Back Door Man

I’m the one with tears in my eyes. They will ask what happened here, and there will be no witnesses. No whisper in the wind to relay of how a dream died here. My dream is dead and all I can do to hold on from bursting into tears is to remember that I tried so hard, did all I could, this is keeping me, for now. Still, I’m the one with tears in my eyes. I was the fool who dreamed.

Preview

"The day Fiona called is the day I left my house on the hill in Ntinda. The day Fiona called is the day I never went home again. The day Fiona called is the day I stopped using my first Mango line. The day Fiona called was the first evening I did not walk Kampala road, my workday done, my friends all gone, but I did not want to be alone in a room thinking. The day Fiona called is the day I finally realized how much I had needed her to call me but had never admitted to myself just how much. And the day Fiona called me, a phone call I did not want to answer, was like the first day of life after death. My heart in my fingertips in the seconds paused over the faded YES button of my ringing Samsung phone. In the ticking seconds, hearing before I had picked up, what I had for months waited to hear breathed out, “Yes, today, if it’s okay, we can meet. City Square, yes, then we can decide.”

Thursday, busiest day of my week, in the afternoon after a snack of warm glassed orange juice and two big oily doughnuts, working through lunch, she calling. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy startling the napping room in my direction. Angry glances urging me to pick up. I lived and died and came back to life in the seconds my eyes staring at Fiona’s caller photo flashing on my screen, ascertaining that the glare from my computer was not making me see a number I had willed myself to stop hoping was flashing on my screen whenever my phone vibrated before the crash of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy forced me to pick up. A willing that had taken me months to achieve and then when it was done, she called.

My stomach was gone, a cliff fall yawning emptiness there. I could not feel my legs; my knee caps all that were left. I was sure I did not have any voice left, a dry croak surely all I could summon from my parched throat if I tried answering. But beyond all this, I was certain that getting up from behind my old black Dell desktop computer facing the gray wooden door into the partitioned office meant never coming back here, on that Thursday afternoon when she called. The waiting on disaster over. After ten months, Fiona wanting to see me again."

Kim +14 will be coming soon.

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