Author: Moses Abukutsa

Mama is grief, the one clinging onto a portrait-size photograph. She is the photograph’s cold eyes, the dimness of its cold hunch, the smile hanging in other photograph encasings under thin films of dusty layers gathered over the years on glass coverings. This grief has sprouted a withering, sheave of crunchy petals in the carcass of defunct bliss, roasted like the dust on the glass. Mama is the remains of despair, the soft dirge in her breathing, the dying flames of a flickering lantern, and the death of her husband in the photograph. She lets this photograph drop from her…

I pack my troubles in a sigh and stretch them out of bed in half sleepy eyes. I flick on the light. Its flash disorients for a little while. In night shorts, I flounder my way through scattered pieces of my clothing. On the floor, my other shorts have mingled with remnants of chiffon dresses and scarves in a perfect irregular heap. After less than seventy-two hours disorientation is the irregular heap of messed up clothes on the floor. There are paralyzed moths on the carpet scattered in the disorder in which they sneaked in through the window louvres that…

It is midnight and this could be the last stop before the last stop. At the previous stop, I checked into a public toilet and paid ten shillings just to throw up. Nausea had been building up I guess from taking in the stuffy cocktail of smells in the bus. A cocktail that was the recipe of strong scents — smelly feet mixed in the unmistakable waft of smoked fish and cheap perfume odours. It hasn’t helped matters that I have been sitting next to an old woman with a rather strong natural smell. I have mild Hyperosmia and today…

Crisp dry leaves on the backs of dead twigs rustle and roll on rusty iron sheets. It is a discordant clangour. Grotesque sooty walls and blank glass window frames suck in a groaning of trees swaying in wind. This is in the skeleton of a palatial house, scattered within its many rooms are all assortments of eeriness; egregious windings of spider webs, pellets of cigarette butts, queer animal skulls, pieces of snakeskins and shreds of women lingerie. “This world!” “Tape recorder what about this world?” “Sinbad Olwika you will not believe.” “In riddles?” “He did.” “Did what?” “Achando Achungo.” “The…

It is grotesquely furrowed, beaded with perspiration like the drops of a light drizzle, on the rough exterior texture of a plastic pail roughened by years of use-What a face? “We must face it.” In a feeble alto, gulping from a Dasani mineral water bottle, she passes a frightful hollow whisper like the feeble despondent protest of a spirit broken widow under the yoke of conspiratorial sisters- in- law. She is and we all are under the yoke of something. “We must face it,” she repeats. It has come finally. I remember the bits of newspaper opinion polls’ reports-the voting…

She swatted a fly with her palms, savagely.  “Senje! It’s nice seeing you.” “Nice is your head.” The fly she had mutilated, dropped from her palm.  “I am not here for blaaalalah!” Her blaaalalah sucked our attention more than her stunt with the fly.   “Mlamwa Marcella, what is it? What is it, sister in law?”  It was Ma’s calm voice, the one she favoured in times of such a crisis.  “Your other rat is stealing my husband!”  She wiped the remains of the fly on her leso wrapped around her vibrating plus size waist.  “Marcella!”  Ma adjusted her threadbare headdress. …