Read Online Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor - Free Book Online

orange suitcase and red carry-on half full of mismatched clothes, assorted art supplies, two passports, and three credit cards. A red cell phone and the amethyst necklace she always wore. She had thrown her black MacBook with the tomes of commercial art, her living, into a red shoulder bag and fled.
    Also.
    In the loneliness of the eastern corner of her all-white, big-windowed room, a space set apart, perched on a black stand sits a half-shaped clay face resting on a plaster skull. White rubber stick tissue-depth markers cut to different lengths, glued in twelve points of the face; the other nine had been removed. The nose and mouth, shaped and reshaped and taken apart over seven years, were half done and gaped in anticipation of a conclusion. The piece’s eye orbits had worn and discarded all colors of mannequin eyes. Thin strips of clay connected the white pegs on the face and across the cranium. The lattice spaces had been filled and refilled with clay, everything reconstructed from the dark-lit memory of a skeleton and its last-breath gesture. The form had journeyed with herfor seven years, traversed the Americas wrapped in brown paper, waiting for dimensions, nuances, completion, and a name. She had considered it. Stroked the plaster on the unfinished face, the undone muscles. Arabel Ajany had not looked at it when she left.
    All departures are layered. Hers was accompanied by fingers of silence on the lips of at least ninety ghosts. Arrivals. Touchdown at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport against a dawn cliché of a postcard Nairobi sunrise, acacia-in-the-morning scene, the sky red, mauve. An exact sensation of life wafted around the passengers. Kaleidoscope flavors, earth scents, for her a tumble of memories. A mother’s hand sprinkling mixed herbs into water-keeping sheepskin vessels, spicing hair with ghee, cedar body-washes with desiccated acacia bark and leleshwa leaves. A childhood written in aromas.
    At the customs unit, steps toward a queue designated for East African citizens, Ajany was of Kenya again. A dour-looking teak-toned officer with cheap green cuff links on his shirtsleeves stamped the inside page of her blue passport. Thump . “You missed the vote.” He was gruff. “Karibu nyumbani.”
    Baggage hall, and a circuitous trolley roll. A glance at the waiting people. And then, in front of her, out of place because he was so detached, so elegant and tall, was Baba, who stood where the outside world separated itself from the inside mêlée. She remembers the warm light, the clouds that caught the edge of her left eye, the smell of rained-upon earth mingling with smoke and age and dust and sun and cows on her father’s coat. She remembers her head on his shoulder and tears that would not stop. She remembers Baba murmuring, “Ah, nyathina! Ah, nyathina! ” She remembers being safe, and the rhythm of his hands patting her back, a rumbling voice calling her his own.
    Arms linked, they had traveled the road from airport to morgue in Leonard’s yellow taxi, in silence. Baba watched the road, the vein on the side of his head pulsing. Traffic nervy, bumper-to-bumper. Red brake lights spilled onto the wet road, like escaping blood. Whispery breeze. Above, low-hanging telephone wires swung to, fro, to, fro, tar-paint pole to tar-paint pole. Along the road, leftovers of last month’s jacaranda season, the green grass brown-tipped from too-short rains. Next to a lamppost, a purple-pink bougainvillea had wrapped itself around a twisted croton tree. Billboarded faces of presidential candidates and corporatemarketers stained the land; messianic promises on smiley faces, salvation products in shiny packages.
    Leonard had turned knobs to increase the radio volume.
    They heard a menu of vote counts, rumors, accusations, tallying-hall disruptions, and even more fantastic numbers. The rest of the world did not exist. The car swung left, swooped right across an uneven road, and stopped at a gate of peeling