taller than the shortest of Ita’s attackers.
Doesn’t look like he has got a lot going for him, Ita thinks.
But he does have a machete.
The attackers don’t seem to notice; they’ve begun to thaw. They giggle, Ita doesn’t see which one starts, but now they’re all hyenas, cackling in the dust. The tallest boy, he zips up Ita’s backpack and slings it over his shoulders. He laughs as he walks toward where Ita lies. Ita’s eyes are about to close, having upheld their end of the bargain.
But he fights himself to watch the tall boy come slip the shoes off his feet, and to see the incredible thing that happens next.
The miniature madman makes a sound. It cannot be called a scream—it hardly fits the description of any human sound Ita’s ever heard. He waves his machete in the air. When he brings it down, it whacks into his own forearm until blood squirts out in the shape of a rainbow, splattering Ita’s attackers. With the bubbling blood, the madman smears his cheeks, like war paint.
The last thing Ita sees is the blood-smeared kid spring from the jerrican and charge, roaring like a hound let loose from hell.
The last thing Ita hears is the backpack drop in the dirt beside his head. But then his senses are extinguished, replaced by the sound and color of nothingness.
* * *
When Ita comes to, it’s nighttime, the most dangerous time in Kibera. He struggles to cobble together his thoughts, rocks tumbling into a river.
“Good. You not dead.”
Ita looks, and the machete-wielding psychopath is sitting just beside him in the dark.
“Chege,” the psycho says.
It will hurt to speak, Ita imagines. “Ita.” He was right.
“Go back to sleep, Ita. See you tomorrow.”
* * *
In the morning, Ita wishes he was dead. Still might happen, he consoles himself. Everything hurts. Everything.
“Morning,” the psycho says brightly.
Ita wonders if maybe he is a spirit, a spirit guide into the other side. Should he talk to him? Can he ask questions? Like...where is my mother? Is she here? She’s dead, too. She just died two weeks ago—
“Hey, you okay? You eyes rolling back into your bones again. How much longer you expect me to sit here?”
Ita’s ears normalize for a moment. They’re near the tracks, he can hear the trains. So they’re in the landfill. Now Ita can smell it and his stomach turns.
“I’m just kidding. You can sleep. Just don’t die.”
* * *
Sun’s going down again when Ita next wakes up. His mind is clearer. He understands he can die now, if he wants to. Or not. Because he saw what the psycho named Chege was sitting on—the backpack.
“Inside.” Ita isn’t sure if the words came out or not. “Medicine.”
“I saw. Which one?”
“Pill. Orange.”
Ita’s mouth feels orange, stuffed with Kibera dust.
“Got it. Here. What’s it for?”
“Infection.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother. Sick. A long time. I learned—”
“You Kikuyu, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too.”
Ita doesn’t answer.
“It your mother’s fault, then, that Kikuyus not take you in. She go with men? Get money? She got that sickness—”
“Shut up.” Ita rolls up to his elbow, ignores the lightning strikes of pain, blood frothing in his mouth. “You shut up, you—”
“Shhh. Hey. I no judge. Your mother love you so much, she do it for you. That makes it okay.”
Ita sees his mother’s face, a skull painted brown, her trembling bone fingers giving him her necklace, the gold sparrow sparkling in the setting sunlight, her voice, scratched raw, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive me—
“No, it doesn’t,” Ita says and blacks out, back into the in-between.
* * *
Two more days, and Ita doesn’t take any more of the pills. Best to save them. When he finally sits up, Chege nods in approval, and they sit on the field of trash where no ground is visible.
“You live here?”
Chege hears the judgment. “Now you do, too.”
“Why?” Ita asks. He is genuinely curious—why choose to live in a trash heap?
“Because here you won’t run into those guys again. Because here you can sleep, even if you stink like a cockroach.”
The backpack is zipped, sitting between them. Ita opens it up. It’s all there. The books, even the food. He looks at Chege in surprise.
Chege twists away. When he swivels back, he holds out a crooked carrot and a mushy tomato. “Eat these.”
Ita knows he must have been saving them. “How’d you get them?”
Chege shrugs. “I stole them from an old woman.” He pats the machete resting across his knees.
Ita looks at the food in his hands. If he eats it, he will break the promise he made his mother, and himself. The promise that he would try to be good, die if he must, but not die shamed, like her.
“What did you do to the guys that attacked me?”
“They not coming back, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I want to know.”
Chege’s face is blank, placid, cracked dried blood still visible on its skin. “Just eat.”
Ita looks at the tomato. The pang in his stomach tells him he’s starving, his body desperate. He pops the tomato in his mouth. The skin splits and the mush bursts in his throat like rotten flesh. He almost chokes, but gulps it down.
“Why are you helping me?” he asks Chege, and chomps the carrot, so dry and old it’s furry on his tongue.
“I’m not!” Chege huffs. “I’m leaving. I just didn’t think you should die yet.”
Ita looks at Chege’s face, staring straight ahead.
“You smart,” Chege says quietly then.
