Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 8
Kerit
Alex Moonn
He is teaching me back.
Colonial Kenya, 1924. For twelve years Kimathi has been translating the real Africa into an adventure tourists can buy, and he still counts the distance that killed his brother: two hundred meters between the ward for Africans and the hospital with the medicines. Boston architect Arthur Whitmore wants to see the real thing. His wife Margaret, a natural history teacher, knows exactly what she is looking for in Nandi territory: the creature behind seventeen documented attacks since 1902. Kimathi should have turned the job down.
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Juma’s son still had no name.
He had told me that on the first night in camp, while preparing the fire. The boy was born early, before expected, and Juma wanted to meet him before choosing the name. “A name is a weight,” he said, pushing a log into the flames. “I need to see his shoulders before I know what he’ll carry.” He was twenty-two, had been working since he was sixteen. Half of what he earned went to his family in Kisumu. He sang while carrying loads, which irritated the others, but which I — though I’d never said so — thought was one of the most courageous things I had witnessed. Singing while you carry the weight another man put on your back.
Juma left to urinate at eleven fifteen. By eleven thirty I knew.
English edition, available on Amazon.
