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  • City Boy
  • Vincent Anioke (bio)

Emeka started with Chidi outside the gate of the village family hut. Those gates were like a portal between two clashing worlds. Behind them, steel and chrome and glass and even cars—around which the village kids were still crowded, pointing, muttering, gaping, grinning. Ahead, an unpaved road that wound downward, seeming to never end. In the furthest distance, hills stood together, buried in and surrounded by masses of green, the most trees he had ever seen in his life. It was easy to look ahead and imagine that there was no life beyond those trees and hills, that the blend of endless leaves and stark white sky comprised the entire universe, blotting out time and space.

“How far is the stream?” Emeka asked.

His cousin Chidi was still smiling, the sort of excited smile that burst at the seams with barely contained zeal. Considering that he had only known of Chidi’s existence an hour ago, Emeka couldn’t tell if Chidi’s smile was always so wide.

“Just an hour.”

Just?

Chidi’s smile wavered slightly. “We don’t have white-men taps here like you people do in the city. We walk to get our own water.”

Emeka knew Chidi’s tone. It was almost a mirror of his own mother’s, who always turned every request Emeka made into a theater of melodrama, complete with extensive monologues about how hard things had been “back in the day” and about how his current request reeked of lucky ignorance. It was a tone Emeka had grown tired of.

He shouldn’t have been in the village anyway. It was summer and he was miles away from the city, but his mom had picked the height of July as the perfect time to bring him to the village, her excuse the funeral of some distant friend of a distant relative. And while he was here, she’d said, he might as well get accustomed to some of the village practices. Hence this unfair crisis of empty buckets and a long, looming journey.

“Okay then,” said Emeka. “Let’s go.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the path ahead sloping ever downward. It was narrow and flanked by walls of heat-yellowed grass. Nothing spoke but the clap of slippers on stones, the quiet so stretching Emeka could hear the sound of his breath. He wondered why the buildings were so far apart.

“It’s as if no one is around,” he said to Chidi.

“It’s just where we are,” said Chidi. “We’ll see people soon. So what is the city like?”

Emeka launched into a tale of the wonders he expected Chidi would like to hear—the talking machines called televisions and the flying rooms called airplanes. Yet Chidi replied with the barest of sounds, the “hmms” and the “I see” of deep disinterest. [End Page 105]

After a few minutes, Emeka stopped talking. He decided he didn’t like Chidi.

The path seemed like it would never end, but as the slope began to even out, the wall of grass and shrubbery thinned until Emeka could see between the strands. Then there was nothing flanking them, and he could see the rest of the village, little huts and shops huddled below them. No streets, just crooked paths in sandy zigzags.

They passed what seemed to be a bar, a large square bordered by a perimeter of thick raffia sticks held together by rope, their surfaces dull with dust. Within the square, people chattered, an elderly woman making her way to a makeshift concrete table, her multicolored wrapper sliding against the ground behind her. There were others too, a pudgy man biting on a chewing stick and pointing at the table, two little kids in a distant corner, shirts green and tattered, trousers nonexistent, sweeping the ground with brooms different from the ones Emeka was used to. Their brooms were no more than thin bundles of stick. And he thought it odd that they were sweeping against the sandy ground. On the makeshift table stood rows of glasses, flanked on one side by a bald lady selling the drinks, on...

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