Free Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Hugh Bolton. Odidi had nicknamed Hugh Bolton “Someone Else.” “Whose books are these?” Odidi asked his parents one day. Akai-ma had snarled, “Someone else’s.”
    Someone Else . As Ajany’s hand hovers over the book, her mind replays a humid evening when the family sat in this room. In the armchair, Baba gripped the edges of the Dhouay-Rheims Bible as his lips moved, spelling out words letter by letter, unease furrowing his face, as if he were memorizing a damning verdict in an alien language.
    It had been a good time for Ajany to show off her improved reading skills. Drawing in breath, she spelled out: “H-U-G-H, Hugg, Huff … Baba, what’s a Hug-g B-Bolton?”
    Nyipir’s head had almost jumped out of his neck. In one move, he dropped the Bible, surged up, strode over, and snatched the book from Ajany’s hands, snapping it shut. In a shredding tone he said, “Brush your teeth. Go to sleep. It’s late. You, too, Odidi.”
    Ajany had run out of the room, down the steps, and into the living room and thrown herself behind a settee. Odidi found her there. He crawled in next to her, let her weep into his shoulder. “I c-can’t never get the spellings right,” she mourned.
    Odidi had said, “ ’Jany, ’Jany, don’t cry.”
    She had wept until she fell asleep in her brother’s arms.
    Now.
    Ajany rustles book pages, sitting cross-legged between a gramophone and a Lamu chest, next to which lie three elephant tusks and moth-eaten sheepskin rugs. In the room, four leso s in a heap, a curved horn on which fat white cows with slanted eyes are painted in brown, gold, and white, Ethiopian Orthodox art, wood etchings, and landscape watercolors. A twenty-by-forty-centimeter painting titled The Last of the Quaggas . On the eastern wall, a still-flaking depiction of a green robed Saint George conversing with a resigned gold-sashed, golden-fire-sworded Archangel Uriel with only a quarter of his grandeur intact, victim of the brown dirt trails of termite nests.
    A creak and grumble from one of two massive water tanks sitting on platforms and posts inside the roof. They had leaked for years, creatinga grooved, reliable wide tear line that sustained the life of small things. Ajany disturbs a small cloud of insects as she wanders out. She falters outside Odidi’s room.
    Odidi .
    Crossing time, she trudges in, looks around, glimpsing shadows of brother that slice into her heart, her stomach. No tears. Ajany sits on Odidi’s low acacia-wood bed, rearranging its grimy, thin floral cover. Dust of spaces. In the wall recesses that served as his cupboard, emptiness. Ajany folds herself into his old bed and curls into a ball, hands clinging to feet, as she remembers the things that make a brother: Voice. Deep-seeing eyes. His music—old fashioned Afro-rumba. Franklin Boukaka, Fundi Konde, Mzee Ngala. Addiction to water songs—a liturgy of flowing, bubbliness. Even the camels listened to him. Rockdrill laughter, excavating terror; salt in soup; no sugar in tea made from rangeland herbs. Sign of the cross before converting a try—Shifta the Winger’s trademark. Soaring out of bed to meet the sun, shaking his sister awake and making her join him in watching sunspots grow and grow. Whistling. Odidi lying on warmed-up stones to witness the evening’s departure. Large arms—wings, really—that engulfed fear. Words suggesting Obarogo and then vanquishing the bogeyman in the same breath. Heartbeats. This is my brother . And then, in dreams, she has returned to Wuoth Ogik and Odidi is shouting from akwap a emoit —the land of antagonists—that she hurry to watch the advent of a moonlit indigo night.
    The Kalacha dusk will soon descend in colors borrowed from another country’s autumn. Cattle will low their way home, bells clanging; white Galla goat kids in the boma will raise a chorus in answer to Galgalu’s whistling. Barking herd dogs; bleating fat-tailed, black-faced sheep. Nyipir will watch his animals return, greeting