Yvonne Owuor - Dust

Needing to go home to England but not wanting to leave without Hugh. Why live? What was the point? Haunted. Wanting warmth in July. Hurting for her husband’s body, his soul, his laugh, hers. His laugh was hers. Mucus on her face. “I don’t belong to anything,” she told the wall. “Not even to myself.” Body-shuddering weeping. What do I need?

A deep-voiced answer came from within the room. “I’m here, memsahib.” And from that moment until the night of the next day, it was all she needed to know and touch and feel and smell and have.

Selene’s plane left Kenya. She took only what she needed. Her plane circled the plains with the stragglers of the Rift Valley wildebeest migration, black pockmarks on the ground. Migration instinct . Selene smiled before she closed her eyes.

The baby was a boy. Selene named him Isaiah William Bolton.

Her mother, who was blind in one eye, peered at the newborn baby and said, “A significant throwback. Not as English-looking as he could be.” She cackled through the opening phrase of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

“He’s mine,” Selene answered.

More than a year later, a divorce decree for Hugh Bolton was dispatched to Kenya.

No reply.

She waited.

And waited.

Selene forged Hugh’s “no contest.”

Done.

Three years later, Selene acquired a new husband. Raulfe Greenwich. A man from a popular rather than a distinguished military family that made its money illegally trading in Darjeeling tea. A diffident third-born son with a penchant for order and walking dogs in the park. In Selene, Raulfe found a foil to his blandness. In Isaiah, the son he had hoped to have. He became aware that he also had Hugh’s ghost to contend with, and that he dealt with in his own way.

SUNDOWN. AKAI’S AND ALI DIDA HADA’S BODIES TOUCH.

Akai says, “Another song?”

Ali Dida Hada stares across the fire. “No,” he says.

“A song?”

He snaps, “Only hyenas walk the same road twice.”

“You’re not a hyena.” Her voice is a whisper.

Ali Dida Hada lifts his forefinger, touches each of Akai’s eyelids. “Bring me Nyipir’s red dance-ox.”

The fire crackles.

A throbbing tension engulfs all.

It is the first time Nyipir’s name has been mentioned.

Akai grabs dust and throws it at Ali Dida Hada.

Ali Dida Hada pushes her to the ground, his hands gentle around her neck. He says, “The red dance-ox.”

Akai tears at Ali Dida Hada’s hands. “Let me be.”

Ali Dida Hada spits out flecks of dust.

“What do you want?” he shouts.

Akai turns away to look into the night. “How’s my husband?”

Ali Dida Hada lifts himself from her. “ He sent me to you.”

Akai’s head spins. Tears. She rolls over and gets up, wiping her thighs. “He …”

Ali Dida Hada continues: “He wants only his animals back.”

Akai’s eyes shimmer; her mouth opens and closes.

Lowers her head.

Nyipir had waited for her. He had always waited for her. She needed his waiting. She was used to his waiting. All she had ever needed to do was show up, and he would be there.

Then.

He had sent his rival to find her.

Nyipir had stopped waiting.

Quivering breath, scratchy throat.

Nyipir had stopped waiting.

The knowledge causes Akai’s world to become unsteady. She sits down, stunned. Only his animals back . She will not cry.

Ali Dida Hada moves away.

He stops at the margins of the light.

He returns at once to her. Impatient voiced. “A poem. Do you want to hear it?”

She nods, tears in her eyes, scattered thoughts, ringing ears.

In Tigrinya, Ali Dida Hada sings, “Seed of song hidden in the single eye of an old star …”

Akai feels the end of Nyipir’s waiting as if she had fallen into a bottomless hole.

Now Ali Dida Hada’s forehead touches Akai’s.

Gray-hair-flecked skin, wrinkles and scars.

Ali Dida Hada croons the rest of the tale into Akai’s ear, and as he speaks, her head moves closer and closer to his shoulder until it reclines.

“Where’s the ox?” Ali Dida Hada asks.

“Gone,” she mutters.

“The car?”

“Gone.”

“The animals?”

“Gone. A dog remains.”

A lone jackal races to Isaiah’s left, a small creature’s white feathers clogging its mouth. Isaiah, still bemused, hears the water before he sees it. When he finds it, he stops. He quivers before he pulls off clothes, unbuttons his khakis. He hears the snapping of rusted chains, sees the falling to earth of a rain of ash, and smells that rancid after-burn of spent matches. There would be a moon in the sky that night. Isaiah drops into the water, submerging himself and then propelling himself to the surface.

Breathes.

No crocodiles.

Birds, plants, the scrambling of secret creatures.

The wind.

No thoughts.

Drained.

What is true?

Stark naked, Isaiah builds a cairn, piling up stones with bare and then bloody hands. The pain is a relief in the darkness. The cairn is for every illusion and lie, for questions and his personal dead. Hammering down rocks with all his might until there is nothing left to fight with.

Not even himself.

Deep night.

He sits with the warm stillness.

Sweating.

He listens to the water while shadows undulate.

At daybreak, he sees how a landscape unfurls into eternity, shimmering past origins. How can life endure these infinite spaces? And from nearby bushes, sounds of an impish summons — a white-tailed honeyguide has spotted a nude, hungry creature by the water who might be chirped in the direction of a freshly spotted honey hive.

Four nights later, a small group reaches Wuoth Ogik. Ten steps behind Ali Dida Hada and Akai-ma, Isaiah stares at the play of light on crumbling coral walls. The herding dog starts to yelp and whirls after his tail when he recognizes the boundary lines of home.

DUST IN HIS HAIR, MOUTH, NOSTRILS, AND EARS. DUST AND sweat inside his clothes. Isaiah can ignore it all now. So he searches faces, studies gestures. He searches for the woman he needs to hold to himself so that he can create a frame for feral, amaranthine places cleaving to his marrow, threatening to lose him.

Watching.

Galgalu’s half hobble. “Mama!” he calls as he tumbles toward Akai. They cling to each other. Akai weeps as she touches the bandage on Galgalu’s head, cups his face. “My poor little one,” she croons, “and still just a bone.”

Nyipir picks up his herding stick, cradles it on his shoulder. He waits, unmoving. He had heard the dog bark. He had stepped out, prepared for anything. He had seen and counted the new arrivals: three people, one dog. Nothing else.

Silence.

He waits.

Ali Dida Hada glances over at Nyipir, holds the look, gives a single shake of his head.

Nyipir wheezes.

Spirals. Dizzy. But he also knows if he were to reach for Akai-ma he might suffocate her and then kill himself. He sucks air in, one dollop at a time. He pivots, turning his back.

Glimpses Odidi’s cairn, his promise to his son.

Above, Hadada ibis call.

Footsteps.

She appears from his left.

Akai, unkempt, her face dull, lips dry and cracked, makes a furtive gesture. She stretches out a hand to touch Nyipir’s bare arm. She moves closer and closer. Tentative, she rests her head against his stiff body, his hard chest, pillowing her head.

Softer than last night’s breeze, she whispers, “I’m sorry.”