* Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing *
It all started with a letter, slapped smack in the middle of our street sign. It was Uncle Ermu who saw it, …
Fiction
Ma’s Cactus
While I am tweezing the first of three cactus needles stung into my right shoulder, my teeth furiously biting into a small rolled-up towel I’ve put in my mouth, I feel more certain than ever that Ma’s expensively exotic plant …
Susu
You are coming from your friend’s. It is Sunday. The date is the 9th of August. You have spoken about the far and near, you have indeed nattered. Y’know it is unusual to converse with an age mate in Rukiga. …
The Birthmark
Their daughter is born healthy but a little underweight. Five pounds six ounces, the father proudly repeats in his emails and reports to relatives on the phone. On the second day, before they leave the hospital, the mother notices a …
Back from Paris
A journey punctuated by stinks. Crossing a street in Jackson Heights in Queens mother and son drifted from open-sewer smell at one corner to the reek of piled garbage at the next. All manner of mechanized traffic on slush begrimed …
Slo Girl, Jazzy, and Me
If you was to ask Slo Girl, she was to say that she discovered blue religion on a Saturday morning, when she landed flat on her back, ankles twined improper, under a sunny kinda someone; her first reaction upon landing …
A Butcher Fantasy
It is dark inside the cow. Space is limited; you can crouch or curl or squat on your haunches. My favorite position is fetal: chin down on my stomach, knees drawn up in a tight ball. I sleep like that …
Monkey
Like all good things this is chewed on. That’s her tongue in my cheek, curled up with my family and me. That’s her voice, those are her teeth biting my caution and wrists. She says we know what we’re doing, …
D
D talked about South Africa like it was one of his brothers who’d been taught, since birth, to hate himself. Like Harold, his mother’s bastard son, or William, who had sex with the nanny as a child. He told their …
Sirens
During the weeklong first-year orientation activities at the University of Nairobi, freshers are constantly reminded that this university is the best university in Africa, south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo. This phrase is used to confirm the …
