Author: Abigail Arunga

So when I came back, everyone decided I was foreign – and not just because my accent was thick and faltering over the sir that we were supposed to call Mr Iddi, instead of sah, like massa, when I’m trying to get his attention in class, And not because I talked fast or people heard slow even when they listen to music and write down lyrics just fine, But also because every time one of the boys tried to grab my tits, I would recoil in shock and hit one of them, immediately, almost instantaneously. They would call me Tyson.…

1 The way this one ends is with me in a not-too-sanitary club bathroom, clutching the girl he left me for, as we both cry, snot-nosed, heavy-hearted, confused. That wasn’t meant to happen quite like that. I wasn’t meant to be those girls – you know those girls who end up tipsy and tearful in the middle of a booming, boisterous night? – but then I saw her and for some reason there was a switch we flicked in each other. He’d left us both for a friend of mine and I thought I had moved on from it. At…

In 2016, my body is still a battlefield Bloody, lying, a lying carcass, they always tell me I am lying Even when what happened happened to me. They always say it was someone else, or I brought it upon myself, or I wanted it, or Why didn’t I do better? Read harder? Look nicer…look worse. Cook better…fuck different. The things that a woman is required to do in our society is a bible of contrasting, conflagrating ordinances designed to confuse, abuse and misuse everything that a woman is ‘supposed’ to be. I mean, let’s be real Who is actually supposed…

You also beg for the little things. You beg him to eat. You beg him to talk to you when he doesn’t want to because you think it must be a lie. A fallacy. He used to beg to talk to you, when you had no time for him – when you didn’t care about his car, or his money, or his woman, whom he was going to leave for you. Not that he left her until you left that other one. But you didn’t notice that until you started begging. So clearly he must still want to because…how could…

She would talk to her god, often, and he would respond. ‘But,’ she would start, as far back as she could remember, ‘but why is this necessary if love is cyclic and eternal?’ He would smile at her, indulgently. ‘How will you learn it, if not again and again?’ She remembered when it all started – when she was 12 years old, convinced she was adopted and trying to jump off a third story balcony in their inner city home. She wasn’t looking or listening for a voice to tell her anything, just a relief, a passage into another world…

There was an angry looking red gash on my underwear and I was pretty convinced I was dying. My mother, however, told my panicked 11 year old self that I had started my period, and then went back to reading the paper. It was that simple. I don’t remember ever having to be taught how to use a pad – my precocious self had been in enough classes where the teachers showed us that. What I do remember is feeling like my period was a huge secret – only one other girl in my class had gotten hers (and we eventually…

There’s a chunk of my finger in the potato salad. Only because everyone at this bloody party needs more me in them. Maybe it’ll remove the electricity pole in their arses. For example. That’s Jane – the one he’s sleeping with. She’s just like me but sober. I don’t even feel it any more when he beats me, because there’s blood in my Valium. I don’t know if it’s because she’s always box ready. Perfectly coiffed life and manicure, dripping salon bills and entitlement with a slight stench of pretentious adultery. You know the stench. Of The Other Woman who…

I was fingered once on my back, in front of the maize cobs that waved in my mother’s backyard. I remember itchy grass and an uncomfortable feeling that something was poking somewhere I did not want it to be; something dry and scratchy like what a scarecrow boner must feel like. Only the guy doing all the work wasn’t a scarecrow. I remember that I thought I loved him and every time I remember that I deeply regret it. In spite of the love or whatever it was that I felt, his finger wouldn’t go through. After huffing and puffing…

I love the rawness of the beginning When I can see your heart in your throat every time you want to touch me but you’re trying to figure out whether the molten emotion in your stomach is appropriate and if it’s burning you or just heating you up When my breath goes faster if you brush across my consciousness and my thoughts are honed to you To the exclusion of all else, like a Ray of light piercing through a cloud on a quiet sunny day in a field of sunflowers, reflecting Heaven. Image:  Adam & Eve – from James C Lewis…

There’s no denying that the Kenyan service industry has a major problem. Companies have numbers on their websites that do not work. Try calling them. They keep you on hold for over half an hour, entertaining you with privileged hymns and choruses composed in their praise and honour. This is typical of the banking industry, and yes, this particular example relates to KCB. You will spend Ksh. 70 of your credit on hold. Look, I understand that 70 bob is not money to make your hackles rise. But in a month like January when money has a predilection for pulling…

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been four weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins: I have broken the 7th and 10th commandment. I think I’m in love, and I think I’m a thief. I don’t have particularly high standards, I must admit. I only ask for three things in a man, and yet, it is surprising how hard it is to find just three things in the men I meet. I ask for honesty. Don’t lie to me. Mostly because you’ll be busted at some point when I decide to come home early and…

Look, it’s not that I wanted to do a sex tape. But all the conditions were optimum for said recording. First of all, there was Wifing and dining – and by this I mean the Jakom Wireless was running at maximum efficiency (meaning everything was being downloaded and my applications were all being updated). The dining consisted of a tea masala beef stew that I didn’t see coming and yet turned out so well that I didn’t even know there was tea masala in the beef. Then of course, there was the 48 inch Samsung TV in the middle of…