Short story – Zakueeua ties the knot

“I’m getting married!” shouted Zakueeua, as the words shot out of his sticky lips like stones from a Y-shaped catapult.

Hearing the ear-bursting news, Kanairombe popped out of the circlet hut to catch the words hanging fresh in the air.

Suddenly, she pressed her reddened eyes at the grinning Zakueeua and cupped her mouth.

“You’re what?” she asked, miming the word ‘married’ and narrowing her eyes into shapes of chicken eggs.

Meanwhile, Zakueeua’s vein-bursting remarks had shaken Kambangane’s hands, forcing the wooden spoon of sour milk to fall like an autumn leaf.

“Who’ll marry a beggar?” asked Kambangane, as happy ants drowned in puddles of his dripping sweat.

“I’ll not sing at your wedding,” said Kanairombe, crisscrossing a finger over her sweat-dripping forehead, while fastening a feet-stomping plank to her feet.

“Mosquitoes will sing at your wedding,” said Kambangane, bribing Zakueeua with a black goat, if he cancels the wedding.

“What will be slaughtered at your wedding?” asked Kambangane, sticking out his tongue. In response, Zakueeua rubbed his blood-tasting chest as the question had punched him with a knockout fist. Only now had he thought of butchering his only naked-neck rooster to entertain the guests.

“Even the ants will abscond your wedding,” said Kanairombe, chuckling.

Soon, Zakueeua ran straight to his sweetheart. Afterwards, he tickled her with heart-piercing truths and dizzying lies as to why he was postponing the wedding. At least, until the sun could trace its path from sunset back to sunrise, he had vowed.

Then he did the unthinkable; he smacked kisses in the sand where she’d sketched ‘I love you,’ with her toes.

The next morning, the rat lovers gunned down a mouse-terrorising lion and donated the soiled meat, skin sewn into the groom’s gown.

Then Kambangane, drugged by envy, took a leisurely walk around the lion’s ear shrubs. His tummy roared before he spotted a lion showing off its outfit.

Seeing a ghost in broad daylight wiped the sweat from his forehead, and soon he tripped over something.

Immediately, he crawled, dusted his hands and picked up what he had tripped over: his Brahman bull. He squinted at the lion’s spoor because the big cat had holed the bull’s belly by greedily eating chunks of the now nose-pinching carcass.

This time, he clenched his jaws and ran to Zakueeua’s hut, but the hand clapping partygoers sipping black sparkling water and stirring pots simmering with lion’s stew bones choked him.

Somehow, he skewed his eyes at Kanairombe singing merrily at his best enemy’s big day, and his heart skipped.

The breathing ghost he had seen now clasped his stepdaughter’s sweat-soaked hands, as she looked like a white flower wrapped in a satin dress.

-Mungambue@gmail.com

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