Fixing the Roof

Wambui let her thigh slither down the slick mat. The motion sent a slicing stab of pain through her belly. She ignored it as she did the tiny lifeless form by her knees.

That hole in the mabati was getting larger, she noted absently. She would have to get that seen to. Best do it soon. The March clouds were gathering already and there is nothing more annoying than cold water running into your bed at midnight. It would cost at least a week’s pay to get a fundi though. Maybe half that if she sweet-talked the randy one near the bus stop. But she didn’t have the strength to haggle just then, not even mentally.

Wambui sighed. She would probably have to fix it herself. God knows she didn’t have the money to afford new iron sheets anyway. She would stop by the junk yard. Maybe they could spare some old sufurias. Failing that, she would have to patch the roof up with thatch. Or banana leaves. That probably wouldn’t keep the rain out for too long but at least the rest of them would be fed.

The rest of them. That’s what they had become. Them.

They were like worms. They gnawed at her from inside and ate. Taking everything. She felt hollow. Like a voiceless shadow. They left her a wasted, frail shell that staggered about to sustain them. And some of them, like the one by her knees, used her and broke her to no purpose.

The child had not cried. It was wrinkled, ugly and blue in the face. She’d seen the like before. Thrice that she could remember. All had been her mother’s. Each time, her mother would cradle the thing for a moment or two, wrap it in as clean linen as she could find and put it in the earth. She would turn away then and say, “Best think of something else.”

A ragged tear ran down towards her ear. She swept it away angrily leaving a bloody smear where the tear had been. Her mother would have slapped her for that had she been here. She always said crying was a lazy woman’s shirking. “Pain comes. You deal with it quickly and think of other things.”

So Wambui sat up and shoved the corpse away from her by the feet. She ignored the wet sticky sound of flesh sliding against blood and afterbirth. And she did as she was told. She thought of the roof.