Wanyiri

Tension. 

 

Somebody else was in Jibral’s house. Somebody else besides Charlotte Nneka who had woken up with a start, on damp swirling sheets from a restless sleep. The pit of her belly tightened with a dreadful knowing.  The cold hands that often wrung out her womb whenever something horrible was looming, climbed their way to her chest. She lay frozen, petrified to breath, lest it give her away. Charlotte Nneka’s curse was that everything she felt, she did so with a primal intensity. 

 

Perhaps the intruder, for it could only be an intruder at this hour, could hear the deafening and rapid drumbeat of her heart. Trying to control it was as useful as carrying water in a basket.  Nobody but Charlotte Nneka was supposed to be here.  

 

Last week, when the townspeople had burned down a restaurant belonging to Chinese businessmen on the outskirts of Nairobi, accusing them of racist practices, Charlotte had held a megaphone on the march rallying university students and locals to protest and picket around the establishment. She wore fire engine red dungarees over a yellow crop top and pulled a ski mask over her face. She would have argued down anyone who’d have called her a hooligan. Charlotte Nneka was big spirited and strong willed, but never a goon. A rebel, yes, with or without a cause. The fact that she owned a ski mask in boiling  equatorial heat was shrugged off as a non issue. What irked Charlotte Nneka then and there was audacity. Her disdain for it fuelled her chants of Africa for the Africans! What audacity these people possessed, erecting their business on African land and then prohibiting natives from dining in their establishment by way of bold notices stuck on ornately carved oak doors. No Blacks. Said the pink manila papers on the doors.  

Blacks. Weird, thought Charlotte Nneka, Kenyans didn’t even consider themselves black. That was a vague term she’d come across while reading Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom in apartheid South Africa and lately on international news whenever police killings, which were often, highlighted race relations in far off America. Kenyans were just Africans, she thought, as she marched on the hot tarmac surrounded by chanting and clamoring hordes, headed to the eatery.  

 

Outrage had sparked the nation, when the manager, Esther Zhao, a plump Chinese woman, whose gray hair was cut in a bob that framed her square-jawed face had ignorantly explained to two University students, who streamed the incidence on Facebook Live that “the time for blacks was over, no blacks after 7pm, unless accompanied by Asian or European guests… is due to security concerns.” she had said in her foreign accent to a gobsmacked Charlotte Nnekka and Mjomba, her boyfriend. The two, who were on a date and had decided to splurge on Asian food away from the University’s  Main Campus, had been denied entry by a bulking man with flared nostrils, large clenched fists and SECURITY emblazoned in yellow lettering on his faded black t-shirt. Mjomba had pulled out his phone and recorded the entire conversation. Charlotte Nneka, tall and spritely, had towered over the diminutive Esther Zhao and incredulously asked her to “come again?” Zhao had obliged her.  

 

Hours later, the establishment had been razed to the ground.  

 

Nairobi’s governor, Mite Sonko was on the evening news condemning University students for the fire and trying in futility to mend diplomatic relations with the Chinese Embassy. Foreign establishments, or as they were favorably referred to, investors, had already closed their businesss alleging xenophobic concerns. He wagged a stubby finger at viewers, promising to bring the culprits to heel. Initially, Charlotte Nneka had scoffed at it all, but when C.I.D officers started to sculk student residence halls, she’d sat out close to three hours in a pungent second floor loo, texting Uncle Jibral.  

 

So Charlotte Nneka had fled to Jibral’s house in neighboring Somalia. Jibral had always admired Charlotte Nneka ever since he met her at an East African Youth leader’s conference in Nairobi when she was in her first year of Uni. Charlotte Nneka had flirted shamelessly with him as she always did with men shorter than herself.  The Somalian, barred by their difference in age and the fact that he was married, had reluctantly acquiesced to a fast friendship between them. He’d found himself playing the role of Uncle to a passionate Charlotte Nneka. He’d never understood why everyone called her by both names. Charlotte Nneka couldn’t remember either. He’d paid for her bus ticket to Mogadishu and had handed her the keys to his house to wait out the fiasco as he’d called it. His family had emigrated to Nairobi but still owned the empty house in a Mogadishu suburb.  

 

Her eyes, in an adrenaline powered reflex adjusted to the dark room she lay in. A chair with her clothes draped over it, sat still in its corner, the duvet she’d had kicked off the bed when the stifling night air had steamed her skin, lay in an ominous mount on the cement floor. Wardrobe doors she had flung open looking for a tshirt to sleep in gaped back at her. Her breath came in short spurts, every single hair on her lithe body stood erect. How could she have so much inward movement, yet her body lay paralyzed with fear?  Why did she always have to feel so intensely it crippled her?  

 

A cracked tile creaked in the hallway outside of the bedroom Charlotte Nneka occupied. Her brain registered it almost tripping her twice earlier that day when she had explored Jibral’s house. Now without a doubt, she confirmed, somebody was here. She could smell the intruder’s anxiety. He smelt like lit matches and dust. Charlotte Nneka was unaware that her bladder had given out until the hot stream steeped her bare thighs in a warm pool. A digital clock from the cellphone that had lost connectivity when her bus had crossed the border from Wajir into Gedo, seemed to indicate in neon green digits that the hour of her death was 3:72 am. Her ears rung like the banshees she had never seen but had read about in American novels. The intruder had to pause too, the way foot soldiers crossing a minefield did when their boot crunched on an explosive that would be triggered by a shift of their heft.  

The silence of that second sliced through her before the raucous burst of fire from the intruder’s AK47 punctured her forehead, chest and ribcage. Charlotte Nneka made a gurgling sound, whose echo in the resulting silence of death, outlasted her final breath.  

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 Jezebel’s Cackle. 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                      HM Prison Holloway 

                                                                                                                        Parkhurst Rd,      

                                                                                                                        London N7 ONU, 

                                                                                                                        United Kingdom. 

 

                                                                                                                          February 10 1910. 

 

 

 

Dear Grace,  

 

       Now that I don’t have an assistant here, I have no one to dictate letters to and must scribble them myself. Such a tedious task! It’s been eons my darling, since I last put pen to anything that wasn’t a contract, or a bill, and even then only briefly to append a signature. Alas, how the mighty have fallen! 

 

They let us know after an abhorrent cavity probe, that wardens, or guards, or any of these swine faced brutes promenading the halls would be privy to the contents of all correspondence coming in and out of the prison. Hell’s Bells! like I can’t tell from their bare expressions that literacy levels are lower than morals on Masquerade night at Lexie’s down on Peg Street.  

 

How are Ginny, Mary and Helga? I hope none of you are sitting moping for me and twiddling perfectly manicured thumbs. I taught you to keep your chins up and expect no less from any of you.  

Mr Johnson was just here, he is appealing this ridiculous sentence and will get right on it soon as he can get the paperwork filed. Take care of him. Grace, no you may not visit me here, soon I will be home in my fine furs and silks. I could not bear you seeing me in drab prison issue apparel. It would devastate you my precious, to see me in a dishwater gray tunic. Its neck so wide, stretched by time that my nipple peeks out at the bars and walls like a single eye on my chest.  All the same, I take vain pride in the pert of my breasts at my age and after the ravages of childbearing. Do not gasp in faux outrage my dear, for there are worse things that could befall a lady. And no, brassieres are not issued along with tunics. 

 

 

Enough about the atrocities of the prison wardrobe. While I am temporarily decommissioned Grace, you must keep things as they have always been at the nunnery. I say temporarily because Mr Johnson has assured me that without a body, it is likely that a higher court will overturn this judgment. Oh Grace, if only I had my nail file in here. Just because I sit in here like a hen in a coup does not mean I should spot matching talons! It is frightful how they treat a lady here Grace. Why, I’d be clutching my pearls if they’d let me wear them through this unspeakable disgrace.  

 There aren’t any other captives in this cell assigned to me. Thank Mr Johnson for me, he convinced the warden that a lady of my standing at the very least deserved the dignity of privacy.  I couldn’t bear proximity with street urchins and riff raff commoners that file into the dining hall. Speaking of dining, I haven’t put a morsel in my mouth in the last four days, not since the Beluga caviar we picked at on the night of my apprehension. I refuse to insult my tastebuds. It is bare muck they dish out in trough- like bowls to the women here. Utter garbage. Black, but tar like coffee with packets of sugar have sustained me thus far.  

 

I must end my missive now darling, I am allowed only one sheet of parchment every two days and this stubby pencil that I can keep while I wait on my eventual release.  Kiss the girls for me, remind them that a liquid sword is as good as any for a lady to wield.  

 

                                                                                                             All my affections, 

                                                                                                               Your Mother, Jezebel.  

 

 

                                                            This submission is part of a short story about an incarcerated woman who has seemingly lost her mind in solitary confinement. In order to disarm the system and prison psychiatrist, she conjures up identities, time and impossible scenarios that she refers to in her letters to imaginary characters . 

 

                                                                                      

                                                                

Monica Wanyiri

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About the Author

Monica is a short story fiction writer. She hopes to someday write for the big screen. In the meantime, she leaves a trail of Google and Yelp reviews in her wake.