Another Day

A Story by nirvanakcid

I woke up to dust in my hair and Kissa shaking me awake. The wind was strong last night, howling over the plains like some formless, tortured beast finally let out of its cage. As I cracked my eyes open and stared at my daughter, I could already tell that the noise must have kept her up. How I prayed the wind would remain the only terror she had to face.

It was the heat that made me oversleep. It had probably settled in early, even before the sunrise: a thick, suffocating blanket that pushed sweat out of my pores and made the cattle foam at the mouth. I groaned as Kissa jumped on top of me.

“Baba! I put all the bananas on the bicycle for you!”

I had to grin as her round face beamed down at my own. I pictured her lying with her eyes open, waiting for the wind to die down, then quietly tiptoeing out of the hut so as not to wake me. This time of year, the bananas hang low and fat off our tree, begging to be picked before they fall to the red, baked earth. I imagined her as I’d seen her so many times before �" wrapping herself around the trunk, her skinny arms just barely making it around, and shaking it back and forth until a large cluster falls out, hitting the ground with a thud. Heavy and ripe as the fruit was, it must have taken her quite a while to carry each successive bunch to my bicycle and gingerly place them on the back.

”Well, my daughter is becoming quite a good worker,” I said as I smiled at her. “Maybe you’d like to take them to the market today instead of me?”

Her mouth opened and music streamed out as she laughed.

“I’d rather go to school and read with Teacher then go to the smelly marketplace! Especially after that old woman’s monkey tried to bite me. And Teacher just got another book, he says it’s named Moby Dyke, or Dick, or something.”

And in that moment, I would have done anything to know its name, to be able to tell her what the story was about as well as her teacher could.

“Then I’d rather you go to school, too.”

As I began to get up, Kissa rolled off my stomach and jumped to her feet. Yawning, I took her hand and we walked outside together.

“Now go to school,” I said as I picked her up and laid a kiss on her cheek. “Teacher says you’re always the first one to class, don’t let today be different.”

“I don’t even have to try Baba! All the other boys and girls are lazy, and they make fun of Teacher when he can’t hear them.”

“Well then they must not be that smart, I told you teachers can hear everything. Now, enough talking, I will see you before the sun sets tonight, and you can tell me all about this man, Moby Dyke.”

With a final smile, Kissa turned and began skipping down the road. I watched for a second, contemplating whether I should yell for her to stop kicking up the dust that was quickly settling like a fine powder on her faded black shoes.

Instead I turned away and hopped on my bicycle.

The metal was hot to the touch, and I momentarily winced before I began to pedal away. The village was soon behind me. In the fields, nothing moved. On a day like today, the animals know better than to leave the shade. Only man is arrogant enough to battle the sun.

The road began to incline slowly. The ridges ahead were an annoyance on a normal day, but would be pure torment today. As I pushed hard up the hill, rays of sunlight danced off the handlebars, and I began to squint so much that dark spots appeared on the ridge ahead.

Dark spots.

My heart turned to cement in my chest. Suddenly, it felt as if dust had invaded my throat, sending it into convulsions as I slammed my bicycle to a halt.

Kissa.

I turned around and began to maniacally pump my legs, the bike shaking under me as I pushed it harder and harder. The world flew by me in a blur, and everything around me turned the color of ashes.

Kissa.

Now I could hear the engines, the rattling of their suspensions as they bounced down the ridge. A wave of nausea hit me, and I resisted the urge to vomit as I strained against the handlebars.

My daughter.

My breath burst out ragged as a thousand needles stuck into my chest. Behind me came the noise of music being blasted through tinny speakers, what sounded like a million voices raised, yelling in a language I could not understand. A pack of hyenas at my heels. But my village was fast approaching, a collection of mud huts and pastures cooking under the Ugandan sun.

I began to scream, somehow forcing air out of lungs ravaged by dust and heat and panic. I screamed for my daughter, for the mother she would never know, for the old men laying in their huts and the women in the field. I screamed for Teacher, for books I never got to read, and for the banana tree outside my door, ripe and fat with fruit. And then the bicycle skidded and wrenched me from its seat.

“Not too bad, boy.” The older man said as he placed his hand on the child’s shoulder and took his Kalashnikov back.

“It’s very hard to shoot from a moving truck.”

Mokobe looked up at the man, whose sallow face was shining, drenched in sweat. His lips were smiling but his eyes were cold.

“Th-thank you sir”, Mokobe meekly answered.

The man turned and banged a clenched fist on top of the truck.

“Stop!” He yelled to the driver. “Let the boy see.”

Turning to Mokobe, he pointed to the body lying face down in the dust.

“You see those two holes in his back?”

Mokobe pretended that he did. The man’s tattered shirt was too soaked with blood to distinguish the wounds.

Suddenly, the man grabbed Mokobe under the waist and held him so that his torso hung outside the truck. He was now directly over the limp body.

“When you kill a man, you take everything from him. Every hour he has worked. Every mile he has walked. Every woman he has fucked. When you kill, you can call these things your own.”

He dumped Mokobe back into the truckbed and fixed him with a cold stare.

“This man was weak. Did you see those bananas next to his bicycle?”

Mokobe nodded.

“He was going to sell those at the market. Only weak men must make money from selling bananas. Strong men like me and you can make as much money as we want, whenever we want. This is the first man you have killed, but next time you must try and kill a stronger man. A man with a gun, not one carrying bananas. Then you will be even stronger yourself, because you will take all his strength away from him.”

The man paused to light a bent cigarette.

And in Mokobe’s ears, a buzzing like a million locusts feasting on a once-rich land. In his nose, the stench of his own urine-soaked trousers. And behind his eyes, the blackness of a night where there is no one left to light the fires.