Route 125

Route 125

To get to Ongata Rongai, you board those decrepit buses at Railways. The route is 125. Fare could be anything between 50 bob and 120 bob, depending on the mood of the conductor, the rain or the number of traffic officers on the road. If you are in a different tax...
Childhood Snapshots

Childhood Snapshots

Shyly the girl jumps into the pool. She’s teaching me how to swim, but I am learning how to leave. This falls on the wrong side of my pleasure principle. This won’t work. The swimming, and the relationship. She’s a good girl. The kind of girl God gives you young so...
a drink called loneliness

a drink called loneliness

There is a boy next to me making love to his Smirnoff Ice. Smirnoff Ice tastes like expired antibiotics, but I don’t tell him that. A girl and her lover make way to ask for a matchbox. They reek of Dunhill cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in years mostly cause I end up...
the dead are born every day

the dead are born every day

The dead are born every day. I know because I am at the Langata Cemetery. There are more fresh graves today. The mud is still virgin, the ground thick and warm and damp and smells like formalin and wet dirt. A fig tree, the modest mistress of solitude, sits alone...
It’s Us, not Them

It’s Us, not Them

It was ten to 11 PM when the lights went out. Close your eyes. Yes, that kind of darkness. Like that Kenya Power rogue monkey had cut off power. A cough here. A whistle there. A glass shattering. The parabola of tension. The air was heavy, as if there were too much of...

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