Dark Well

“A beastly cry tore the morning silence. Kurui’s hand froze on the bookcase in the living room.  He walked outside, with his face unwashed, and still dressed in the faded black polo shirt and grey flannel trousers he had slept in. He stood for a while on the square, earthen depression surrounding the house and looked around. Another cry came along. A human one.

He climbed up the depression and walked across the narrow stretch of kikuyu grass that made the rest of the compound to the home’s horizontal plank fence. Stepping on the purple hearts clustered against the fence, he held onto the planks and looked across the road.

On the other side was Chepkuto, standing next to her hut and dressed only in a tattered skirt. Her naked breasts hung low and still, hibernating like toads, even as she flailed her arms about and kicked clods of earth into the air. She had hurled her faded, Aztec-print blouse on the ground and stomped on it. It now lay crumpled and soiled on a patch of grass next to her. Kurui found it hard to imagine that it was what he mostly saw her in, especially in those evenings they would pass each other along the road as he walked down to the valley.

She shouted,

“Murenju bo Kapsio weeeiii!!! …” – Excerpt