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Weekly Contest #367
The morning we sold my mother’s house, I closed the blue door for the last time and discovered it did not want to close. This was not sentiment. The bottom had swollen during the rains and dragged against the cement floor with the stubbornness of an old woman being asked to leave church before the announcements. I put my shoulder against it. The door groaned. My brother Daniel, who had spent most of the morning explaining how everything should be done while personally doing nothing, told me to lift as I pushed. “I know how to close a door,” ...
Weekly Contest #366
I don’t remember when my mother started setting eight places for Sunday lunch, which is annoying because every family story deserves a clean beginning and ours has the manners of a goat in a vegetable garden. It wanders in where it pleases, eats the important details, and leaves you staring at whatever remains. There were seven of us: Mother, Auntie Sarah, Uncle Paul, my two brothers, my younger sister, and me. Yet every Sunday, before the beans had softened and before Auntie Sarah declared church long enough to qualify as employment, Mother...
Weekly Contest #363
Every evening at 6:47, the Okello family gathered around the dinner table because the Wi-Fi password changed automatically at seven. It was Miriam's solution to a problem she couldn't ignore.. Her husband answered work emails while insisting he was listening. Her fifteen-year-old daughter could text beneath the table without looking. Her twelve-year-old son claimed he wasn't on his phone even when its screen reflected in the dining room window. Eight-year-old Lila negotiated every meal as though vegetables violated international law. "If I h...
The first time the old woman said she had been waiting for him, Elias assumed she had mistaken him for someone else. It was raining hard enough to blur the buildings across the park. Water ran from the brim of his cap and gathered at the cuffs of his trousers. He should have gone back to the office, but the thought of fluorescent lights, unanswered emails, and another sandwich eaten over a keyboard made the rain feel almost welcoming. The bench beneath the sycamore tree was usually empty on Tuesdays. That was why he liked it. But the woman w...
Weekly Contest #362
The last meal my grandmother cooked before I left for America tasted like every other Sunday. I hated that. If I was leaving home, maybe forever, surely the food owed me something extraordinary. I wanted candles, speeches, photographs. I wanted everyone to lower their voices when they said my name, as though I had already become a story. Instead, Grandmother woke before sunrise, swept the compound, and sent me to fetch water before I had even rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “I am leaving in two days,” I reminded her. “And today you are still ...
The first time Kaya met Eren, he was holding a plastic bag of mangoes as if it were evidence.Not dramatic evidence, no blood, no fingerprints—just mangoes, bruised and leaking sweetness onto his palm, like the fruit had decided it was tired of keeping secrets.“You dropped this,” he said.Kaya blinked at him. She stood at the edge of the market where everything smelled like charcoal smoke and fried dough and sun-warmed dust. Somewhere behind her, a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) revved like it wanted to join the negotiation.“I didn’t drop it,” Ka...
The first sign something was wrong was the smell.Not “oops, I left something on the stove” wrong. Not “burnt toast at six in the morning” wrong.This was… spiritually delicious wrong.A smell like toasted spice, warm rain, and a secret you weren’t allowed to remember.It floated through the apartment like it owned the place.Kataike stood in her kitchen holding a wooden spoon like a microphone, staring at a pot of soup that had absolutely no right smelling that good. She had followed the recipe loosely,because recipes, in her experience, were mo...
Hunger does not always arrive with noise.Sometimes it comes dressed as discipline.Sometimes as patience.Sometimes as a tightness in the chest that refuses to loosen nomatter how much water you drink.She learned this slowly.At first, hunger meant the obvious things.The hollow sound her stomach made in the early hours beforethe sun reached the kitchen window.The way her hands shook when she stood toolong without eating.These were simple hungers.They announced themselves.They could be answered.Later, hunger became quieter.It settled into her da...
Weekly Contest #334
I have carried many names, though most people only know the one written on maps. Before maps, I was simply here. Before borders learned to argue with each other, before they cut the land into pieces and pretended the water would agree, I was already holding what humans could not. I remember when hands first reached into me without ceremony. They did not call themselves fishermen then. They were only hungry. Hunger and gratitude were the same thing in those days. People come to me now for different reasons. Beauty, they say. Peace. Escape. Th...
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