Free The Dig by Michael Siemsen

liked that his skin was as pale as a Londoner’s, and unblemished. She could tell he had been trying to grow a beard of sorts, probably for the past few weeks. His dirty-blond locks were tousled, though she had a feeling he wouldn’t especially care. This was a man with bigger things on his mind than his hairdo.
    “Can I get you anything, ma’am?” asked the flight attendant.
    Tuni was surprised to feel a little awkward at having just been caught looking as if she were admiring him.
    “No, thank you, not right now. Will there be food at some point?”
    “Of course, whenever you like.”
    Right, of course. It wasn’t as if there were a schedule and two hundred people to serve. “Very well. I’ll wait until Matthew wakes up, and eat with him.”
    The flight attendant smiled and raised her eyebrows at Tuni before walking away. Tuni felt a vague ruffle of annoyance at the thought that the woman assumed she was smitten with her dozing charge.
    Tuni wondered how her cat, Mr. Pups, was getting on without her. She had given her neighbor the key and asked him to feed him and change his litter box. Randall had two kitties of his own, and she trusted him with Pups. Who knew what else he was doing in her apartment, though. Hopefully not going through her skivvies drawer! Ugh, a wispy little bachelor like him… She wouldn’t be surprised. She would have to remember to launder everything on her return.
    She did not look forward to her return to Africa. Her last time there, she was a gangly eight-year-old, living with her mum—Dad was out of the picture long before. Their house was no shack, but the menu did often come down to beans and cornmeal sadza when times were tough.
    Fortunately, after they had moved in with her aunt’s family in London, things got much better. In her memory, if not that of others, her awkward phase turned out to be an awkward decade. And standing several centimeters above her classmates, it was impossible to blend into the background. The downfall of many a lanky girl, she used the “hunch” technique to fit in. Mum loved to pull out the old photo albums. “Just look at you now …” she would say. But Tuni knew what she was really saying: “Good God, look at you then! ” Blossoming in her late teens seemed to have a lasting effect on her self-esteem. Even now at 31, when a man or group of men gave her the old reow, hey baby… routine, her first thought was— If only you knew what I really looked like .
    “Hey, they gonna feed us at some point?” Matt was awake. She offered him a piece of gum. “No, I’m good,” he declined.
    “Really?” she replied with raised eyebrows.
    He frowned and then realized why she had offered. “Oh, sorry—the breath of doom after sleeping, huh? I’ll take one.”
    She smiled, close-lipped.
    “They’ll feed us anytime we like. I take it you’re hungry?”
    “Yeah, aren’t you?”
    “Oh, sure,” she said breezily, as if it hadn’t really occurred to her. Her belly gave a quiet moan, and she shifted to silence it.
    A short time later, the attendant rolled their food to them on two little carts with locking wheels. It was chateaubriand—lovely, nothing at all like airline food.
    The pilot poked his head out to say they’d be descending soon.
    “Oh, are we there already?” Matt asked, pulling up his sleeve to look at his watch.
    “We stop briefly in Accra for fuel and shots and then cross Africa to Nairobi, with no further stops. How is your meal?”
    “It’s great,” Matt replied. “What shots?”
    “Oh, the usual immunizations: malaria, hep. B, and so on. You apparently didn’t have time back in the States.”
    Matt felt the icy fingers of panic. He could not do shots. He took a deep, shaky breath and tried to hold back the tears already pooling in his lower lids.
    “Hey, you okay?” Tuni reached across and touched his shoulder.
    He turned his head so she couldn’t see him.
    “I’m just not big on shots, is all. Nobody said anything