The Lost Boy in Aisle Five
Happy Birthday sings the staff of Pigs and Pokes Supermarket. Thank you, thank you all, I say back. Rose the night manager tells me to make a wish and this I do. I wish you all happiness and success in the new year I say. It’s the very same wish I declared aloud last year on this day.
I’m not supposed to tell people my wish, says the young daughter of Roberto the bakery chef. All these American customs are hard to keep straight I answer back. Several of my friends laugh and others tell me to blow out the twenty-three candles, each representing a year in my life, but it is hard to know how old I really am. Twenty-three is about right I think. All these things were decided for me, including the date of my birth. All boys like me are said to have been born on New Year’s Day.
So have you found what you are looking for asks Roberto’s young daughter. I am confused at the question. You were lost and looking for something she says.
Ah, yes, I was a lost boy, but I have found a new home here with you good folks at Pigs and Pokes. So, that means I’m not so lost anymore. She looks satisfied with my answer. Roberto hands me a slice of cake on a paper plate and says his daughter’s name is Justine and she is in sixth grade. They just finished a unit on Africa at her school.
I slide a piece of cake into my mouth. The sweetness of the icing shocks me, numbs my mouth to any other taste. I feel an instant headache coming on.
It is also my brother’s birthday, as he was also lost like me, wandering across the countryside, our feet blistered and our mouths dry. We survived, two among many, and made it all the way to Kenya. I remember his call to me from the Kakuma refugee camp using one of the aid worker’s satellite phones. He wanted to know how the airplane flight had been, and had I thrown up like it had been rumored all air flight caused. Such losses of face are of great concern among the survivors.
I said it was not a problem. I could tell he was quite worried about this thing. Just come to America I said. Your feet will feel like they are planted upon a shifting table floating in the Nile. Flying was just like surfing. This I knew he understood because we had seen several surfing films in the camp to prepare us for the shock of going to America. We believed we would both be going to Hawaii.
It is sad for me to think again that his plane crashed only two miles from the camp. Sometimes since that day, I see Abraham in the aisles, dusting the tops of boxes of breakfast cereal or turning jars of apple sauce so that their labels face out. Now he is cutting the plastic strap from the stack of newspapers and setting them beside the magazine rack. An article lies below the fold about a speck of light in the sky where ghosts go after an acceptable probationary interval.
A Planet in the Dark Coal Sac of Night
So what good can come from the people of the dark side of our planet you ask? We know that for one, they are excellent musicians and artists, having honed their skills in the caves in which they huddled for warmth during the time of the great geologic tumult. The earthen walls proved to be both an ideal canvas for their natural pigments, and the caves themselves lent themselves to the whites, what we used to call those that dwelled in them, as perfect concert halls for their drums and flutes. The acoustics in many of the larger cave systems are unmatched even by our own opera halls here on the continent of the sun. Of course our halls are designed by the intellects of men. That they are rivaled by natural formations in both beauty and function is proof that there exists a higher being, so says I, Uwele the Wise.
It is our minds and the perpetual light of summer that gave us an advantage in some sense over those who lived on the dark side. We wandered the earth to exchange ideas and goods, yes, sometimes we wandered to make war upon our brothers and sisters, but mostly we traveled in peace our historians say. It is with the great geologic tumult of ten millennia past, that we put down our spears and shields and built the great walls to protect our city-states and channel the molten rock away from our homes and markets. This was the first ever public works project in history. Many died to build the great walls of granite, but countless more were saved. The walls allowed our societies to flourish, to develop art, philosophy, and new methods of commerce our world had never seen. Over the centuries we invented and perfected automobiles and aircraft, and reality television programming, all with the cooperation of our white brothers from the side of perpetual dusk.
Over time, the ashes were swallowed by the great sea and our white brothers came out from their caves. What surprise must have overcome them to see their brothers of the light having built great cities and monuments to progress They sold whatever small trinkets their troglodyte craftsmen could fashion in exchange for the technical bounty of dark-skinned progress. By happenstance, as the volcanoes bellies cooled, we discovered we needed our melanin-deficient brothers to maintain our city buildings and keep them clean. We needed them to work our fields and weed our gardens. We needed them to buff and polish the marble tiles in our foyers as we were gone on vacation to the Riviera during the infernal season.
Only now do we enjoy the rich rewards of cooperation between light and dark. We have allowed our white brothers into the inner sanctum of progress, having employed them to build the great orbital telescope we have named Uhuru. It is a part of the creator’s plan, so says Uwele, that the skilled artisans of the darker side of our world, that the whites have polished a great mirror that has entered into an orbit of our world. Through it, our eyes are extended far into our celestial neighborhood. It is with great pride, that I can announce to you the pinnacle of advancement - the identification of a world similar to our own at a distance that makes the head swim. It would take over twenty years for the light shining off Uwele’s wise brow you see here to reach this other world. This world has water, and mountains, and rivers and light. It is warm and probably teeming with all sorts of odd and wonderful life.
This blue speck is just more proof of the existence of a being greater than us. There is no higher aspiration for either dark or light peoples. So says Uwele the Wise, Prime Minister of our beloved world.
Mother and Daughter on Safari
“So what is the cause du jour?”
“Trachoma.”
“Tacoma? I thought this soiree was to benefit African war refugees.”
“Trachoma is a disease which causes blindness. It blinds millions in Africa. We’re raising money to fight Trachoma in Nigeria.”
“So why are we in a Moroccan joint, and what is there to see in Nigeria anyway?”
“Morocco is in Africa.”
“Oh?”
“What are you doing Samantha?”
“Taking a photo of that fine waiter’s ass. I have one of these new cameras with a four megatrixel lens. I can take a picture of just about anything and keep it stored on my phone to look at whenever.”
“Are you back on heroin Sam? I haven’t seen you act this way since you entered rehab.”
“Hah hah hah. Oh my God, heroin? You’re so dramatic mom. I’ve always been this way, maybe the uh — smack— just brought it closer to the surface. No mom, I’m not. Want to look at my arms? How big of a check did you write these guys anyway?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“What? Mom, it’s not like you’re made out of money. Planetarium guides don’t earn squat.”
“I’m an assistant professor and three hundred is enough to buy a thousand doses of Azithromycin.”
“I guess we’re not junkies. We’re pushers.”
“Did you read we discovered the first planet we think is in the Goldilocks zone?”
“Huh?”
“A planet we think might have all the right conditions for life. Everything there is just right.”
“I don’t know if I would get too excited about it mom.”
“And why not?”
“Everything here is just right and we still fucked it up. Half the world is going blind, and the other half is pushing drugs on the other, and . . .”
“Maybe I should call your counselor at Mt. Jude.”