn’t scare her away when they finally pressed, skin to skin. Hope for things that he knew couldn’t change.
Theirs was a private and short wedding earlier that night. He had sought out a fatwa from an off-kilter imam of his mother’s people, who had allowed the secrecy of their union. The night was officiated only by themselves, the presence of God, and a photograph of his young father that hung high on a wall in his room. Her lips had almost melted when he’d pressed himself to her, aflame with desire. He remembered her eyes widening in fear before she pushed herself away, realizing his true nature.
#
His mother had always told him that humans were weak and cowardly creatures. Like his father who had tried to leave his mother when she became pregnant with him. If the human community in Zanzibar had known of his affair with a female jinn, they would have cast him away to the Prisoner’s Island. But they never found out. When she realized he had decided to leave her, his mother had simply possessed him and made his neck swell and eventually burst. No guilt, no remorse; jinn were temperamental that way. His mother had then borne him on his father’s grave; he had singed her on his way out. More jinn than human; more fire than earth.
His mother had taught him to assume human form. And a pleasing human form at that. Dark hair that disappeared into the Zanzibar night, eyes with the gleam of black pearls like those from the wild oysters found in the Indian Ocean, and the milk-and-honey skin that his Persian father had contributed. Still, he was an abomination. And that was the reason his lover had left.
#
On Fridays he would wait for her at the steps of the mosque where she would teach children to read the Quran. He’d arrive a whole hour early to hear the children’s voices reverberate off the walls of the mosque. Tiny voices reciting large melodic verses with meanings greater than they could comprehend. But they understood them more readily than he could understand why she cared for him so much.
Their voices moved him almost as much as she did. They would start with the iconic prayer: “A’udhu Billahi Minash Shaytaan Arrajeem.” I seek refuge in God from the accursed Shaytan. Each time he heard it, he hoped and prayed that when she eventually kissed him, that she would see he was still a person and not a devil to be feared.
Once, after she had taught madrasa, she had asked him if he had prayed already. He lied that he had caught congregation prayer in a different mosque an hour ago. He had spent the last hour thinking of how to avoid touching her. And the hour before that, thinking of what to say if she asked him if he had prayed. As he spoke to her at the foot of the mosque, he could see several jinn of pure fire preparing for prayer behind her. She turned to see what he was looking at. He told her that he was staring at the fez of a man in the mosque. Said that he always wanted one like that.
When they met the next evening, she brought with her a boxed parcel wrapped in plain brown paper, and tied with rough white string. She told him she had had her cousin mail it to her from Dubai. Pulling the string and gently removing the tape from the edges, the striations in his hands twitched. Inside the box was a fez of royal red velvet. Its tassel was made of the hair of an Arabian stallion. And when he put it on, it looked as if he had pulled a lock of his hair through the top of the hat. She laughed and went to adjust the angle of the fez. In fear of her touching him, he jerked his head backwards, and the hat fell into the mud of the alley street.
Two weeks after that day, over the smoke of a houka pipe, he told her his secret.
“Do you promise not to be scared? W’Allah?” he asked.
“W’Allahi, I promise!” she answered, shoulders leaning forward. Her ears perked as her eyes widened ever so lightly, the corners of her mouth following their movement to a coy smile. Her back, arched with interest, made her resemble a Stone Town alley cat. The kind of cats the witches used to communicate with the jinn. This was a perfect moment, he thought. And then he told her. He told her his nature. That his passion for her may burn her delicate and dark fingers. The words left his mouth like opium smoke from a witch’s mouth.
She said she had known ever since she saw his devilish smile; that his walk was more of a glide. She said that anyone who could spit on the Sultan’s palace and tell the guards they smelt like a monkey’s wind had to have fire in his belly.
But it was clear she did not believe all of what he said. Excited, like a cat, she had moved impatiently to touch his face. But like most Zanzibaris, he was startled by cats, and he withdrew. To ease her sullen and disappointed expression, he did what most lovers do. He reminded her of his affection. He also did what most pious people do. He reminded her that they could touch, after marriage.
At the time she had thought him a poetic and shy soul who was simply modest. That his tales of the temperature of his flesh were just words to describe how much she invoked in him. She mistook him for being good with words. He mistook her for having an understanding nature.
#
He sat on the edge of his hot bed now, playing with the fez and trying to pry pieces of dried mud from its skin. No use in trying to clean it now. The moon had made its way past his window and the muezzins were calling the city for morning prayer. The scent of Kilimanjaro coffee was wafting through his window, catching in the cotton of his tattered drapes. He wanted to catch her, dark skin in white cotton, like the scent of that coffee. He wanted to be all earth, or more fire. He needed her lips to touch his fingers when he fed her her favorite dish of hot bread and cold butter. He wanted her smooth ebony fingers to run across the canvas of his cheekbones.
He had hoped she would rest in the earth of his being, her head on his chest, with patience. That his passion would eventually subside, and his fire would cool to the temperature of morning earth, ready for a garden.
But the garden that grew for him instead was a burning shrub. As the call for prayer ended, and a hollow silence filled the sky, he recited the ancient words, “A’udhu Billahi Minash Shaytaan Arrajeem.” For now he knew that she had finally realized his nature and hers.
Dr. R. Abdulrehman is a clinical psychologist, poet, and writer of Zanzibari descent, born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who resides and works in Winnipeg, Canada. He has a strong interest in magical realism, particularly in how mysticism is woven into the culture of Zanzibar Island and Tanzania. Professionally, Dr. Abdulrehman works primarily in Canada as a psychologist and professor at the University of Manitoba, but also is a visiting professor at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
At peak noon the sun became a ball of molten lava blazing over the cloudless yellow skies of Abuja, capital city of the United African Republic. Skyscrapers glinted pupil-searing bright like towering cuboid mirrors. Hot silver rays of sunlight poured into the still clear waters of Jabi Lake at the city centre and long serpents of steam began to rise into the atmosphere. Spanning this lake was the Balewa Bridge, a marvel of steel cables and graphene tarmac six lanes wide, which lines of remote sensing auto-navigated SUVs ate up. The chiefs, alhajis and madams in the backseats of these cars dozed like fat pigs, their bloated skins fanned by ultra air-conditioners while at the ever-bustling El-Rufai Bus Stop at Berger Junction double-decker buses belching smokeless Afrosol fumes flocked like drunken whales.
Their working class passengers, all clad in reflective long-sleeved jackets and sunglasses, rested their heads on leather cushions, occasionally jerking out of their sleepy trances to see whether they had reached their destinations. Before alighting they would take deep breaths, grit their teeth and put on their government-approved cooler-helmets before dashing out into the streets. They left black footprints of soot on the melting concrete sidewalks as they ran past. There were no taxis. Those green-striped driverless vehicles which operated from the City-Trans headquarters at Nyerere Crescent had been run out of business at the beginning of the heat wave three days ago.
Because the air was perfectly still, as though trapped in a glass vacuum, the only natural-grown tree in the whole city, a gmelina everyone was proud of, was dying. Its gnarled bark peeled off in dry flakes and its branches were covered in a mass of crisp biscuit-leaf hair. As the day wore on, the smell of burning natural-grown grass began to fill the air. The patch of matted green around the tree had suddenly sparked into flames.
In Daye’s living room the air conditioner struggled with the heat-strangled air. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, a shaky index finger hovering above the touch-screen of the flat monitor in front of him. He was glaring at the headline on the Ministry of Environment’s website that screamed: Deadline for surrendering all Organic Waste Elements is 4 pm today. His heart throbbed against his rib cage, cold sweat poured off his body. The digital clock blinked 2:15 pm.
“Organic Waste Element?” he muttered to himself. His finger was hovering at the edge of the screen where there was a highlighted box tagged CONCUR.
“She’s my mother, you bloody bastards!” he roared suddenly at the screen.
Leaning into the E-glide chair he breathed in jerky snorts. The outburst seemed to lighten his head a bit.
He heard footsteps lumbering across the living room towards him.
“Na wetin be dat, my pikin?” came the feeble voice of an elderly woman from behind him.
He quickly switched away from the euthanasia page.
“Nothing Mama,” he said, narrowing his brow at the screen with affected seriousness. Afrinewsia, the government propaganda news page, swarmed into focus. It was showing the pyramidal glass headquarters of the Intercontinental Space Agency. An inset picture showed some space-suit clad astronauts standing on parade, their captain holding the Republic’s flag. They were listening to a farewell address from the Kenyan-born President Ole Sunkuli. Daye wondered if their lunar expedition would be affected by the heat wave.
“You no wear helmet, eh? Na only God go help us for dis kind heat o,” she said, re-adjusting the cooler-helmet she wore.
“Amen o,” Daye’s replied, his lips moving of their own accord.
“When dem say dis wicked heat go stop, sef?” Ma Braimoh asked and shook her head.
Without waiting for a reply she shuffled over to her favorite E-glide armchair and settled her massive frame in front of the ceiling-to-floor TV. She adjusted her spectacles and punched the buttons on the armrest, one at a time. The TV switched on.
His mother out of the way, Daye returned to the Ministry of Environment’s euthanasia page. He knew what would happen once he touched the CONCUR box; within 30 seconds, a Waste Chopper helicopter carrying four green-uniformed men would be dispatched from the ministry headquarters to come and whisk his mother off.
“Na wa o,” lamented Ma Braimoh from her chair. “How dem go arrest somebody go Sahara just because him cut one tree?” On the TV screen the Green Police were holding a press conference to parade the five men convicted of the tree-felling. A Libyan-born officer was briefing journalists.
“This continent will not tolerate planet-killers,” the officer was saying. “Every criminal arrested will go work, for life, on the labour camps of the Green Sahara Project. This should serve as a lesson to others.”
Daye didn’t turn to look; the sight of the Green Police always cast a dark cloud of fear over him. The news took Daye back to his boyhood a quarter of a century ago when his mother would take him to the Mandela Parklands in the foothills of Mount Kilmanjaro. The Parklands had been established to protect the last remnants of some of Africa’s finest species and they would venture far into the vast blanket of natural grass fields to learn their ancient woodland secrets. The reserve had contained natural trees of every color shape and size. Baobab, acacia, flame-of-the forest, gmelina, mango, cashew, shea butter, you name it and it was there. They would stand and listen to the whispers of the rustling leaves while inhaling the sweet aroma of bark and loam.
“Trees dey talk o,” she would say. “Dem dey talk about bad-bad things wey go happen for future.” Then she would point at the skies where Daye would gape at the black-tailed hawks gliding through the evening skies. “See, those birds dey bring good-good message wey go come quench the bad things for ground.”
As he grew older Daye had dismissed her stories as primitive nonsense. But that was years before the natural forests of Africa began to go extinct.
Today the forests were artificially bred in greenhouses and out of bounds to the public – fenced by electric wire and 24-hour CCTV surveillance. Daye wished he could show his own ten-year-old daughter, Cheena, what a live forest was. He doubted if she even knew what an iroko or shea butter tree looked like. Once, in the years after the Tree Crime Act was passed, he had climbed the only natural tree at the centre of his secondary school. He had been expelled as a result.
As if sensing his thoughts, Cheena spoke up.
“Don’t you even have one cookie of sense in your skull, Big Momma?” she asked. She was curled up on the sofa by her grandmother, her tiny eyes peering from under the visor of her cooler-helmet. “Tree-felling is an unnecessary waste of our natural resources.”
Ma Braimoh cleared her throat, swallowed and fell silent.
Daye hadn’t noticed when the little girl had come in. The way she crept around the house these days, like a tiger cub sniffing for flesh, sent a shiver down his spine.
3pm. The dilemma gnawed at his stomach with steel claws.
A soft hand landed on his shoulder and Daye jerked his head to see his partner, Nnena, standing behind him. Her head was turbaned in a towel filled with ice cubes; she hated wearing the cooler-helmet because they made her scalp itch. She looked like she was carrying a mountain on her head. The scent of boiled sweat and concentrated perfume seemed to be fighting each other to escape her armpits.
“How far?” she asked.
“Honey,” Daye sighed and leaned against the back rest. “I don’t think I can go through with this.”
“Oh puh-leeease!” she snarled. “Why can’t you ever use that archaic thing you call a head. We are in the twenty-second century now!”
“I know,” said Daye. “But she’s my mother.”
“Fuck you and your mother!” Nnena barked, smacking the back of his head.
“Wetin be dat, my pikin?” Ma Braimoh asked, raising her voice from the other side of the living room.
“Nothing, Mama!” Daye said, trying to sound calm. Nnena hissed.
“Listen to me, homo-sapiens man,” she whispered into his ear. “We need that Geriatric Compensation to upgrade. Maybe you enjoy snorkelling in this filthy Pacific Ocean of sweat, but I don’t. Cheena needs a Robot Dancer toy, like every other child her age, and I’m tired of eating synthetic rice and beans every day! The stock we have now is the last we have to eat before-”
“Alright, alright! Just let me think.”
“You will have to choose between me and your primitive hag of a mother.” She said and left him.
“My pikin, food don ready?” Ma Braimoh asked as Nnena swaggered past her. Nnena simply tut-tutted and walked into the bedroom. Cheena giggled, her eyes following every word and action.
Daye shook his head, rubbing at the spot on the back of his head where Nnena had smacked him. A mere tap, but it had felt like the club of a sledgehammer. Nnena was right, he thought to himself. His mother didn’t have long to live, after all. Why deny his family’s comfort for her sake? He thought about his daughter. He should be her hero, not her zero. Still, Daye wished his mother were a “primitive hag” as Nnena put it, then it would have been easier.
3:30 pm. Thirty minutes to go. Daye’s heart accelerated its thumping on the church roof of his chest. Eternal banishment to the Green Sahara Project labour camps stared him in the face if he did not give up his mother. He saw himself and thousands other convicted planet killers hunched over the glowing red sand dunes of the great desert planting trees until they collapsed like dehydrated fish in the molten furnace heat.
The thermometer dial blinked the room temperature: 30 degrees. The air conditioner was beginning to resurrect from the dead as the heat wave petered off for the day. It would return tomorrow afternoon a hotter molten ball.
“My pikin, wetin be U-A-V?” Ma Braimoh asked suddenly. Daye craned his neck to look at the TV. In the news the Ghanaian-born vice president, Efua Akwase, was beaming from ear to ear and shaking the hands of three Nigerian-born engineers who had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. They had invented the Blue Mary, an unmanned aerial vehicle built to transport goods from internet auction sites directly to the homes of customers. Daye felt a glow of pride, a feeling that was axed in half when he remembered his present dilemma.
There just must be a way out. Daye switched to the Mambilla search engine and typed in: How to save your elderly parent from state-euthanasia. As he surfed through the list of solution sites that turned up on the screen, an Afrinewsia page caught his eye. He found his hand giving in to temptation, and before long he was perusing through its contents.
Afrinewsia: the dawn of a new Africa! it read, and went on to describe the achievements of the government. The space program: Soon Africans will be vacationing to space. Afrosol: the first greenhouse-friendly motor spirit to go into public use. He focused on one section that read:
Made in Africa auto-navigated cars now ply the streets. The poorest Africans now live in radiation-proof homes. With the double-digit rate of technological advancement, analysts have forecasted that our Republic’s economy will overtake that of Oceania to become the world’s new superpower in a decade. We Africans should therefore sacrifice to save Mother Africa and the planet. The elderly, the terminally ill and prisoners are usurping our scarce natural agricultural resources. They must be given up for neutralization. Surrender your Organic Waste Element and do your part for the Republic . . .
He loved the Republic, he really did. But his mother? How many natural resources had she consumed to qualify her as a threat to the planet’s existence?
3:45pm. Daye didn’t feel the itchiness pinching his skin as his sweat evaporated. His heart beat had gradually returned to normal. He had found his solution. It was on the site of a faceless blogger who claimed to be a former engineer for U-54, Africa’s scientific think-tank based in the provincial state of Zimbabwe. The site featured testimonies of customers from all over the continent for whom the engineer had built oxygenated underground cellars to hide their elderly parents – for just 100 million U-R pounds!
It would plunge him in the red, but there was a solution – that’s what mattered. Daye felt the invisible wet towel that had wrung tight in the middle of his stomach begin to relax.
“Cheena, please get me a glass of water,” Daye said over his shoulder, rubbing his palms as spasms of relief surged through his fingers.
“Fuck you, Dad!”
3:55pm. Daye glanced at the digital clock and sneered. Run, run, run, Mr. Deadline!Catch me in your dreams. He was so engrossed on the screen that he did not hear the sound of padded footsteps creeping up behind him. A hand tapped his shoulder and he craned his neck to see who it was.
Cheena was brandishing a silver badge. Her photo was embedded in the badge and carved underneath were the words: Green Police Junior Under-Agent Cheena Braimoh.
Daye’s breath froze out of him, accompanied by hot trickle of urine which dripped down from between his legs.
“Primitive planet killer,” she muttered, her eyes glinting under the visor of her cooler-helmet like molten red slits.
Daye broke into laughter. The kind of laughter you’d expect from a monkey thrown into a wrestling ring with a tiger. He tapped the CONCUR box on the screen without even thinking.
4:00 pm. The spinning roar of the Waste Chopper could be heard above them on the helipad of their roof. Seconds later, four men in green uniforms stormed into the house. They flashed their silver badges. No questions were asked. No statement was given. They hurled her out of the armchair like a bag of garri.
Cheena kept hopping from one leg to another chanting: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Her mother stood by her, puffing her cheeks and patting her daughter’s helmet-clad head.
“Eleleleleeee! Wetin I do?” Ma Braimoh cried. “Daye help me beg dem, naa!”
Daye remained statue-still in his chair perusing through the latest updates on Afrinewsia as though nothing was happening behind him. Her wailings floated to him as though through a long underground tunnel.
4:05 pm. The sound of the chopper had faded away into the distance. Silence fell on the house for a moment.
Then the breaking news icon blinked, and Daye clicked on the latest Afrinewsia update. A cloudy video popped up. It showed an astronaut in a spacesuit standing on a dusty silver landscape beside a lunar roving vehicle and saluting the U.A.R flag. The headlines screamed: Kalahari-1 missionsuccessful! Nigerian-born Captain Nzeogwu lands on the moon!
The news hit Daye as though his brain had been plugged into an electric main. He shot up from his seat and ran round the house. He banged his balled fists on the wall, kissed furniture, and danced in circles.
“Long live Africa! Long live the planet!” he chanted. Daye lifted his daughter and threw her into the air as she laughed. “You are a pride to Africa! My little Planet-Heroine!”
Nnena rushed out of the bedroom holding her cell phone.
“I’ve just received the alert!” she squealed. “Big Momma was the 1 millionth waste element collected and the ministry is awarding us a 1 billion U-R pound bonus in addition to our Geriatric Compensation. We are rich! We are rich!” she yelled as she jumped in celebration.
Wild fire seemed to engulf Daye’s head. Laughing like a possessed hyena, he picked up his mother’s E-glide chair and slammed it into the TV screen. He took his computer monitor and smashed it against the wall, making Nnena and Cheena duck down to avoid the shower of glass.
Still laughing, he ripped off his clothes, and charged out into the streets, buck naked.
END
Yazeed Dezele was born in I991, in Abuja. He is a Social Entrepreneur and former Editor of ‘The Crescent’ (a Mystic Campus zine). He is currently struggling to hatch the stubborn egg of an African Science Fiction novel he’d being laying for sometime now.
African SF used to be pretty thin on the ground, although this may be partly down to narrow Western definitions of what exactly SF is – whether it was referring to science fiction or to the broader, more encompassing label of speculative fiction. Certainly, as Nnedi Okorafor (2014) put it in one of her online essays: “African science fiction is still alien.”
Dr. Okorafor’s (2014) essay mentions two important considerations: 1. Africans are (generally) absent from the creative process of global imagining that advances technology through stories. 2. Africans are not yet capitalizing on this literary tool, which is practically made to redress political and social issues. Or as editor Ivor Hartmann phrases it in AfroSF (2012), the first SF anthology by African writers: “If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Thus, Science Fiction by African writers is of paramount importance in the development and future of our continent (p.7: emphasis mine).”
However, when academia starts to collate and analyse it, there is a feeling that a ‘movement’ is perhaps starting to make ground. Such a collation took place with the 25th volume publication of the journal Paradoxa, which focused on African SF (2013). The journal, edited by Mark Bould, starts with a historical overview of the origins and current emergence of African SF – although – given that Africa is indeed a lot more than a country – it may well be that there will be multiple and differing representations of such a huge, geographically rooted form of this genre. The introduction from Paradoxa has been generously made available online and is well worth a read. However, for those unwilling or unable to wade through the online introduction to Africa SF, I will give a summary of contents as – more or less and with paraphrasing apologies – represented by the editor.
Paradoxa 25 covers a sweeping range of topics addressing both stories and issues from authors within Africa and across the Diaspora. Initially, Mark Bould analyses North African texts, such as Mohammed Dib’s Who Remembers the Sea; Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half and Ahmed Towfik’s Utopia, within colonial, neo and post-colonial discourses. (Cheryl Morgan has an interview with Ahmed Towfik on The World SF Blog.)
Lisa Yaszek then “rethinks” portrayals of the apocalypse arguing that in some short African SF stories, the ‘apocalypse is re-contextualised, rewritten – and refused’ (p.12). Melissa Kurtz analyses Lauren Beukes’ first two books, arguing for the enduring legacy of apartheid, transmuted into futuristic cyberpunk representations of capitalism. Marleen Barr situates Zoo City within systems of power and difference – and then focuses on species connections, represented by a common ancestor and the novel’s animal “familiars.”
Noah Tsika reassesses the first Nollywood SF movie, Kajola, with other movies such as Pumzi and District 9 pointing to the gradual emergence of an African SF cinema.
The second half of the book focuses on Afro-Diasporic authors, including an interview with Minister Faust, looking at variations of Afrofuturism. Andrea Hairston is also interviewed and emphasises a wider (and indigenised) conceptualisation of science, including Afrofuturism, as needed to reboot the world from a cataclysmic post-European colonial patriarchy. Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is examined by Lisa Dowdall as a brave critical feminist dystopia, looking for new and better ways of being. Ian McDonald’s African-set Chaga saga is evaluated by Neil Easterbrook, focusing on postcolonial themes. De Witt Douglas Kilgore assesses the first black superhero in mainstream comics – T’Challa/Black Panther from Marvel’s Fantastic Four 52 (1966). Three major Afrofuturists are then focused on: Sun Ra, Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson. Nick Mamatas and Andrew Butler overview recent work by Samuel Delany. Finally, Nisi Shawl reviews AfroSF and Zahrah Nesbit-Ahmed (aka Bookshy) reviews Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls (2013).
Paradoxa represents (perhaps) the start of a considerable emerging academic coverage of African SF, which in itself appears to be gathering significant momentum. Mark Bould (2015) has updated this overview with a blog posting ‘African Science Fiction 101’ (link below)
2015 has thus already seen Jalada’s online African speculative fiction anthology Afrofutures launched on January 14th. The anthology has a prelude piece from Binyavanga Wainana as a lead in, written late last year. Linked in to Jalada’s anthology is a podcast panel debate on Afrofuturism between Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar et al at the University of Texas, recorded during their Symposium for African Writers in December last year (2014).
With AfroSF (Vol 2) due to build on the successful launch of AfroSF by publishing African writers’ speculative fiction novellas, as well as Short Story Day Africa’s Terra Incognita anthology – featuring nineteen new African spec-fic stories and headed up by Diane Awerbuck – – African speculative fiction in 2015 is now gaining some serious momentum. Other recent notable books is a collection of short stories by Dilman Dila A Killing in the Sun, Deji Olokotun’s Nigerians in Space and Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. (Incidentally, the March-April 2015 issue of Interzone will also feature Tendai’s story The Worshipful Company of Milliners.). Also due out this year is Tade Thompson’s. ’Making Wolf’ and Afro Cyberpunk’s Jonathan Dotse continues to drive forward Accra 2057.
Add to this heady mix ongoing work by a number of other established writers including Sarah Lotz, Nisi Shawl, Karen Lord and Sofia Samatar, as well as the launch of this magazine (Omenana) in December 2014 – and the future of African SF looks both bright and imminent.
In fact, I’d say African SF is already here – and is getting ready to take over the planet!
Omelsky, M. (2014) “After the End Times: PostCrisis African Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, v.1 (March), pp. 33-49.
Wood, N (2014b) SF in SA (23) African SF Rec List from Nine Worldshttp://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/?p=1093 (An already out of date list of African SF generated after August 2014 ‘Nine Worlds Con’; – panel on African SF)
Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with over a dozen short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family, AfroSF and upcoming in the How to Live Amongst Aliens (2015) anthology, amongst others. He has also had a YA speculative fiction book published in South Africa entitled ‘The Stone Chameleon’. Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently teaching mental health at the University of East London. He can be found: @nick45wood or http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/
At some point, he could not quite remember when, the paladins had left him some water and bread. It was the smell of the bread that had woken him. They had also unlocked the irons on his hands, although his ankles were now in chains. He tore off a crust from the loaf and ate it, sipping some water. The sensation made him feel a little better and he managed to get up onto the wooden bench at the back of the van and cover himself properly with the blanket.
It was a long drive through the two cities and then up through the freezing mountains. They were passing through the outskirts of the second city. He could see out the grilled windows that they were passing Location 22; an area that had once been demarked for ruin. A 13th-century roofless and windowless Franciscan friary had been built at the crest of the road. A process of demolishing and rebuilding that involved the construction of semi-detached Edwardian houses with sundried clay-bricks was taking along the winding streets up the foothills towards the snowline. Four-storey chimneys towered over the structures beneath. They were being built despite the fact that domestic fires had been banned under the Smoking Act of 2275, some 30 years ago.
Chad Rossouw is an artist based in Cape Town. He most recently exhibited a solo show entitled The Planet’s Wake at Brundyn + in 2014. He has a Masters degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art. He teaches photography at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town and writes regularly for the art publication artthrob.co.za
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