"Pity the poor Moxx of Balhoon" (photo by Flickr user squacco)

Feel like doing some weirdo time warp mash-up? That’s cool. There would be a dial for that. You’d just select some combo like a Charles Dickens and Mary Pickford sandwich, and blammo—you got it. Want a Hulk Hogan golden shower while Betty White spits peach pits at your face? That’s totally sick, but now insanely possible. You dig?

Are you imagining it? Good. Because here’s my theory: we get these magic time machine sex machines out there on the market and price them like whatever gaming console is currently popular. That’s step one. Step two: inundate the market with ads, testimonials, and soft core porn—all declaring the awesomeness of the product. Step one and step two ought to culminate in step three: everyone with half a genital buys one—maybe even two, just so that they have a back-up in case the first one breaks. Step four: everyone is getting laid in extremely satisfying and creative ways, then bragging to all of their friends. (Hey Alex, did you know that I totally did Martha Stewart in one of her weirdo Halloween get-ups that she wears on her magazine covers while Shakespeare and Ross Perot took turns spanking me? Dude, it was awesome.) All of this leads to glorious step five: total world peace.

What about cruel dictators whose genocidal tendencies threaten the very existence of whole races/ethnicities/etc? Not to worry! There is no way that they will be able to find time to address such grim matters now that they find themselves scampering about in enormous diapers, holding oversized lollipops, and crying to be changed by Cindy Crawford, Julia Roberts, and Julia Child.
What about the moral majority? Please. The morals will go straight out the window once they can actually convince someone to sleep with them. Praise-a-thons will be on permanent hiatus while they drunkenly cavort with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Talk about a “baked Alaska.”

Ok, I don’t know what that last part meant—some sort of Palin sex reference? Whatever. Let’s keep this thing moving.

What I do know is that suicides will most likely also cease. Feel like you’re a big ol’ sack of crap? Probably won’t once all the stars of Twilight reveal that they are warm for your form. “Team Jacob” or “Team Edward?” Bitch, please. Can you say double team? That’s what I’m talking about. Bam! Making this thing happen.

Pretty much the only group that is still going to be annoying is little kids. They will still suck. I know that that is a bummer. We’re working on that. We’re thinking about some kind of aging machine that could just grow them up super fast, something like genetically modifying them the way we do vegetables. Get them big fast. That would minimize the unpleasant years of parenting and the burdens of their endless pointless inquiries about the world. Blah, blah, blah, why is that lady pooping? Whose ugly dog is that? Why am I such a boring kid with no friends? Blah, blah, blah. Something about the moon and a puddle and reasons why you don’t swallow gum. No one really has the patience for that stuff.

Failing all else, we could probably pump them full of tranquilizers, hook them up to feeding bags and just set them aside until they are eighteen and legal. Supermarket tantrums and late night bedwettings? Not likely.

Emily Brontë, sex goddess

When the world is good, I’m going to kick back in my skankiest tube top and order me up some Johnette Napolitano (that’s the chick from Concrete Blonde, for those of you who are not as cool and indie and retro as me), some Rachel Maddow, some fucking Brangelina Jolie Pitt. I’m going to order Marilyn Monroe in a corset, Chloë Sevigny in her big crazy boho 70s sunglasses, and Winona Ryder is going to steal the clothes right off of me. Oh man, and then there is that little minx Judy Holliday, and that tarantula of a woman Joan Jett. God, and Emily Brontë was probably a good time—way better than preppy Miss Austen and her polite little tea set. And hey, let’s throw in the big pervs and see what they’ve got? A little dalliance with Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, or Howard Stern? Howard, I’m going to narrate the way I fuck you on your radio show and you’re going to like it. You will reward my high school listenership with mind-blowing oral and a stunningly tender buttocks massage.

Ok, you get the picture. I know that you are ready for a better world—a world free of bad economies, bad debts, bad cheap food, bad clothes you bought before realizing they were ugly as hell, bad dates with bad losers in which you go to see bad movies starring bad actors behaving badly toward bad others. I know you want the change. I know you want the magic time machine sex machine. I know that you need it. I know you want to finally buy heart-pounding, aneurysm inducing, sextastic sex! Not “ok I’m a hooker and you paid, so go ahead” sex. Not “fine, we’re married so I guess I owe it to you” sex. Not awkward or shy sex. No—liver popping, ovary stomping, kick you in the back of the neck, reckless feckless totally amped up to the max SEX. Glowing, shining, glossy like a prize-winning pony SEX. Say it with me! Preach it to me! Glory be to the sexy! All hail my sweaty lusty sisterhood and brotherhood and transhood!

And don’t forget to pay shipping and handling.

–

Sarah Sorensen’s work has most recently been published online or in print at Identity Theory, Apt, The Battered Suitcase, Knee-Jerk, The Ear Hustler, Metazen, Staccato, and Bastards and Whores. She likes cats, tats, and coffee.

Outside her shared dorm room, down the hallway, a coed screamed playfully. Nkoyo turned away from the blank document toward the shut door. Maybe she would be able to concentrate better if she got away from the dormitory? But she knew that would only be an excuse; she was procrastinating. Another boisterous cry from somewhere in the corridor, however, finally convinced her otherwise.

"Nigerian Student" (photo by Flickr user iEARN-USA)

Closing her notebook, she deposited the device and the three Chinua Achebe novels that her paper was supposed to critique into her Texas Tech backpack. Nkoyo entered the hallway and walked towards the lift.

The elevator carried her to the top floor where she exited. To get to the rooftop though, one had to forego the lift and walk the last flight of unadorned stairs. No students were allowed on the roof, but Nkoyo guessed no one would be out monitoring. No one would fret about a lonely female literature major salting herself away for the afternoon on an unused rooftop.

An autumn zephyr welcomed her immediately as she stepped out onto the barren rooftop of the twelve-story high structure. She unfurled the arms of her red hoodie to block the wind. Nkoyo quickly found her normal writing spot near the building’s industrial-sized air ducts. Comfortable, she removed her books and laptop. Another gust of wind blew westerly, rustling the highlighted pages of the topmost stack of used books.

She picked up her copy of Things Fall Apart and thumbed through the pages listlessly, blankly until she came to last page with Achebe’s black-and-white portrait.

Nkoyo sighed.

Admitting that she thought Achebe’s prose not worth analyzing in depth had surprised her professor. The frail lecturer could not understand why Nkoyo would not want to write on this world-renown author of her own nation. Was there any better known African writer? the lecturer had questioned. But Nkoyo was used to such silent admonishments: when her father had carried their family to London to work with the oil giants, her college professors had also not understood why such a bright girl like Nkoyo could not seem to embrace such a cultural treasure. Surely all Nigerians loved Achebe. Not this one, she would think to herself. Nkoyo was going through a fin-de-siècle phase, where if the writer was not a realist and not dead by at least a century, then she was not interested. She would have taken a lesser work by de Maupassant, Galdós, or even Fontane over any of Achebe’s supposed bests.

Now that her father had been relocated to Irving, Texas, she had followed the family again dutifully and ended up in some place called Lubbock for her masters’ degree. Here, the water was not safe to drink, and the air smelt of burnt tires in the summer. Lagos had a similar smell, she would occasionally remind herself.

Nkoyo had attempted to be conciliatory to her new professor. If they insisted that she critique someone from her native continent, how about Tayeb Salih, or even better, Coetzee? she had suggested. Neither of those had esteemed her to Nkoyo’s instructor: one was too Arabic, and as for Coetzee—did he even count, an Afrikaner?

Also, Nkoyo’s ethnic group was Yoruba and Achebe’s Igbo, but that actually mattered little to her, cosmopolitanized girl that she was, half raised in London, half in Lagos. She had even met Achebe once. Her father’s wealth had allowed them to move through the type of social class that inevitably draws in national literati from time to time.

—Our daughter aspires to be a writer, Nkoyo’s father had said after dragging her away from her peers.

The family was celebrating their last evening in Lagos before the big move to London. The city’s socialites had gathered at their downtown loft. Achebe had been dragged along by one of these affected souls, unwillingly. But the bookish man was experienced enough to know not to fight his public role:

—A youthful woman author, strong and confident, that would surely mix up the old club of writers here in Nigeria, Achebe responded, shaking hands with the fifteen-year-old Nkoyo.

Achebe knew immediately when he was in the midst of an unforgiving critic. The precocious glint off Nkoyo’s eyes told him so.

—And who is your favorite author then? Achebe continued.

Nkoyo did not answer immediately, so her father, standing behind her, squeezed her shoulder, indicating that she stop playing the boarding school brat and respond to this living national icon in front of her.

Deviously, Nkoyo smiled:

—I love Conrad.

Before Achebe could answer, Nkoyo wriggled away from her father and hid amongst her friends.

Nkoyo’s father laughed magnanimously. The oil man had never heard of Conrad before.

—You have to forgive her. You understand how teenagers are. But she sure does think your writing’s swell, Mr. Achebe. She was just telling me the other day she hopes to emulate your style, Nkoyo’s father said to the Nigerian hero.

As Nkoyo was recounting these memories, still staring at an empty word processer document, she heard the sound of the stairwell’s steel-hard door open and close quickly. From behind the air duct she could not see who had entered onto the roof.

A man appeared and walked indolently to the building’s precipice. He did not espy the exchange student. With his back to Nkoyo, the man removed a cigarette from his uniform windbreaker.

Nkoyo recognized him as the complex’s security guard. He was a Nigerian, an Igbo like Achebe, and had conversed with Nkoyo a few times, but only enough to establish that he was a poorer immigrant—probably with refugee status, she guessed—and that he was much too diffident for a Nigerian male.

—Ikenna! You can’t smoke up here, Nkoyo shouted at his back coltishly.

The security guard appeared startled, as if someone had just ran a feather against the back of his neck, and immediately dropped his fugitive cigarette. Turning to face his accuser, Ikenna relaxed when he saw Nkoyo’s friendly, smiling countenance. Embarrassingly, Ikenna walked towards his impish compatriot.

—Little sister, what are you doing on the roof here?

Ikenna smiled when he spoke. His eyes seemed to hold a thousand starry stories. All the men of Lagos seem to have eyes like this, she thought as he neared her—eyes that were always shiny, both somehow religious and lecherous at the same time.

—I’m not your sister. And smoking is like a sin in America, so maybe they should fire you, she rejoined.

—Fire me? But fire me how? I am a star employee of the university. And if I have to go, then who would watch over you, little sister?

Ikenna’s voice carried the weight of his forefathers. His accent was terribly Sub-Saharan, rusted by a not-so-distant colonization, limned with unforgiving experience, yet veneered, coated anew with something hopeful and forward-looking all the same.

Ikenna crouched down in front of the coed. If someone had walked upon the two, they may have thought the uniformed man was leaning over to kiss Nkoyo. Ikenna picked up one of her paperbacks.

—Uncle Chinua! He is like me; he is Igbo, Ikenna said when he saw the cover.

Nkoyo watched him turn the book over. She wondered why the way one cradles a book in is his hands is always a giveaway; Nkoyo wondered if the security guard had ever read a novel.

Ikenna suddenly appeared tired:

—I cannot be a university student. You see me, little sister, how I am already old. So I cannot be a student. But I know this story.

—The writing’s just okay, Nkoyo replied, a hint of honest London listlessness highlighting her accent.

Ikenna turned over the paperback again.

—This story is about my mother’s mother’s village. Or, no, maybe my grandmother’s mother’s village. But, it is about a village in the east of the country.

Ikenna placed the book atop the other two carefully.

—Little sister, do you miss Nigeria?

"Nigerian students power up their OLPC laptops" (photo by Flickr user Kevin Lim)

Another gust of wind blew, this time from the north. The wisps of cooler air flipped open and closed the cover of the topmost book.

Nkoyo did not respond. She did not want to answer Ikenna’s question.

The security guard’s radio beeped. Someone’s voice crinkled through the walkie-talkie unintelligibly. Ikenna stood and retrieved the plastic-cased device from his belt. He spoke into the receiver once, quickly, before returning the radio to its holster.

Ikenna smiled down at Nkoyo.

—That is okay. I do not miss Nigeria anymore either, little sister.

The security guard hurried away, leaving Nkoyo alone on the roof. She closed her laptop, placing it aside, and walked to the edge of the roof. Once to the cement precipice, atop the twelve-story building, she peered over the edge into the afternoon horizon, her back to the wind, her dark-brown eyes forward, gazing upon the flat interminable plains of the Texas panhandle.

Nkoyo returned to her special writing nook and began her essay, not the one on Achebe, but the one she wanted to compose on de Maupassant.
–
An American, T. F. Rhoden is an avid traveler. He enjoys good lit, cold beer, and learning new languages. Rhoden is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Poli-Sci. Past books include the travel guide Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand, the language-learning books Making Out in Burmese and Outrageous Thai, the literary fiction piece The Village, and the epistolary account Burmese Refugees: Letters from the Thai-Burma Border. Visit him online at tfrhoden.com or tfrhoden.blogspot.com.

"bumble star blows a fuse" (photo by Flickr user Mike Krzeszak)

The boys said: “That girl, she’s too needy. That girl, she’s too much.”

But who could blame Lisa? She’d Been Through A Lot. Or so she told the mailman and his junkmail, piled high on the mat; the clerk and the Tide bottle, wrapped twice in thin plastic; the neighbor and the sugar cup first borrowed, then shattered, then returned cloaked in trash.

Until she sat across a white-cloth dinner table from a man with hairy knuckles and Jack on his breath.

“Who hasn’t?” he said, and reached for a roll.

–

Leah Kaminsky is a short story and freelance writer originally from Ithaca, NY. She received her MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Washington in 2009. She has placed three times in Glimmer Train top 25 lists and was nominated for inclusion in Best New American Voices, 2008. Her work has appeared on The Rumpus, Pindeldyboz, The Yellow Ham and on her website, leahkaminsky.wordpress.com. She is in the midst of launching Just Start Applications, a business, college and graduate school consultancy, located in Texas and Virginia and operating mostly online.

The house had been empty for over a year before he got there. Just two days later, the possibilities rummaged about inside his head trying to find a logical reason for the noise. Shit. His wife and her sister were to arrive in one more day. He’d have to discover the origin. Or risk the lie once they arrived and heard something, or worse tried to determine the source themselves.

"Ghost house" (photo by Flickr user Amir Rezai)

He stood and walked towards the sound above him, taking a curved route to track it down. He stared up at the graying, smooth ceiling.

“What the…? Oh well. Probably nothing.”

He was still not used to the sounds the unfilled house made. He began to regret the mental energy, the deceptive devices his mind began to employ.

“Nothing. Maybe a mouse,” he mused.

He walked back less quietly now to his chair, his end table, his novel, his 14 year old scotch. Simply nothing. He eased into the leather. The novel was varyingly meeting his expectations. The scotch’s three ice cubes melting too quickly. Watering down its strength.

What could that sound have been? An open window? He was on the second floor. The small library he intended to use as such. And call it such. The attic would have no window. Was the sound right above the room or closer to the attic’s roof? The nails would stick through there. Nothing would be able to crawl over them. Unless maybe something tried and fell.

“What are you up to Mr. Mouse?”

He pulled a loose thread from the chair and began to examine it. Mice usually made some sort of vocal noise, right? He scanned his memories. Meep meep, mouse-like right?

A thud. No, not a thump at all. A thud. Thick, wooden, dense, like something falling over. Yet something more dampened than a higher pitched knock if it were, say, a rock. Or a mannequin, which always seemed to be in movie attics. Maybe there was a blanket or a towel on the ground and a few simple coincidences led to something falling over. That’s it!

“You’re going to go up there, and it’ll be a mouse that knocked over a book onto a towel. Or a mannequin. Brilliant.”

It had to be that. Of course, maybe not exactly that, but something like it. He finished the scotch, leaving three rounded cubes behind, and began his ascent. From the chair. To the bathroom.

“I’ll just—”

Another thud.

“Fuck,” he actually whispered.

October had just ended.

“Why did I have to show up here alone? Why couldn’t we just all come at the same time? Inspection. Someone must have been here to check things out before I got here. What is going on? Man up, Goddamnit. Ok, Ok, Ok.”

He looked for a bat in the adjacent room. Dust lined everything. Suddenly the place looked like Miss Havisham’s; spider webs appeared in the corners that had not been there upon his arrival. A golf club. Or something long, generally wieldy. Anything, damnit. Downstairs.

There was something, a banister needing to be replaced. Dense, heavy and square at one end. An ideal weapon considering the unavailability of a bat… or a gun. Shit.

He took a single step down a single stair and heard an unfortunate sound below his socked feet. A cricking and creaking as loud as his teenaged bedroom door. Road block. Old wooden steps are a spy’s worst enemy. Or an intruder.

“How has something gotten up there without me knowing? Two days and nothing. Why tonight?” He stood. A gloved foot afraid to recover.

“Unarmed we go.”

He shot his foot up and turned toward the attic entrance in a single swing. He grabbed for the hanging string which pulled the door down and allotted steps.

“Helloooo!” he called up. “I’m coming up.”

He swiftly pulled the door completely open. Paint ripped from the adjacent ceiling, carving out a slice of faded lavender. The old wood splintered loudly in secret jest.

“Hello?” he asked with emphasis as he unfolded the steps and stared into the black rectangle above. Shit. Fuck. Fuck. Shit. “I have a bat,” he stated rather simply. “A gun,” he echoed immediately.

He knew the paint meant nothing had made its way up there in a while, but he wasn’t sure if this reassured him or meant something worse and so suppressed the theory. He began his ascent taking note of his breath. Tilting his head away from the hole, his body sniffed further up the steps.

He crouched at the top before lurching his face into the darkness. Rafters, pillowy insulation between them.

The lower light provided little advantage, creating only a small cloud of glow above the rectangle where his forehead and eyes peeked out. His body now stood halfway between both worlds. The known and unknown. He panned quickly around. Looking for all available evidence.

There it was! The mouse shuttered quickly into the cloud of light just to return to the darkness beyond. Thank God. He began to descend back into the light.

“A mouse I can handle, or rather ignore for now.”

A pressure around his arm. A grab. He tried to turn to face its direction. Falling into the light, skidding and fumbling down the steps. A large thud.

The man’s head hit first. Right upon the back of it, where he worried he was beginning to bald. The occipital lobe. The temporal lobe. Disorienting him to the border of unconsciousness. He reached for the hole, now, that lay roughly nine feet above him, searching for anything.

“Ghosts aren’t real,” his aphasic speech tried to conjure, and he saw what appeared to be another mouse conquering the final step into the attic. Shit.

–

Eric Mitchel Brown is a copywriter and graduate student currently living in Austin, Texas. He is in his graduating semester at the University of Texas and spends his nights and weekends lost in the mind of a fiction writer. His stories tend to focus on the great consequences of life’s seemingly insignificant occurrences. You can find him online at emitchelbrown.wordpress.com.

"Warri Nigeria 2001" (photo by Flickr user Danny McL)

And Okwuchukwu knows how to clone currencies, especially dollars. All he needs to do is to get the right paper and an original dollar bill. And then he gums the bill atop the paper and pours in the chemical. And a replica is done. The next step is to find a local bank to deposit the clones. When next he goes for a withdrawal, he sure will be paid in original dollar bills of the same value. He can also steal vehicles and ship them home.

“What if you’re caught doing all these things?” his girlfriend, Chinwe, asks, her eyes dry as harvested farms.

“I don’t care, Chinwe,” he says. “American prisons are like five star hotels with good canteens and toothsome meals.”

“Why don’t you go there and engage yourself in a meaningful job, like your mother?”

“You mean I should babysit?”

“Jobs like that, I mean.”

“I can never go for a feminine job in America. There are drugs to push around the globe, from Atlanta to Bangkok to Barcelona.”

He says Chinwe has a feeble liver. She has served in Roberty Restaurant. She has served in Asaba Cool Spot. She has served in Point & Kill Restaurant. What does she have to show for her efforts? Nothing. Absolute nothing. He reasons she lacks effrontery, and has told her to corner some customers so as to establish her own restaurant. What he always gets is a feeble no. He calls her a holy nweje, the sort of person who sits in a place chanting Hail Mary, while the serious ones have all gone to heaven.

He’s going to America to possess his possessions, he insists. His pastor has already prophesied he will succeed there, in whatever he finds himself doing. Since graduating from the polytechnic, he has worked for Banana Bank for several years as a cashier, counting money, inhaling diseases, although he always covers his nose with a white handkerchief as he counts. His salary is the kind that delays a marriage plan, and makes a man postpone and postpone until his semen is watered down like spoilt milk.

“But, Okwuchukwu, your mother sends you money, doesn’t she?” Chinwe says.

He grows livid. “Chi-Baby, should I continue to depend on my mother? Am I her only child? I have sisters, and we share the money whenever it comes. Meanwhile, you’re not getting any younger. I want to marry you now; if I don’t, I will marry a white woman in America.”

She shivers on the bed. They both have just completed five rounds of vanity, panting like dogs. She understands what he’s saying. The traditional marriage rites in her village are like buying an enormous ship. He has to buy five he-goats, seven bags of kola nuts, seven boxes filled with Hollandaise wrappers and headgears for her mother and grandmother, ten cartons of Seaman’s Aromatic Schnapps for her father, and ten cartons of beer for her brothers. He has not even included the bags of rice and beans and tubers of yam for the Umunna and the rest of the kindred. And for the bride price itself, he as to sell his family land. Although his rented room in Asaba city is properly furnished with curtains around it, a red rug masking the floor, he thinks he deserves something better. He says he must go to America. His mother’s presence there is of advantage to him. He will ask her to send him a letter of invitation, to be presented at the embassy.

***

It has stopped raining when the yellow taxi conveys them both to the Lagos airport. Chinwe alights first as Okwuchukwu pays the driver, a talkative man. Within the thirty-minute drive to the airport, the charcoal-skinned driver spun stories of his turbulent marriage with his wife—how he had gone to Apapa family court with his children’s school fees receipts to show the Chief Judge that he had been fatherly and very responsible, how his wife hawked oranges on the streets, but sold her precious pussy more than the oranges. Okwuchukwu comes out of the taxi and sees his reflection in the gleaming wet floor; the happiness of his leaving Nigeria for America becomes luminous like a glowing bulb.

“Okwuchukwu, will you still marry me when you return?” Chinwe asks, dragging his travel bag towards the airport lounge, her long hair fluttering behind, in the cold wind.

“Chi-Baby, I will remember you, provided I don’t get caught,” he answers, as their shoes squelch over the puddles of rainwater on the asphalted entrance.

“They won’t catch you.”

He smiles and puts his hand across her shoulders.

"Ofem Ekapong's Wedding" (photo by Flickr user Bill Bedzrah)

They both sit down in the lounge, sipping yogurt with straws. He brings out his laptop to browse the Internet. He wants to update his Facebook profile to read, “Lives in Brooklyn, New York,” even though he has not landed there yet. An imaginary fleeting figure of a Brooklyn lady he hopes to marry clutters his head.

America here he comes; catch him or he catches you.

Chinwe hisses and frowns, placing her hand on her stomach.

“What’s wrong with you, Chi-Baby?” he asks her, minimising a Facebook blue-tinted page.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this, but it seems difficult to me,” she murmurs.

“What is it?” He stares into her face.

“Our baby kicks me.”

“What? Whose baby?”

“Our baby.”

“You and who?”

“Okwuchukwu and Chinwe.”

“Stop this joke. I am not ready to be a father now, please.” He unzips his travel bag and brings out some dollar bills. “Visit a bureaux de change and convert this money to naira. Please, ask Dr. Chike to destroy this baby when you get back to Asaba.”

She collects the money, and ensures it’s at the bottom of her jeans back pocket. “I won’t murder this baby. Never!”

“You must abort it!” he shouts.

“I won’t.” Their defiant voices draw the attention of other passengers waiting at the lounge. “And you’re no longer going to America,” she continues, “because I know you won’t come back. You’re not going anywhere.” She shuts her eyes, briefly, as if that will cancel his journey to America, too.

“You are kidding! Nothing can stop me from achieving my American desire, not even a harlot like you.”

She takes an angry, reflective pause and snorts and bites her finger.

“Where are these airport policemen?” She stands up, looks across to the ticketing counters and finds one. And then, she screams, “Police, please come over here. There is an emergency!”

Her boyfriend is startled.

The policeman, skinny like a coconut tree, bolts towards them in his black uniform, holding a truncheon. “Yes, what’s the problem?”

She points down at her boyfriend’s travel bag. “Officer, please ask this man, this dunce, to open his bag. He has concealed something inside it.”

“Now?” The policeman’s mouth is as open as a hollow tunnel.

“Officer, there is nothing in my bag,” Okwuchukwu huffs, feigning resoluteness, although shivers circulate all through his veins now, his heart pounding and evaporating. Other passengers have started to gather around the scene.

“Let me see first,” the policeman screams, bends to force the bag open. Chinwe directs him to open a small zip inside. “Hey, young man, what is this white substance doing here?”

“Officer, help me to ask him,” Chinwe exclaims.

Okwuchukwu is speechless, as ripples of murmurs and giggles echo in the lounge among the people watching.

“Now, you must follow me to the drug law enforcement office. This substance has to be tested so as to determine what exactly it is.”

“It is my face powder. Just my powder,” Okwuchukwu says. “It’s nothing.”

“Powder?” the policeman says, wondering, his eyes reading his suspect’s face. “Are you a woman?”

“Yes… eh… eh… no… But I use white powder. I have oily skin.”

Chinwe cuts in. “Officer, can you see powder on his face now? Crook!”

“Officer, let me see you outside; I can explain this,” the suspect pleads. He whispers into the cop’s ear, “I know we can settle this outside. I am going to America. Please.”

“There is nothing to settle outside,” the policeman brays, and shoves him to the enforcement office, as an announcement comes from a sonorous lady’s voice, through a loudspeaker: “All passengers for the Lufthansa Airline flight to New York should get ready for departure.”

–

Jekwu Anyaegbuna is an alumnus of the Farafina Trust International Creative Writers’ Programme, taught by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Nigeria. He graduated from the University of Ilorin, and his work has been widely published, or will be published, in literary journals in the United States and the UK including Ambit, Asinine Poetry, Atticus Review, Bow-Wow Shop, Breadcrumb Scabs, Dark Lady Poetry, dcomP MagazinE, Eclectica Magazine, Haggard and Haloo, New Black Magazine, Obsession, Orbis, Other Poetry, Pattaya Poetry Review, The Journal, The Talon Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Vox Poetica, Word Riot, Yuan Yang Journal and elsewhere. Jekwu works and writes in Lagos.