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Last Laugh
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Last Laugh Shimmer Chinodya At the gate she nearly collided with a cat strapped up in a white bandolier . Two scrawny dogs were alternately courting and kissing with their cordless snouts, or sniffing in the half-light for condoms among food scraps, waste paper and garbage. Trying to make love at the foot of a hill of demolished brick and mortar, they were eager to beat the curfew of daybreak, after which children and grown men would surely – spitting with half-savage glee – kick them to separate them from their lustful union, or curse them away with stones. As if the human race never made love! Or, better put, as if the human race never engaged in sex. She imagined the National Sports Stadium packed with people all rising and shouting ‘Gooooal!’ Where did they all come from? All those thousands of people, those zillions of humanoids swarming the streets of the world, if not from the same seedy, sticky, smelly depths of the human anatomy? How much sniffing , moaning, grunting and coming had gone into their individual making? How much gasping and clasping? Funny, she thought, how in these cramped, sleep-suffused rooms couples were nakedly, heatedly, disentangling from each other with nothing and no one to whip or kick them apart but the stark fact of their disparate lives; groping and fumbling in dazed hordes to face the new day. Outside bathroom doors, voices in the frantic queues were urging, ‘Hurry up in there, Auntie! This is not a maternity ward. Are you giving birth to quads or skinning a pig or what?’ But now, with her husband having half deserted her for Botswana 23 (to look for a job, so he said) and her two children packed off to her mother in her village, (cheaper schools, simpler meals, no transport fares and more room to play in – plus God’s fresh country air, of course) all she’d done over the last three years was work and work every day to fend for her family and her ageing mother. Half-buried in the rubble, a sign read: PRAIVET PECKING, KEEP OFF THE LONE PRIZ, though there was hardly a blade of grass in sight. Down the street, in a chicken-run as yet un-touched by the demolition crews, a lone rooster crowed, belatedly, ‘Kukurigorigo ’. From behind a hedge, a tramp yelled, ‘Rigo, rigo your mother’s! We’re up already, idiot.’ Spotting her, the man hastily buttoned up his trousers, straightened his cap, stood to attention and said, ‘Sorry, Mai George. I didn’t hear you coming. Eh, eh, excuse the language. Please do proceed.’ At the Home Industries Centre, or what remained of it, among gaping walls, smashed windows, mangled door-frames and torn roofs, a few surviving signs brazenly announced: MAI IVY, ENTER-NATIONAL ‘MAZONDO’ WITH FULL (MUTI) FOR TYRED BACKS FRESH EGGS LAID HERE WHILE YOU WATCH. KWALFIED HARE-DRESSER, FRY YOUR HEAD QUICK! CAR-PANT-RY – ODROBS, SOLFAS, CHAIRS RAPED HERE GOBLINS BOUGHT AND SOLD INSIDE – ALL SYZES AND AIGES Under the eggs’ sign an enterprising customer had scribbled, ‘Have you tried to sing to the hens?’ Under the goblins’ advertisement another had added, ‘Do you also sell Maenza lightning from Mutare?’ There was already a sizeable queue at the bus-stop. A kombi bursting with human cargo squelched to a halt to pick up a few frenzied passengers then idled, swaying like the back of an elephant. An elderly couple scrambled in. Mai George squeezed in past the red-eyed, wild-haired hwindi. The bald man sitting next to her said, to no one in particular, ‘Gehena is better, don’t you think – there you don’t have to spend any money on firewood.’ Another man two seats ahead cut in, ‘Yes, but there’ll be a lot of gnashing of teeth.’ A toothless old woman blabbered, ‘Thath doesnth conthern me.’ ‘Not so fast, gogo,’ chirped the bald man. ‘Everyone without teeth 24 Shimmer Chinodya [54.196.114.118] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:22 GMT) will be provided with a brand new set. And there won’t be any Razaro to bring a drop of water.’ ‘No sacrilege meant,’ coughed yet another, ‘but I think hell is where all the real people will congregate.’ The hwindi clutched at the sheaf of notes between his lips, like a cat grabbing a flaccid mouse, his body rocking with the jerking bus. The fare had gone up again – a daily event. The...