Tropical fish

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Doreen Baingana

The street was hard and hot. Filled with people walking through their lives so purposefully, up and down the street, so in control. But they seemed to be backing away from me. Did I look strange? Was there blood on my dress? The hot, dusty air blown up by the noisy, rushing traffic filled my head like thunder.

Did I want money? What did I want? Bubble baths, gin-and-tonics, ganja sex, the clean, airy white house where I could forget the hot dust outside, school, my all-too-ordinary life, the bleak future? A few hours free from myself. Was that so bad? Had I wanted him to care, of all people? He was trying to be kind, I supposed. I'm sure the only Africans he knew needed money. Six months of sex, and did I want money? What did we want from each other? Not a baby, obviously. Nothing that permanent. Our baby. What a joke. I discarded my baby like I did my body, down a pit latrine crawling with cockroaches.

I waded through the taxi-park bedlam into a matatu, and was squashed up on all sides by strangely comforting fat hips, warm arms, moist breaths. The old engine roared to a start, blocking out the radio's loud wail of Soukous. The driver revved the engine repeatedly to get passengers to come running, as if we were leaving right away, only to sit for another fifteen minutes. The conductor screamed for more people, ordering us to move over, squash up. We all wanted to get home, didn't we? Hawkers pushed cheap plastic into our faces through the windows, their spit landing on our cheeks. The voice of one of them pierced through the noise, pleading insistently for me, me, to buy some Orbit chewing gum for my young children at home. "Aunty, remember the children, be nice to the children!"

We finally moved away, swaying and bumping up and down together with each dive in and out of pot holes, each swerve to avoid the oncoming cars that headed straight toward us like life. I closed my eyes, willing the noise and heat and sweat to recede to the very back of my mind. The glaring sun hit us all.

Doreen Baingana is from Uganda and has made the United States her home for twelve years now. She has an M.F.A. from University of Maryland, College Park, and received an Artist's Fellowship from the District of Columbia Commission of the Arts and Humanities in 2002. Baingana won the 2003 AWP Award in Short Fiction, and she has a collection of short stories forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press.