I wave my hands. “Shoo,” I say, “Shoo!”
Sindi hisses, spitting bits of stolen pellets. The Maltese bares its teeth. Eyes fixed on the dog, Sindi digs into the bowl, takes a handful of pellets and drops them into her pocket. The dog growls. She narrows her eyes, reaches into the bowl again.
“Sisi,” I warn, but it’s too late. The dog rockets forward. Sindi throws up her hands up to defend her face and the dog sinks needle teeth into the soft flesh of her palm. Her arms flap, but the dog is all over her and she loses her balance. Pellets scatter across the yard as the bowl is sent into a spin. The water bowl flips, but neither Sindi nor the dog notice. The dog snarls and bites. Sindi kicks and yells.
I run around waving my hands, but it does nothing to help. Their coats blur black and white and I’m thinking this is the end, the dog will rip her throat, when Sindi’s foot connects. The dog yelps. A strange liquid sound that makes everything stop.
The dog takes a few wobbling steps, whimpers and sits down; but just when I think that dog is going to fall over dead, it jumps up again and shoots through the pet flap into the house, tail between its legs.
I want to get out of there, but Sindi doesn’t seem in any rush. She dusts dog shit from her coat, carefully wiping the wool with the stolen T-shirt, then bends to gather the scattered pellets. Blood runs down the inside of her hand and drips off her fingertips, freckling the concrete. I scan the yard for somewhere to wash the wound, but there are no taps, and all that is left of the water from the dog’s bowl is a damp patch on the concrete.
Long-Dead Worm Dinner
There was a time I used to dream, curled up warm in Mama’s house that smelled of paraffin, Vicks VapoRub and Vaseline. A time I’d press my face into Sindi’s neck and breathe in the smells that clung to her hair, spicy as the air in the takeaway where Mustafa sold slap chips and bunny chows and Black Label quarts wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. A time I’d close my eyes and drift, like a paper boat floating in rainwater currents between the pavement and the road. Drift into the soft mouth of sleep, where sweet dreams waited.
Now, I close my eyes and disappear. I close my eyes and I am gone and being gone feels like forever, though I never left at all.
We walk all day, tramping down the emergency lane. Trucks thunder by. We march past vacant lots bristling with scrubby grass, rusting cans and broken beer bottles. Sindi only stops to watch the evening rush hour. Even then, she stays standing, halfway up the embankment, mumbling, “Emi, oru, abiku, O.” When the first cars shake loose she’s off again.
By the time the roads unclog, Mama Moon is on the rise, but she’s sucked her belly in and the night pours over us like fresh tar. Cat’s-eyes, lumed up by the headlights of passing cars, stretch into forever like rows of licked lime Sparkles. One for me, one for you.
“Sisi, stop,” I wail at the dark and the passing cars and Mama Moon. The soles of my baby-dolls feel like they’re sticking to the road. I struggle to put one foot in front of the other, step after step after step. “Stop, stop, stop,” I cry, frost-bitten, bone-tired. She keeps walking, but my legs are like lead, dead-dead.
Mist rises from the cooling concrete. Twisting white vapours swirl around my ankles until I can’t see my feet. Soon that milky sea reaches my knees, trailing ice along my skin. I think of the deep earth in winter and my head fills with cold and damp and I want to lie down and sleep forever. I close my eyes and, in the dark space inside myself, I see a bare bulb swing, flickering on, flickering off. I follow its shadowy arc back to before. Mama is crying and Sindi stands by the door, wide-eyes. And then they’re gone and I’m alone.
I open my eyes. “Sisi,” I call, but my voice is mouse-squeak small. Memories flash and fade. With every step Sindi takes, another piece of me disappears until she is so far away I hardly remember her.
Something buzzes in the soles of my feet. I frown at the dark curve of road. The ground rumbles as if a giant truck is hammering down the highway, but the road’s dark.
“It’s the King of the Road, little sister.” I hear Ben’s voice in my ear, but no one’s there. “He’s got a belly long as the highway and five lanes wide, and no matter how much he eats he’s always hungry. You better run.”
I look down and will my feet to move. I don’t want the King of the Road to eat me like roadkill, like an accident victim, but fear has made me lame. A hooter whines through the night. Passing headlights leave me blinded by white spots. I push my thumbs into my eye-sockets, then squint into the dark. A man stands in the middle of the highway, behind the barrier that separates the cars going west from the cars going east. He’s a shadow, but his eyes are like coals in an oil drum. He holds my stare and heat pours into me. My toes zing with pins and needles and the road lets go.
I dash up the embankment and I don’t stop running until I reach the top. The mournful warning of another car draws my eye back to the man. He drops over the barrier and stands on the same side as me. I scan the grey belly of the highway. Headlights float above the road like disconnected ghosts.
I can’t tear my eyes away as he darts across, long legs running lopsided, veering left, veering right. The car cuts close, speeding-speeding. He’s roadkill, I think, another soul sacrificed to the road’s hungry King. Even from up high I can hear the King’s stomach grumble. I close my eyes and plug my ears.
When I look again, the man is safe behind the yellow line. He gives me a narrow look and takes off up the road. I follow along the embankment.
The man has a strange way of walking: he takes long strides and careens from side to side, as if one of his legs is shorter than the other. And he keeps up a constant conversation with someone invisible, nodding like he’s listening and pausing like he’s considering the answers to questions. He’s loony and I mock him, “Loon Man, Loon Man, your legs are lopsiiided!” He pretends he can’t hear me, even though I know he can – he keeps glancing my way with his heat-projecting eyes.
Ahead of us, a girl walks into the train of Mama Moon’s glowing indigo dress. She walks like she’s asleep and dreaming. Loon Man calls out to her and she swings around.
“Sindi!” I yell, relieved to have found her, though for a moment my head is a fog of confusion as to how I lost her, if she was lost at all. I want to ask her where she’s been, but she’s focused on Loon Man. The air between them is tense. Sindi’s shoved her hands into her pockets and pushed them wide, so she looks bigger than she is. Looking at Loon Man, bent double, wheezing, hands flapping like dying fish, I wonder why she bothers.
Loon Man’s old. His face has collapsed in the middle like he has no teeth. A thin grey straggle spills from under his sooty trilby and sits unevenly on the shoulders of his trench coat. The coat gives him bulk, but his hands tell me that under it he’s skinny-skinny. Still, he’s tall, and his brogues are polished to a mean shine. What’s a man with nice threads doing walking the highway at night?
As his breath slows, Loon Man straightens up and the years fall off him. I frown, trying to focus on his face. It’s like watching a TV being fine-tuned, the screen warping back and forth. His face shifts through a lifetime – young, old and every age in between – but always his eyes remain the same. Hot cosmic eyes, deep as the moonless sky. His face fixes around sixty, but the shifting has left me dizzy. Loon Man slides a hand into his coat and Sindi cocks her pockets.
He smiles. “My child, I know you’ve got trigger fingers, but you don’t have a trigger. Still, I understand where you’re coming from.” His voice reminds me of Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend, too smooth for his mouth. Mama said Next-Door-Auntie’s boyfriend spoke like an American televangelist, and that all preachers were tsotsis, you could tell by the designer suit. I cut narrow eyes at Loon Man, to let him know I’ve got his number.
“I’m not going to hurt you, my child. See?” He pulls out a hip flask that glows in the lunar light like the embers of a dying fire. “Just something to keep warm,” he says, raising the copper flask to his lips. He knocks back a slug, shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His cheeks