Fiction

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi landed on the literary landscape with her ‘great Ugandan novel’, Kintu, which won the Kwani?

Image credit: Douglas Perkins … The ramen reminded Tabeko of the cove in which she grew up. She held the sides of the  earthenware bowl and imagined they were the sheer mountains that encircled the bay her family home overlooked, a thousand kilometres away from her apartment in Tokyo.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … I’m having a drink on my balcony. The lights from Zürich and surrounding villages coruscate a prism of dreamy colors on the lake. The air is still and there’s no wind.

Image via State Library of Queensland … 'The Window' was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 'Fiction' category. The morning after election night, she was Big News. The Metro had selected a small photo of her, taken from her Facebook page, smiling with her best smile.

Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 Fiction Category …  It’s warm in the shop, the window so wide the whole of the street is beside me. But it could be warmer. A dog’s shat, running into the road to the ice cream van and that huddle of school kids and there’s a sleek black car.

Lydia’s new therapist is all corduroy trousers and flat-heeled sandals. Hair pulled back in a ponytail as if it has been slicked with starch. Brown-rimmed glasses that melt into her face. Mousey, as if she doesn’t want to be a distraction to the Healing Process.

From the harbour she looked like a tiny black beetle scurrying up the hill towards the oblivion of the horizon. The sinews in her thighs burned and her fingers were numb from the bags she carried filled with potatoes, yams, breadfruits and acres of cotton muslin.

‘I need to speak with you, meet me at Al Nuaimi Café in 15 minutes’. Helin wiped the sweat from her forehead using the knuckles of her left hand and checked the time on the phone she held in the other.

Parallel to the Learning Centre there was a playing field, lined and oblong and chopped and trimmed with regularity, bordered with hedges and visible through the classroom windows: apart from a patch at the far corner that had a cluster of cottonwood trees.

Nineteen days of rain – unprecedented, they said – and I could hardly tell it was morning. E, my youngest, was screaming and had me up for four hours the previous night, so I switched her off, laid her on the bed and gently closed the door. The silence a soft blanket around me.

The Heavens Also Weep I call it the day the heavens wept. I’d arrived home unexpectedly and there was my father battering my mother on the kitchen floor. Beyond a sensation of heaviness in the pit of my stomach, three things will ever remain clear about that afternoon.

Sunday afternoon sweltered hot and rainless.  On the cul-de-sac next to the alligator canal, the humidity shimmered off the black tarmac, giving the neatly-trimmed hedges, palms, and ficus trees a fluid, iridescent sheen.  In his computer room in the white three-bedroomed ranch house…

‘I bought you something,’ Duncan said, ‘but you can’t love it.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘That’s the rule,’ he said, and he lifted a blanket off his surprise for me, a little mechanical dog. Its tail and ears were furry but the legs were metallic and its torso was smooth white plastic.

Fritz told me once,  ‘ Be the sea so that you may receive their polluted streams but not become impure.’ … At Elysians, a secure psychiatric unit for adolescents, our days began by lining up for a tiny paper cup.

Look to the rudder. It explains every damn thing. Every damn thing. What will steer the world on an even keel is not the stern, the bow, or the hull. Wake up, boy. Stop dreaming a big fix. Look to the fucking rudder.

  … Gideon’s knife moved softly, swiftly, over the white card. My hair was wet from the post-work shower and I stood way back so as not to splotch my husband’s work. It always looked less like cutting and more like stroking.

It was one of those grey days when even the best plans seem ill fated, Monday and the school holiday. Mum and I were going shopping. She particularly wished to buy me something for the disco on Thursday. I think she felt, having been ill for months, she had neglected me.

The classroom was devoid of its usual liveliness and chatter. The stillness of the air seemed to have had a soporific effect on its occupants. Even the gecko suspended upside-down on the ceiling was stationary. A thick blanket of heat engulfed the room, making it oppressive and stifling.

On the spur of the moment, Scott decided to take a leave of absence from his job, to see Goya's giant tapestry cartoons, among the jewels of the Prado Museum in Madrid. Since his mother's funeral, two months before, he'd been finding it difficult to sit at his cluttered desk.

Samira wanted me to say yes. She’d asked if I could accompany her to an exhibition later that day. Though this was the kind of thing I hated, it was impossible to say no to Samira with my head resting on the softness of her thigh, with her hands twisting my hair into Bantu knots.

Ray … 1. Ray and I got suspended from school for a whole week and we were the only two kids around to enjoy it.

New Delhi and Kot Badal Khan, India; Lahore, Pakistan, August 1967 Poor Raju was having the same dream again. In it, he was once more the boy he had been, aged seven years old. “Water, water!” he demanded in his child’s piping voice, tugging at the man’s arm.

In exactly two months, it would be her ninety-ninth birthday. This they murmured repeatedly, although sometimes she thought it had been only once. Between bouts of dozing, her eyes wandered over the walls and ceiling, often returning to a tiny wisp of abandoned cobweb in one corner.

In this fiction piece, the narrator finds herself falling for her sister's new love interest. Torn between loyalty to her sister and her desire, she struggles to control her emotions.