Free Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey

inhabitants of the streetless city might escape and spread out over unknown and at times dangerous roads. In his dreams he sometimes lived in the streetless city.
    He often went to see Petite-Guinée on nights when he was feeling low. He enjoyed finding himself in this bar, with its decor of hazy nights warmed by the soft light of the lampshades and the barman’s unchanging, practised gestures: serving, refilling, clearing away the glasses, rinsing his hands, placing them on the counter, offering a smile to a new customer who had adjusted his itinerary to include the bar.
    The barman smiled at him. “What’s your pleasure, Askia?”
    â€œWhatever.”
    â€œWhich, if I’m not mistaken, means whisky?”
    Askia stared at the glass, then drained it in one go. His fingers strolled over the varnished wood of the bar. He tapped on the smooth surface. There was some Miles Davis playing. The notes drifted up from behind the bar. Miles’s “Bye Bye, Blackbird” rose like a joyful, translucent requiem.
    Petite-Guinée arrived — his small, unobtrusive body, the slowness of his movements, the wrinkles in his smiling face. Askia realized that he had no more than an abstract, fragmentary idea of the book of his friend’s life: Born in Montmartre, a happy childhood spent in a choirboy’s surplice serving Mass at the Sacré-Coeur, an unhappy adolescence spent with the shame of having a collabo as a father, his youth spent as a roving seaman trailing his quest through the ports of old Europe. Adulthood brought him a career as a mercenary, the love of his life dead in the jails of Conakry, the return to Montmartre, dark years, alcohol and depression, a bistro bought with the proceeds from his contracts, old age, art as a way to forget. That was all Askia knew. The rest didn’t matter. Petite-Guinée, agile despite his age, perched himself on a nearby stool. Askia gave him an account of the fire at the loft and the past few nights.

27
    THE PARKING lot. Deserted, dark, cold. He climbed into his cab and pulled his coat tight around his body. Sleep. At least an attempt at sleep. His foot nudging the accelerator. He told himself it would be a blessing to hit the gas and leave. His thoughts turned to Olia. She must be wondering where he was. He tried to conjure her up. Alone, the girl from Sofia, on this very sad, very beautiful night.
    He imagined her. Sitting on the sofa, her gaze hovering vacantly over her books of photographs, the posters of her idols on the walls, the cups of coffee she had probably drunk, hoping something new would come up on this dull night spent searching yet again for Sidi’s portraits, to the point of exhaustion.
    Then he visualized her, the photographer, lying on the sofa with a book over her face to shield her eyes from the light, her feet resting on the box of a pizza that she had had trouble finishing. She had left the lights on because in the dark the zombies would come out to frighten her with their half-burned faces. She could not sleep. Because as soon as she shut her eyes, what she saw was terrifying. Masked heads smashing her door down, ripping the photos of her idols off the living room walls, carrying them off to be burned in a city square. She stood up and tried to stop them. She blocked the way with her thin body, but the masked men took away the pictures of Richard Wright, Ella Fitzgerald, Malcolm X, and the others. They went up to the mezzanine and scoured it until they found Sidi’s portraits. They shouted:
    â€œWe’ve got him!”
    â€œIt took a while but we’ve got him!”
    â€œHe thought he could hide in the stillness of a few black-and-white pictures!”
    He pictured Olia, eyes open, scanning the ceiling the way he would sometimes do. From time to time she heard footsteps on the stairway and hoped it was someone who had come to visit her. But the steps stopped one floor below and she concluded that it was her