Football

New short fiction from Ugandan Owen Mushabe

My father’s two-roomed house with a thatched roof is wallpapered with old newspapers. Whoever enters will surely have their attention caught by the headlines from as far as ten years ago. I think this was deliberate. Father, being a man of very few words — of course, except when he’s been ginned by waragi-, wanted something to catch the visitors’ attention for long. This way, they would spend long without talking, engrossed in the news. Sometimes I think that the newspapers are there to help my taciturn father get what to discuss with his visitors to pass time. They like discussing politics. Government officials in the GAVI funds scandal acquitted, Presidential term limits no more and Thirty missing in Bududa mudslides, are some of the headlines.

One wall is entirely covered with sports news. Football. This is the wall that I like. There are pictures of both local and international football stars. Father said that they are paid to play football -it’s a job just like the ones we’re studying to get. Father wants me to become a doctor and my younger brother Kisa a secondary school master. But I have known doctors to be cruel. Take an example of the last time I was suffering from Malaria and Father took me on his bicycle to town. He didn’t take me to the hospital where people are treated for free because,he said,he had been told that there was not even a single tablet. He took me to Doctor Waiswa’s clinic. And I hate injections! “But Father, the fever is not that serious”, I said on seeing Doctor Waiswa get his syringe ready.

“It won’t hurt”, said Father in an assuring tone. He had understood the cause of my worry. I wiggled like an appalled maggot on the bed when the doctor made to push the syringe into my bottom. Father had to grip my twiggy legs by the thighs to calm me. I struggled with all my might to extricate myself from his grip but in vain. The doctor, seeing his work thus interfered with, issued a threat that tamed me right away. He would drive the dreaded instrument into the pupil of my eye if I didn’t stop my games. This threat was closely followed by Father’s words of prophecy that I would then remain with one eye like old Kasolo who lives alone near the towering mvule tree along the path leading to the borehole.

I felt the doctor’s hand as he looked for the perfect mark for his syringe and my blood ran cold. I contracted my buttock muscles. He felt it and implored me to relax them. I tried my best to comply but failed. It was reflexive. I think he must have grown tired of my stubbornness and decided to do his job without fear or favour. A scar on my right buttock lingers on as a lasting reminder of the immense pain I felt then and the wound that developed in the aftermath.

Every time I fall sick and Father hints on taking me to Doctor Waiswa’s , I wake up before the early bird does the next day and ready myself for school. I hate school, I don’t want to become a doctor. I want to become a footballer like those I see on the wall. Father said that a good number of them earn in one week as much money as a Ugandan member of parliament does in a whole year. And the doctor he wants me to become earns less than a decile of what a member of parliament does in a month. Yes. Mr.Isabirye, the Maths teacher, recently taught us about conversion of currencies and we’ve covered calculation of percentages,too. So, I know how to calculate these things.

I think Father likes football. He’s ever listening to sports news, tuning from one radio station to another, from morning to noon when he leaves home to catch up with the boys. He returns home at dusk, staggering and all words. On Saturdays and Sundays, he listens to live broadcasts of Barclays Premier League matches. He’s never told us which team he supports but there are clues. There’s a huge calendar for the year 2005 with pictures of footballers and shallow profiles of theirs. “Those lads knew football. They finished an entire season unbeaten, a feat like no other”, he said when one day I asked him if there was any team in history that had ever won a trophy without a loss. Our school had just won the district football competitions with no loss.

He has a shirt similar to those worn by the footballers in his prized calendar. Let him catch you scribbling your nonsense on that calendar! The other day he caught Kisa standing on the table touching one of the footballers in the face with his mucky hands and gave him a thrashing that he’ll live to narrate to his grandchildren. “Not Henry!” he thundered. “See how you’ve hidden the king’s face”. He sucked his teeth over and over again. That’s the first player whose name I learnt.

I am in hiding because I couldn’t remain at home. Father was cross when he found me in bed on Friday when I was supposed to be at school. He said that I was becoming a hardcore truant. He feinted to chop me with his panga in deathly chafe. He slapped himself on the cheek several times with his eyes closed and then vanished only to come back with a bamboo cane which he fondly refers to as child moulder. A child is moulded while still young and with this, he usually says.

It seems he doesn’t know me! I’m an actor of sorts. I think this is the way to go if football refuses. The way I quaked with my head threatening to break off, my teeth chattering horrifyingly and drool running out of my mouth brought him to an instant halt. I saw the parent in him tremble. He slowly removed the blanket from my body — I was drenched in sweat. He withdrew to the door and clapped his hands once in trepidation. He then ran out. Moments later, he came back with his bicycle which he had lent to our neighbour,Musa. He washed his feet and slid them into his car tyre sandals. I heard him wheel away.

He came back with Panadol and anti-Malarial tablets which he gave me to swallow. As soon as I became sure that he had gone back to the shamba, I pushed two fingers to the soft palate and vomited the drugs out into the basin which he had left by the bedside. Poor father! He could never have thought that I was merely acting because I didn’t want to go to school.

I had to remain in bed for most of the day and painfully forego lunch to make everybody at home agree that I was sick. Me refusing food! The worms in my stomach rumbled with unflagging vitality till supper time when I ate like someone who had spent a week without eating.

I was left behind on Saturday as Kisa and Brian,who were also not going to school because it was weekend and school would resume on Monday, were barked at to hurry to the shamba. Sweet relief! I wish I could accelerate time up to when I’ll be an adult, the burden of going to school no longer on my shoulders.

After lunch, Kisa and Brian disappeared to Musa’s to play football with his sons, Abdul and Yasser. I could hear the noise they made as they kicked the banana fibre ball. It was Yasser and Kisa against Brian and Abdul. The latter were winning because Abdul is so huge that everyone fears colliding with him. Abdul is also the best dribbler — he calls himself Ronaldinho. On other days, I play alongside him against Kisa, Yasser and Brian. Abdul and I have never lost a match — we call ourselves the invisibles. I’m the one who taught all of them this term. Father told me that’s what the footballers on his calendar who finished the season without a loss are called.

The invisibles! But I think that Father had wanted to take advantage of my little age to show me that he knew English. If this wasn’t the case, why did our science teacher laugh boisterously, like that lunatic I saw in the marketplace, last week as he was teaching us about germs and he asked if anybody knew the meaning of the word ‘invisible’? He had said that germs are invisible living organisms that cause diseases. Full of confidence, I raised my hand and heads turned when he asked me to stand up and explain the word to the whole class.

“You see, germs usually encounter no difficulty as they strive to make us ill. Our bodies fight hard but the germs always win. They never lose. They remain unbeaten. That’s why we say that they’re invisible. Invisible means unbeatable”, I elaborated.

Mr.Ouma, who had been staring at me unblinkingly as I spoke, burst out laughing as soon as I sat down. The rest of the class remained quiet. Who knew it? Shya! They only howled when he remarked that I’d used a lot of energy to do nothing. That I wasn’t even one thousand miles close to the answer. “But teacher, what do we call a team that wins a trophy unbeaten?” I asked in protest.

“Oh, I see!” he exclaimed.

“Perhaps invisible has two meanings”, I pressed on.

“No, I know what you mean. Invincible”.

He wrote it on the chalkboard. I copied it to the back of my book. When I returned home in the evening, I rushed to check on the calendar because I thought I had seen that word there. And sure enough at the top in bold red, was written THE INVINCIBLES.

They played football from midday up to seven o’clock when they were forced to stop, by rain. I must have turned like a zillion times in bed, trying to wrestle the greed to get out and join them. That would make everybody at home doubt my sickness. I didn’t want to be viewed as one feigning sickness. On returning home after the seven-hour match,Kisa boasted of having broken the scoring record. He and Yasser had beaten Brian and Abdul by thirty-two goals to twenty-four with Kisa scoring twenty times, two more than the highest in one match by Abdul.

I didn’t stay in bed yesterday. Father advised or rather ordered me to get out and warm myself in the rising sun. I didn’t like the day. But anyway, I’ve never liked Sunday because it precedes Monday, the day for school resumption. Monday means going back to late coming strokes of the cane, fetching water for the school kitchen at break time, weeding the school banana plantation and sitting with a girl on the same desk. I hate sitting with Jessica not just because she’s a girl but also because her father refused to give Father meat on credit on the eve of last Christmas and so we didn’t eat meat on Christmas. That’s why Mother left home for her parents’ home. Who can remain in marriage with a man who can’t afford to buy meat for Christmas?

Father is also somewhat proud. Surely, there’s nothing he would lose if he went to Mother’s home and pleaded for her return. I mean,it wouldn’t cost him a lot. Just two kilogrammes of sugar, two bars of soap, two kilogrammes of rice and a loaf of bread. Instead, he decided to marry another woman and force us to call her mother. ‘Big nose’, as we call her while whispering amongst ourselves as children, was working in one of the bars where Father usually goes before he married her. He wanted to show our real mother that he had plenty of options.

Mother can only be traded for Big nose in a world where everybody can neither see nor hear. The things she does! First of all, she’s a heavy drinker who leaves home at cockcrow, returns at one o’clock in the afternoon for lunch and goes back to drinking for the rest of day. My elder sister Queen, who no longer goes to school because she finished primary seven and no sane man can put his daughter in secondary school, is the one who cooks. You send a girl to secondary school and she comes back home with a child, Father says. He got a justification for this when our neighbour Musa’s daughter, Zamu was expelled from school a week before her senior four mock exams. Zamu had a bun in the oven.

Secondly, Big nose is a notorious fighter who, after drinking herself silly, picks up fights with men in bars. Last night, she came back home with a bruised face and in a tattered dress. Then, the words that fly out of her mouth whenever she’s drunk! Wait, have I ever seen her sober? I even hear that she can’t conceive because her uterus got damaged during one of the numerous abortions she carried out as a teenager. If this is true, then it means that she’ll never have children with Father. I think this explains her cruelty -it must be jealousy. Personally,I would stand her wild manners but not her decree that prohibits us from playing football with Abdul and Yasser. I know it’s because their mother blasted her and denied her refuge the other night when she was running away from her equally drunk husband.

So Big nose threatens to burn our feet with hot plastic if she ever finds us playing football with Yasser and Abdul. But we defy her decree because we’re sure that she’ll never catch us. She’s ever in her waragi, oblivious of whether she’s alive or dead.

The only thing that could separate Big nose and Father is meat, she usually bellows on her way home at night. Of course, she knows that Mother ran away because Father had failed to buy meat for Christmas. Big nose is a vegetarian -therefore we can be sure that she’s here to stay till kingdom come. Currently, I can’t ask Father whether he’s satisfied with her or not. He might pull my ears until they stretch and become like a rabbit’s . I’ll save this question for like ten years to come. However, just like there are clues to which English football club he supports, there are clues to this question’s answer. Father rarely laughs. He never talks but roars. He seldom converses with her. Even when he mingles with his fellow men, he remains standing aloof.

It’s not because of her cruelty nor is it because she’s my stepmother that I wonder why any man with two defectless eyes would marry her. Big nose is the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen. Small eyes that dart here and there like those of an overfed piglet that, despite the belches it is making, is yearning for more. Head shaped like a football. Her nose is shaped like the foot of an elephant, with huge dilated nostrils. There’s no doubt that if one were locked up alongside her in a poorly ventilated room, they would not survive beyond five minutes as her nose would swallow all the oxygen entering the room. The other day during the school assembly, the headmaster — who thinks that he knows a lot — was telling us about the seven wonders of the world and I was prompted to ask myself who declares a particular thing a wonder. They would declare her nose the eighth wonder at first sight.

After lunch, I sat in the shade of the large mango tree in front of our house facing Musa’s house.I fought the urge to get up and join the boys to play football for longer than an hour. I knew that once I joined them,I would no longer be regarded as a sick person. I would be made to do everything just like others, including going to school the next day. Nevertheless, I joined them. Playing alongside Abdul, I scored twenty-two goals and broke Kisa’s record denying him the chance to brag for more than one day. This was because I remained upfront leaving all the donkey work to Abdul who had disappointed me the previous day when he scored six less than Kisa.

Kisa, I think seeking for revenge, announced at supper that I was no longer sick. He told Father and Queen that I had played football with them and even scored the highest number of goals. There’s no way a sick person could play for six hours yelling and running after the ball like a lion chasing an eland. Father didn’t comment but this doesn’t mean that he didn’t hear anything. I knew he would wait to get me today. I would have to go to school.

In the morning when I woke up, I knew that staying in bed pretending to be sick would be suicidal. I am here in the bush, clad in my school uniform, with my bucket of packed lunch which was supposed to be eaten during the lunch break at school and a hoe because it being a Monday, we’re supposed to clear the bush behind the classrooms. I can’t go to school today even if you bring Jesus and he threatens to send me to hell on Judgement day. Although I know that I can’t avoid the canes, postponing them for another day is relieving enough.

If Father gets to know that I have not gone to school today, he’ll think that I’ve spent the day in people’s grazing fields playing football with other truants. He will twist my neck until my head faces backwards. He can’t think that he’s the one behind my refusal to go to school today. I hear that the house we live in is even older than him. Grandfather had built it when he was preparing to marry grandmother and it’s the first house they lived in before their family expanded and he had to build a larger hut. The old hut was never demolished. It remained standing albeit unoccupied until Father, who was the eldest among the boys, moved in. It’s where he spent most of his youth. Time for him to marry came. He saw no need for building a house. All he had to do was renovate the one in which he had been living. Renovating it meant replacing the old thatch with a new one and filling the dents and cracks on the walls with mud. He would take his time to build a new house which he would roof with iron sheets. The era of thatched roofs was clearly coming to an end.

Nearly all the men in our village who are in Father’s age group have houses roofed with iron sheets. Father says that iron sheets do not signify richness. He gibbers that he’s far richer than most of them. Very few of them can afford to feed their families thrice in a day. Even among these, there are some whose skins are about to turn white from eating posho and cassava all year round. Their children are out of school. How rich are they?

Before Mother left, the house was one of those things that usually ignited verbal exchanges between her and Father. Sometimes they started with her exalting men who had been virile enough to build for their wives houses with corrugated iron sheets for the roof. Father would interpret it as an indirect way of referring to him as a woman. Then he would ask her to marry another woman since she thought of herself as a man. If it didn’t culminate in a physical confrontation, Father would sulk and reject supper. The way in which Mother would bolt her food so that she could eat Father’s share right before his eyes was otherworldly.

There’s when Mother would start by complaining about the floor being dilapidated. It had countless depressions and it was awfully dusty. It could be harbouring every manner of vectors. Fleas, mites, bedbugs and lice. She wasn’t ready to be rebuked for neglecting her children to become infested with any of these. She would flee prior to that humiliation. Father never challenged her grumbles about the floor. He said that smearing it with cow dung after wetting it would keep the vectors at bay. This had to be done at the beginning of every month.

I now agree with Mother — the floor is simply irreparable. We’ve been doing the smearing regularly but has it helped? I also want to believe that she’s a prophetess because I’ve had sleepless nights in recent days. I don’t ascribe this to nightmares. Burning feet. They can’t allow me to sleep. Dipping them in cold water does nothing to the heat in them. The pain tempts me to scrape between the toes ceaselessly and rub the feet against the floor throughout the night. My toes are now swollen from the rubbing. Before Thursday, I had started thinking that it was witchcraft. That somebody jealous, perhaps Big nose, had cast a spell over me to impede my studies thinking that I love studying. So, I couldn’t report my condition to her as it’d be gratifying news to her. Father wouldn’t listen to witchcraft talk especially one in which his wife is implicated. Telling him about it would be akin to digging my own grave.

I was planning to pass via church on my way home from school on Thursday to speak to Revuranda about it. I thought a prayer from him would be of the essence. However, I had to give up this idea during the Physical Education session that we held after break time. Break time usually ends at eleven o’clock. Mr.Igeme, our class teacher was in charge. The first task that he gave us was running around the sports field four times.My feet hurt terribly. Limping around the sports field four times was a nightmarish task. He then took us through a few other drills such as sit-ups, push-ups and rope skipping. We had a tug-of-war between girls and boys which was won by the girls. I thought this was an ominous incident but I couldn’t guess what was about to happen.

Mr.Igeme then divided us, the boys, into two groups and asked each group to form a football team. It was obvious that I would be in my group’s starting lineup — I’m a trusted footballer. The excitement of kicking the red and blue-striped UNICEF ball that had been brought by visiting white people the previous week was at its acme. Mr.Igeme blew the whistle and what would have been an enjoyable match kicked off. Barely ten minutes later, came that fateful impact I had with Bogere.

Bogere and I were vying for an aerial from one of his team’s wingers. Being a versatile player, I was playing as a back for my team. I can play anywhere on the pitch apart from the left wing. Bogere was their main striker. I was seeking to clear the dropping ball away — he wanted to fire at the goal. My foot was higher than his. He kicked me right beneath my toes and I bled profusely. Is he not the only one in our class with football shoes? I screeched in pain and everybody on the pitch came running to see what had gone wrong. Even the spectators came.

“Master, Bogere has cut him with his boot spikes. He deserves a red card!” Martin shouted, trying to inform Mr.Igeme who was still on his way to the scene.

The pupils made way for Mr.Igeme as soon as he arrived at the scene. He squatted and asked Martin to lift my leg so that he could see how serious the injury was. From his first aid box, he got cotton wool and gave it to me to clean my foot. He asked Bogere, the offender, to run to the kitchen and come back with a small Jerry can of water for washing the foot before he could dress the cut. “But hey, your toes seem to be swollen”, he remarked while standing, waiting for Bogere.

“Master, that kick was malicious”, Martin quipped. “A red card is surely not enough. Bogere should be banned from playing football for a whole term”.

The water was brought. I washed my foot. Mr.Igeme squatted again to look at the cut. He stood up almost immediately, his hands at the back of his head. His eyes were closed. We looked at one another in bewilderment. “God,let it be an illusion. I don’t want to castrate someone’s son”, he said after a minute long silence.

We thought that he had been terrified by the seriousness of the injury. He went down again, this time holding my foot with his hands and peering at it. He released it and examined the other. He stood up, closed one eye and slapped himself on the cheek. This wasn’t an unfamiliar signal. It usually precedes him asking the class monitor to run and fetch a cane from the staffroom. Bogere started trembling — he knew that he was about to face the music for his foul play.

“Master, what is it?” asked John, the class monitor, as soon as the teacher’s eye landed on him and didn’t seem to move away.

“Someone’s rotting. But don’t ask any more questions before doing what you’re supposed to do”, Mr.Igeme replied. John sprinted off. There were confused stares as the teacher fell silent until John returned with the cane. “You neglect your feet to be eaten away by jiggers?” he thundered.

“Jiggers?” the class chorused. Then, everybody moved a few steps backwards as if they were afraid of contracting some horrible contagious disease.

So it has been jigger infestation all along! I looked around — thirty three pairs of eyes on me. Infinitesimal is how I felt. I mumbled a prayer to God, begging Him to let the ground open and swallow me. I think I should’ve used a microphone.

Mr.Igeme ordered the rest of the pupils to form pairs and examine eachother’s feet. At the end of the exercise,I had a breather for I was joined by Joseph,Fred,Mary and Madina. The rest of the class encircled us and sang ‘Shame on you,big boys and girls’.

They were asked to queue up. Each of them was to flog us with all their strength. That meant that my colleagues and I were each going to swallow twenty-eight strokes of the cane from our classmates. The teacher would administer his dose later. Jessica, my seatmate was asked to open the ceremony with a threat that if she beat me with the slightest sympathy, she would have to swallow the lashes on my behalf. I don’t want to think that it’s this threat that energised her. I often hear that her father was a soldier before he retired into slaughtering cows and denying people meat for Christmas. Soldier blood must be flowing in her veins.

We were saved by the timekeeper who rang the lunch bell. The teacher asked Fred, Joseph and I to sit in a secluded place and remove jiggers from one another’s feet using compasses or dividers. Madina and Mary were to do the same. We would then look for him and show him our feet.

The staffroom was packed to capacity when Mr.Igeme led us in. The teachers had finished their lunch but none of them seemed to mind about the time in spite of the fact that the bell for after-lunch lessons had gone ten minutes earlier. They were busy gossipping. “Doctors, I’ve brought patients”, said Mr.Igeme. “And they need the attention of all of us present”.

“Doctor Igeme, what are they suffering from?” asked Mr.Ouma, his face beaming. The whole school knew and dreaded him. Nobody desired to ever get in his way. He’s the reason why Isanga dropped out of school. He whipped the boy until his buttocks swelled up and he could not sit. After spending a week home nursing the injuries, Isanga escaped from home because he didn’t want to go back to school. You might think that Isanga had committed a sacrilege to deserve that lashing. No, just because he had stolen from Isiko’s bucket of packed lunch, moreover one cassava tuber.

“Jiggers”, Mr.Igeme replied. All the teachers stood up as though they were about to sing the national anthem. There’s one thing that they forgot to do -closing the door. As all of them scrambled to the corner where the bundle of sticks is kept to pick the ‘medicine’, I darted out of the staffroom. I wasn’t ready for what was coming. Gang-flogging. I ran to the latrines and through the hole made by latecomers and escapees in the fence, I escaped to safety. I don’t know what happened to the patients who were too frail to follow suit.

Friday was the last day for lessons. I had to find a way of dodging school to avoid gang-flogging. So, I feigned sickness and stayed home. I know that once the end of term exams commence, most of the teachers won’t be coming to school. Some of the present few will be somewhere in classrooms too busy marking pupils’ papers to be drawn into the syndicate flogging nonsense. There’s no way I can evade the flogging but I’m sure there won’t be more than four teachers in the staffroom at a time. And not all of them might be interested. Therefore, I’ll swallow way fewer lashes than I would on a normal day.

Normally,exams commence on a Tuesday. The Monday before is always a day of no studying. It’s when the pupils who haven’t paid school fees to completion are sent home to fetch the balance. Ms.Edith, the deputy headteacher who doubles as the bursar, moves from class to class reading out the names of the debtors. Luckily, Father has paid fully. My name won’t be read. So,my absence won’t be detected unless Mr.Igeme himself comes looking for me. This is highly unlikely because men rarely stick to one thing. He could’ve already forgotten about it.

I’m lucky that Kisa and Brian, my brothers, go to a different school together with Yasser and Abdul and somehow, the rumour hasn’t reached them. They would have used it as an insult against me when Abdul and I defeated them in yesterday’s football match. It’s also by God’s grace that Father’s yet to hear about it. I hate to imagine the kind of punishment he would give me just for dodging school. Truancy is one of the capital offences according to his constitution that governs us all. It carries a maximum sentence of burning with hot plastic. He pushes a long stick into a plastic bottle and holds it above fire until the plastic softens and starts dripping. Having tied your hands and feet with strong kamba, he lets the lava-like substance fall on your legs or arms. I’ve never tasted it but he did it to Brian when Big nose accused him of stealing sugar,which is strictly for visitors.

The five o’clock bell goes. School is over for the day. I can now get out of my hideout and go back home. Nobody will tell that I haven’t been at school. I pick my hoe and my lunch bucket and crawl out of the thick shrubbery onto the road. I look left and right to find out if anybody has seen me. Fortunately, I don’t see anyone. Something springs to mind. Mr.Igeme uses this route as he goes home on his old Quinqui motorcycle. He might see me and offer me a lift home. God loves me! I’ll pass through people’s farms until I get to the borehole where we usually draw drinking water from, pass via old Kasolo’s hut and turn left, eventually reaching home from the direction of the latrine.

I can smell a rat. It’s quite rare for Father to be home at this time of the day. I’m a few metres behind the latrine but I can hear his husky voice as he raps Queen for delaying porridge. It seems we’ve got a visitor. Otherwise, what would the porridge be for? I swagger on after a momentary pause and sneak into the kitchen. I want Queen to brief me about what’s going on. “Queen, how has your day been?” I ask her in whisper. She doesn’t get up from her squatting position, blowing into the fire to rekindle the dying embers. There’s too much smoke, she chokes and looks up. She doesn’t say a word. She’s probably too tired or irate to talk. I know Father can become a pain in the neck. That nitpicker. “You! Didn’t you hear me?” I ask.

“Wako, where have you been?” she asks in a tremulous voice.

“At school”.

“Well, you have a visitor”.

I haven’t been expecting any visitor. Our house has only one door, the only entrance and exit. If it had a backdoor,I would enter and peep through the torn window curtain to see who the visitor is. I tiptoe to the upper corner of the house to catch a glimpse of the visitor. Father accidentally collides with me as he negotiates the corner on his way to the kitchen to check on the porridge. “Sorry”, I say. He treads on unbothered by the collision. He suddenly stops and looking over his right shoulder, growls, “You! You have a visitor”. I narrow my eyes in consternation. Father makes an about turn. He does it as perfectly as those army people. It seems he has cancelled his trip to the kitchen. He makes three long strides and grabs my bony arm. He drags me along to the front of the house.

“Father, I haven’t stolen your…” I protest but my voice dies out as soon as I clap my my eyes on the visitor. God loves me not!

His old Quinqui motorcycle is parked in the mango tree shade. He’s sitting in the blue plastic chair that Father bought on last month’s market day. His eyes are fixed on the grass thatch of our house. He needn’t have come. What would he lose if he waited for tomorrow? I open my mouth to say my last prayer and also repent but no words come out. I decide to pray in my heart but I can’t concentrate. Fear grips me because I realise I’m at the gate of Gehenna.

Owen Mushabe is a Ugandan short story writer, poet and playwright. His passion for writing dates back to his early years at Rwendahi Primary School where, as a Library Prefect, he had unrestricted access to storybooks that stirred up his interest in writing. Furthermore, his love for storytelling is a notable result of the years he spent with his grandfather who regaled him and other children with tales from the past.