By the time Neeli met Hassan he was a nobody. His last successful film was almost a decade ago and even that hadn’t gone beyond two weeks at the box office. He didn’t get invited to the annual award functions, wasn’t part of any film associations, and had slowly slipped through the cracks, well on his way to invisibility.
“It takes so damn long to get anywhere in Florida,” Lidia said then bit her lip and saw that her boyfriend, mouth hung open, was sleeping, in the passenger’s seat. She stepped on the gas, revving the RPM gauge on the Swedish sedan up to six thousand revolutions. Even before the halfway point on Alligator Alley, all the decent radio stations started scratching static so she shut it off; in the quiet and desolation she could appreciate the engine’s steady hum. Manolo had fallen asleep as soon as they’d left Dade County and it was getting dark.
I hated Boones, but Dev always got a bottle for Val anyway. Me with the cool sister who came home from SDSU for long weekends and bought us booze with her fake ID as long as we promised we’d only drink at home. That was fine by me and Val—Dad was usually traveling for medical conferences and Val basically lived at our house anyway.
Did I clarify that it was New Year’s Day? That the kiss was my mother’s last gift? She was dying of cancer. Breast, though no one but me and a doctor from a different island knew. I wasn’t allowed to tell a soul because cancer of the breast or the uterus or any of the part of the body we call private, intimate, sexual—the parts we use for love—cancer there was a shameful thing. And so I boarded that plane and climbed onto that bus, heading to my own death, knowing I’d likely never see my mother again.
When the mind is at rest the body shouts its demands. Furo Wariboko, back on the streets of Lagos, now realised how hungry he was. Weak with it, his head aching, stomach juices churning, his breath reeking with it. He considered his options. He had eight hundred naira left from the money he’d borrowed from Ekemini, and that amount would just about cover a meal at Mr Biggs, the cheapest of the fast food chains. But he was reluctant to spend everything. Thus far he had refused to spoil his happy mood by thinking about where next to go, where to sleep tonight, but somewhere behind the wall of his mind he knew there was no going back.
You still can’t believe that you have your passport to heaven and it has been stamped. A glance at the desperate faces waiting in a long line at the embassy makes you smile. Their fate is still in the hands of Americans. You pity these people. You are a hundred times better than them, especially the ones with oversize scarecrow suits hanging on their emaciated shoulders. Then there are the hopefuls with bend-bend black shoes covered in fine dust the colour of Ibadan rusted roofs. The ones who have been in the queue since 4am, eating only bread and akara washed down with bottles of warm coke or tap water wrapped in nylon bags. You shake your head. They all remind you of a column of ants marching towards a single grain of sugar.
Kweli is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by readers like you and by grants from organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts, Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Amazon Literary Partnership and the Whiting Foundation.
Kweli Journal is supported in part by an American Rescue Plan Act grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support general operating expenses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
