EA Friday Feature Anthology - September 2015

by EA Friday Feature



  E.A. Friday Feature

  September 2015 Anthology

  Stories from East Africa

  Copyright © 2015, EA Friday Feature

  Written by:

  Annemarie Musawale

  Maureen Wakarindi

  Vincent de Paul

  Dora Okeyo

  Elly Kamari

  Disclaimer:

  Characters and Places in the stories are written in a fictional capacity, any resemblance to actual people in real life is coincidental.

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

  ***

  Stories

  By

  Annemarie Musawale

  Bitch Better Have My Money

  The ringing telephone woke her with a start. It was so loud and insistent. She was used to the soft tones of Westlife on her cell phone.

  Who kept these old-fashioned clonkers around anymore anyway?

  The phone wasn't even a touch phone, but one of those old ones, which had to be at least thirty years old. The telephone was fitted with a Dial, Automatic, 21FA. This had a number ring with black figures on an antique silver background and a transparent fingerplate. The dial cord had spade-tags at one end for connection to the dial terminals and ring-tags at the other for connection to the telephone terminals.

  Diana hadn't seen its type since she'd been no more than a tween. But now here she was, in Back Water Australia, on a sheep farm, unable to sleep for fear of some king cobra curling itself around her. Confronted with the shrilly ringing contraption that used to be a communication device back when the earth was cooling.

  She reached out hesitantly and picked it up.

  “’lo”, she said sleepily, her voice rough and cracked with disuse.

  There was no one else to talk to for miles.

  “Di! You’re still alive. That’s great. How’s it going?” Andrew’s cheerful voice danced down the line, sharp and clear as if he was in the room with her.

  “Fuck you, Andrew, and the wagon you rode in on”, she replied, her voice lowering even further and hardening.

  “Aww, don’t be like that Di darlin’. Hey, it coulda been worse. You could be here right now, facing the lynch mob known as your creditors.”

  “Or I could be in the Bahamas, spending those millions you promised me,” she bit out, poison in every syllable.

  “You could I guess; except…”

  “Except you're a goddamned motherfucking liar is except!” she shouted at him.

  “Di, Di, Di…come on. I told you the risks when you decided to invest your client’s money with me, didn’t I? I was upfront and honest about all of it. Not my fault you got greedy”, he said, voice dripping syrup and toxins in equal measure.

  Diana sighed rolling her eyes even though he couldn't see.

  “That’s what I get for sleeping with the enemy I guess. What do you want?”

  She heard Andrew sigh on the other end of the line.

  “I just wanted to check up on you babe, see how you were, if you're doing okay. How’s my brother treating you?”

  “Like poison ivy. He dropped me here in the middle of fucking nowhere and took off!”

  “He’s a busy man Di, you have to cut him some slack.”

  “Sure thing, babe. I'll do that. Just as soon as I see him again. I’ll definitely cut him something.”

  “Hey, I won't call you again if you're gonna be like that.”

  “Like what? Pissed as all get out?”

  “Yeah. Like that.”

  “Well fuck you, Andrew. Fuck your brother and your mother who birthed you both.”

  “Tsk tsk. Language my dear. You still want me to get you out of this jam you got yourself into, don’t you?”

  “Jam I got myself into!! You fucking bastard,” Diana’s voice was so high, possibly only the bats could hear her.

  “I'm hanging up now,” Andrew said and matched his actions to his words.

  Di was practically foaming at the mouth she was so mad. Upside though, she wasn't currently thinking about snakes or snakebites.

  “Did you get the location?” Andrew asked the CID officer standing beside him.

  “Yes. Good work, that was long enough,” the cop replied with a curt nod.

  He turned to his fellow officer and said something sotto voce to him. Then he turned back to Andrew.

  “Once we have her in custody, you're free to go,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir. I was just an innocent bystander. She’s the one who was the mastermind. You’ll see once you bring her in, she can tell you where all the money from the pyramid scheme went.”

  The officer just gave him a non-committal nod and left him in the room to marinate. Andrew could see them outside, discussing in low tones. Probably planning to get in touch with authorities in Australia to see if Diana Lucifera could be extradited to Kenya for prosecution. Andrew didn’t know how strong the relationship was between Kenyan police and Australian police was. It was the furthest point in the globe they could think to evacuate Di when they found out that the police were closing in on her. Andrew had kept completely out of the limelight. He couldn’t imagine how the police had gotten his name. But he was a con artist first, ex-lover second. He wasn’t about to go down for something when he could pin it on someone else.

  Di had no proof he was even involved in the pyramid scheme, let alone the mastermind. Good sex could do that to a person; it made them sloppy and careless. Andrew had learned that lesson long ago.

  A cop came to return him to his cell. A little greasing of palms had made sure that he was alone in there, and a cleaning lady came by twice a day to keep it spotless. Also, those pizza deliveries from pizza inn were like clockwork. It was good to be flush with cash, especially in these hard Kenyan streets.

  Di lay back on her bed thinking hard.

  Why the fuck would Andrew call her? And for seemingly no reason other than to raise her blood pressure. There was more going on here than met the eye and Di’s spidey senses were tingling. She didn’t like it one bit. The last time she’d ignored her spidey senses, she’d ended up on the run with a target on her back. She sat up fast, looking around the room for her bag. She had not unpacked it so it was the job of seconds to swing it up on her back and exit the ramshackle she was in. She had a hundred thousand dollars cash.

  Time to disappear where no one knew where she was.

  ***

  Never Complain, Never Explain

  Roy was walking in the woods, studying the tall redwood trees, looking for the perfect one. The one that would hold his weight without cracking and turning his suicide attempt into an embarrassing accident that would probably leave him with a broken leg or worse. Of course the leg would take forever to heal and it would probably get infected and kill him slowly and painfully.

  That was the nature of HIV after all, wasn’t it?

  It turned the body’s attempts at healing into a joke. The thought was almost enough to turn Roy Lestrange away from his quest. But no, fuck that; he wasn’t waiting around for the grim reaper to take him slowly and painfully. He didn’t want to hang around until the skin diseases had the whole town knowing exactly what was wrong with him, maybe shouting ‘fag!’ as he passed. He wasn’t no fag. He didn’t even understand how he’d gotten the disease. All doctors
were liars. And that bloody scary witch his mother had taken him to, who’d confirmed the diagnosis was a liar too.

  Suddenly the sun came out, bathing the glade where he was in magnificent light.

  It was heartbreakingly beautiful and Roy wanted no part of it.

  How could such beauty exist amidst the ugliness suffusing his soul right now? Why hadn’t this darkness killed him already? Or at least overshadowed the light so that he didn’t have to remember that there was more than disease and sickness in the world?

  He slumped to the forest floor, leaning his head back against a vast redwood and looking up into the sky with despair. He howled his grief and rage at the heavens. There was nobody to hear him here after all…

  Suddenly his vision began to blur, dizziness overtook him and he clutched his head in confusion.

  “What?” he asked nobody in particular, realizing he’d shut his eyes when he opened them again to find a huge, naked, black man peering down at him.

  “O hola si?” the man seemed to be inquiring…in a language Roy had never heard before.

  The man seemed to shimmer in front of him and then turn his head to look deeper into the woods.

  “Báareende liikeenda,” the naked black man said peering into the distance.

  “I.don’t.know.what.you.are.saying,” Roy said with angry emphasis.

  “Get out of here. The Ageless One approaches,” the man said in perfectly good English.

  Roy frowned wondering why the man had to spout all that foreign shit if he could speak the language well enough.

  “Who’s the Ageless One?” Roy asked.

  He wasn’t moving just because some naked black man told him to. Suddenly there was an inexplicable mist in the sunny glade and the man he’d been speaking to was just…gone.

  “What?” Roy asked no one again looking frantically from side to side.

  Was the disease giving him dementia already? He’d heard that was possible. Then he heard voices approaching and scrunched himself low against the tree. For some reason, he didn’t want these new guys to see him.

  “…Even the slaves are getting restless,” a deep baritone was saying as the shushing sound of feet on leaves indicated that they were coming ever nearer.

  Roy scrunched lower down against his tree.

  “There is nothing to be done but wait, Armand. The slaves are restless because they know their freedom might be nigh. Might. They’ve been waiting a long time,” the second voice said.

  This voice had a lower register than the first, like car wheels over gravel. It also shook with a timbre that Roy had not heard before. If he were a guessing man, he’d say that this one was the ‘Ageless One’ that the big black man had mentioned.

  Come to think of it, the naked man had been covered with scarring over his scary tribal tattoos. The kind of scarring produced by whipping, if Roy remembered his history books correctly. Were these the ‘slaves’ these two beings were discussing? Had he somehow traveled back in time? It was all very disconcerting. Suddenly, Roy found that he just wanted to go home to his mama.

  He made a small sound, which to his dying day he would deny was a whimper and then started when the shuffling on the leaves stopped abruptly.

  The two had stopped walking.

  “Did you hear that?” the baritone inquired.

  “The whimpering? Yes I did. Nothing to be concerned about. In fact Armand, there is nothing going on right now that need concern you yet. Why don’t you go back to the hospital? Play craps with Bernard and just wait? You will know immediately when they begin to play your song.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. You haven’t been waiting millennia for this.” Baritone…or ‘Armand’ sounded a little sulky.

  “Oh Armand, ever the impatient one. I have this to tell you. Already the signs begin to manifest; and whatever will happen, it will be soon. Your wait is almost over. There. Satisfied?”

  ‘Armand’ laughed bitterly.

  “Your idea of ‘soon’ probably doesn’t match other people, Mama Ruth,” he said.

  “Indeed,” she agreed, “But it certainly matches yours…”

  Armand sighed.

  “I will go now…because I realize I cannot get anymore from you. One more question though, the Andrewes witches…?”

  “Again, my eye is on them and when something happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “The animals gather outside their shack every night and simply stare. Did you know that?” he asked.

  “Armand, the swamp is full of mysterious things. If we wondered at all of them there would be no time to do anything else”, the ‘Ageless One’ sounded tired.

  “In other words, you already know why they do that,” he said.

  “Go home Armand,” she replied and this time, the tone of command was unmistakable.

  The one called Armand was silent for a bit and then he said, “As you wish, your highness”.

  There was a terrible disturbance in the air and then after a time, the birds in the wood began to chirp again. It was then that Roy realized they’d gone silent when the black man appeared. Roy looked around him, searching for signs of danger but all he saw were motes of light dancing on the leaves.

  “I need to get out of here,” he murmured to himself as he hastily got up and got moving.

  ****

  What If

  Mary Magdalene woke up late, her head throbbing with misery.

  Newsflash. Tequila was really the devil. Somebody needed to tweet that. Not her though. Someone else. She could hear her notifications going off at the rate of a mile a minute and she knew what it was about. She knew she was being trolled like nobody’s business.

  It was that nude pic that Rick had posted of her. Her friends had warned her about him being a nasty piece of work but did she listen?

  Nooo, she went ahead and let him woo her into an affair. Even though she knew, he was married to that Paris chick. He said his wife didn’t understand him; that she was cold to him in bed. He’d been so needy. How was Mary to know that he was a stinkin’ liar? Well…okay, maybe there were signs. For one thing, his Facebook page was full of pictures of him and his supposedly cold wife doing fun things together. Rick had told her that it was all show. Just for the cameras. That as soon as they got home, Paris barely spoke to him.

  Who was she to dispute that? Heaven knew she’d never been married so she didn’t know that married people did or didn’t behave like that. Besides, he was so nice to her, so attentive. He picked up every time she called, texted her like two hundred times a day. It was intoxicating. Plus, there was that Mazda he’d bought her for her birthday – to show her how much he cared he’d said. Okay so it turned out to be leased and she’d had to pay like a thousand dollars, which Rick had neglected to pay…he’d apologized so sincerely. Said he’d forgotten to pay that cash and promised to pay her back. I mean he was so sweet!

  Who wouldn’t be taken in?

  When he’d asked if he could take her picture naked, just so he had something to look at when he was lonely, how could she say no? Besides, they were really classy. Only one really showed her cunt; and it was a pretty cunt anyway; all womanscaped and such…she was proud of it. In fact, Rick had also promised to get her some cash so she could have it vagazzled. I mean, how cool would that be?

  Then…last night, she’d gone to surprise him at his club appearance in Miami and she’d caught him tongue wrestling some other chick. Some tall blonde leggy slut with obviously plastic double d’s and a body modeled on Barbie.

  Mary hadn’t been able to control herself. She was so mad. She’d grabbed Rick’s drink and thrown it in his face, badly stinging his eye. Then she’d called him a cheating liar and left the club. Too bad that TMZ had been on the scene and taken a video of the whole thing. Worse, Barbie girl found Mary’s nude pics on Rick’s phone and posted them online. Ever since, she’d been getting nasty messages from trolls and she didn’t
know what to do.

  rickswife67 wrote: Kill yourself bitch. You’re nothing but a husband stealing slut!!!

  nastygalzsquad wrote: Your vagina looks like it smells of patchouli and regret.

  videovixen78 wrote: If I ever find u anywea nia ma man I’ll burn your nipples off cunt

  kissmyattitude wrote: Whore. God will punish you for being a husband stealer

  songsoffireandice wrote: if u wa in GOT they’d have made u walk in the street naked already. SHAME on you.

  Mary scrolled miserably through her notifications, looking for she knew not what. Would it stop soon or would she be hounded off social media forever? She couldn’t leave! Social media was her life; she might as well be dead without it. She tried tweeting positive uplifting messages to maybe shame the trolls into leaving her alone but they just responded with even more gusto.

  kissmyattitude wrote: You have nerve to even get on here with u’re fake messages. We know who yu r bitch.

  pharisee123 wrote: yeah, go on run u’re lil bitch ass outta here slutty mcsluttington. How you even show your face? Your cunt looks sick

  devotee101 wrote: YOU HAVE AIDS!! YOU’RE GONNA DIE.

  fiftyshadesoffierce wrote: bitch u luk lik a man. Ugly ass vagina.

  Mary threw her phone across the room with an anguished cry. It was the new iPhone 6 and the screen cracked as it hit the linoleum. Mary screamed even louder. She wasn’t anywhere near finished paying for that thing. Now it was broken.

  “God!” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks in despair.

  There was a soft knocking at the door. Mary stopped crying to listen.

  “Mary? You in there? I heard screaming. Are you alright?” a soft voice floated in from the other side of the door.

  “Who are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  Had her trolls found out where she lived?

  “My name is Jesus. I live just down the hall from you?” he said.

  Mary hesitated for a moment but then shrugged. If this was her day to die from some crazed ax man at her door well…it was a good day. She was just about done. She opened the door to behold a Persian guy of middling height, long brown hair tied in a ponytail low on his head and beard flourishing on his face.

  “Is everything alright, Mary?” he asked.