Read Online Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor - Free Book Online Page B

bit hard into her tongue until its blood filled her mouth. Some of the blood seeped out of her mouth; some of the blood she swallowed. And when Odidi saw what she had done to herself, he started to cry. It was the first time she had seen him cry, and the feeling was the worst pain she had ever known in her life.
    “See,” she lisped, opening her mouth, “Ahh ohhkeh.” I’m OK .
    Below them, the world eased by.
    Later that night, after being force-fed by Galgalu, Ajany sat on her bed and waited for the house to become still. She then skulked down the stairs and found the embers of her work in the hearth. The heat evaporated Ajany’s tears.
    Nothing was ever said about her artwork again. But when Odidi and Ajany returned to school in the middle of January, once they were inside the school gates, Odidi said, “ ’Jany, you’ll paint.”
    She had stared at the soil.
    Odidi shook her. “You must paint.”
    She had shaken her head.
    Odidi pinched her jaw, lifting her face, his eyes deep and clear. He said, “I say you paint, silly, or I take you back to your tree now.”
    “Can’t.”
    “Can.”
    “Don’t know how to start.”
    “Try.”
    “Everything burned.”
    “Silly, paint a river out of Wuoth Ogik. Then paint an ocean and a ship, and inside the ship, me and you going Far Away.”
    Ajany had turned and run into the art studio, retrieved last term’s unfinished canvases and hardened paint. She could already hear the sound of ocean waves, and inside the waves, she saw the color yellow-white screaming at the color indigo blue.
    Now.
    Ajany pushes away from the hearth. Racing away from old words, and from the waning memory of the actual pitch of a brother’s voice.
    A small corridor leads into the narrow kitchen, which opened into a womblike alcove.
    Memory maps within an old house.
    Details.
    Details help with forgetting.
    Here was a long-drop toilet with its shower that was open to the elements and also used by bird-sized moths. There, to the left, a gate swung out to uneven stone trails that stopped where food used to be cooked on open fires fueled by livestock dung, paraffin, and desert kindling. Vestiges of numerous herbs and spices and a row of smoked, drying, putrefying flesh. Fodder for so many journeys.
    The shelves are empty now.
    There, Akai had slaughtered goats, sheep, lambs, cows with the precision of a dispassionate executioner. Cool. Contemptuous of Ajany’s penchant for sliding into a mourner’s crouch at the sound of a victim’s pathetic bleating, the memories of which Ajany would regret as she chomped on and chewed up soft, spiced meat chunks.
    No blue fires today.
    To the right, a nine-step stone stairway splits into two at the top, separating bedrooms from two windowless bathroom toilets.
    Next door, the library-study, a family room with functional furniture, a huge, frayed brown couch, a long oval table of dark wood and hard metal extensions with grooved chinks that held homemade beeswax candles that extended and sometimes replaced the night kerosene lamps’ orange light. Memories of long, flickering shadows pouring out of nooks, seduced by naked firelights. A rough shelf laden with the weight of Someone Else’s Baudelaire, George Sand, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Carle Vernet, Flaubert, encyclopedia, and books on engineering, empire, and agriculture. Books on flowers, trees, birds, animals, and hunting. Jack London’s Call of the Wild . One black-leather-covered Holy Bible. Ajany can select a book and name it by smell alone.
    Musty-earthy: The Flowers of Kenya .
    Fingers run across book spines.
    Tactile familiarity.
    A gap, an uneven bump; the rhythm is off.
    Some books are missing. She looks. Crusty clove and fecund green smells: the engineering and agriculture books—Odidi’s preferences. Ajany pulls out a large gray History of Art and turns to the first blankpage. There “Hugh Bolton” has scrawled his name in semi-cursive script. Most of the books had once belonged to