“Nothing will ever happen to me,” said the hyena.
The following Sunday, for the first time in anyone’s memory, Abba Dabo failed to appear at the front gates of Guardian of the World Church to give bread to the poor. The children waited and waited, but as it got later and services began, they resigned themselves to begging churchgoers for food or change or whatever they could spare, just as they did every other day of the week, every week of the year.
As with all untimely deaths in Ethiopia, the specific details and circumstances of Abba Dabo’s demise were shrouded in mystery and fiercely debated on street corners, in church pews, at markets, and outside taverns. Ethiopians visiting from the diaspora laughed aloud, slightly embarrassed at such a superstitious tale being told so earnestly in the twenty-first century.
“A boy who turns into a jib?” they said. Give them a break.
Others worried about the story’s ethnically charged interpretations, while a few told the sensitive ones to lighten up. It was just a story, after all.
Most simply swatted the story away as one would a fly. “I’m too busy to be bothered by such gossip,” they said.
But the young unemployed men who sit around the kiosks all day still whisper unsavory rumors about gambling debts and dangerous friends who had turned on Abba Dabo. They lifted eyebrows and said, “We know what really goes on.”
No one was punished in the end. The Americans are still in court trying to retrieve their dollars. The boy disappeared, like so many others, back into the madness of Addis. No one ever saw him again: not outside the church, not prowling the streets near the orphanage, not anywhere. Though he had vanished, he was not forgotten. Back in his village, a proverb was born. All knew its hidden meaning. The hyena does not laugh because it is happy.
Abba Dabo became a saint and an omen. He was remembered as an angel, which is how even the worst of the dead are remembered. He was memorialized as a symbol of good crushed by a cruel world. The city demolished the orphanage. They say there are plans underway to build a hotel there. The trucks have already started coming, filling their steel jaws with rubble as silent people watch them feast.
The Blue Shadow
by Mahtem Shiferraw
Yerer Ber
When she spoke, the room filled with yellow. Her tone could paint the whole house in one stroke, walls suddenly blooming with perennials and adey abeba, floors caked in branches of tsid, and corners sprouting with the blue of kiremt rain. The air would become thick and creamy, and if anyone happened to listen to her voice at that specific moment, they would be in awe, as they were most of the time in her presence. It was not what she said that fascinated them, but the way she said things with such elegance, such poise.
Weyzero Fantish did not know this, of course, but she did know a lot of things she ought not to, which was perhaps the most obvious reason for her untimely death. When she was found, the big black eyes of her teenage son Amare were resting on her limp body. She could see a blood clot forming around his neck, and though tears did not rush to his eyes, his fists were clenched as if he were ready to explode and spread himself thinly around the room. Weyzero Fantish saw this and observed the rest of the room: it was still as spotless as she’d left it, but drawers had been opened and closed in a hurry, and the walls no longer resembled the blue of the lake where she was born. Instead, they were sagging with a somber deep green. That was when she knew she would not be coming back.
Weyzero Fantish peered into the boy’s eyes. She could tell he had aged so quickly, so quietly. She had seen this before, the way grief appears suddenly and claws its way into the insides of people without their knowing. It was happening again right in front of her, and this time, she was the cause for such sorrow.
When she looked up, he had found the handgun that was clenched in her left palm; he knew who it belonged to, but she didn’t know yet. Amare released the weapon from her grip and was caught by surprise — his mother’s body was still warm. Weyzero Fantish stood next to him, and for a moment, he turned to her as if he saw her, but she quickly realized he was staring through her, to the walls. He sensed the change in colors too: the blooming buds must have shrunken themselves back into dry seeds. He found the Bible right beside her body. He split the pages open and read the first thing that caught his eye — something about a valley of dry bones. He closed it quickly, grief leaving him and replaced with a shadow that inhabited the hollow sockets of his eyes.
Weyzero Fantish followed him out. Her lean body still fit elegantly into the white dress, her head still wrapped in netela, hands resting on her belly as if she were observing something she had never seen before. Her black eyes darted quickly, right to left to right, long lashes flickering with the rain. It was only midday, and a light drizzle was turning the neighborhood into a grim gray.
For the first time, Weyzero Fantish regarded her son as if he were a stranger. She followed him from behind and noticed the ampleness of his shoulders, marveling at how long his back was. If uncovered, Weyzero Fantish knew she could find entire continents worth of pain on his shoulders alone — the invisible scars of siblings from different families, the bigger scar left from his own father. Amare walked briskly and did not respond to passersby greeting him. They noticed the blue shadow behind him but could not see Weyzero Fantish fluttering in her white dress, walking as quickly as she could, careful not to stain her dress in the viscous mud.
Amare went straight to the house of Weyzero Asnaku, their neighbor and his mother’s close friend. He aimed the gun at the woman, who was staring at him with a horrified look on her face. She demanded to know what he was doing there, and if he had gone crazy. She is arrogant even in her fear, Weyzero Fantish thought.
Amare turned the gun away. He didn’t need to say what they all knew: the gun belonged to Weyzero Asnaku’s husband.
“My husband is not home,” she said.
“Your husband is never home,” Amare replied bitterly. He was referring to the man’s multiple affairs with the women of Yerer Ber, including his mother, Weyzero Fantish.
Weyzero Asnaku insisted that her husband was at work. She told Amare to come back later to get the answers he needed, and suggested that he leave the gun with her, for safety.
Amare was not listening to her. He was looking past her, to the room behind her where the bed was still unmade, and suddenly he smelled it: the scent of a man, reeking of sweat, like a body that has stayed in the sun for too long or got caught in the rain and brought all the elements of the kiremt weather with him into the house. He could smell the colors too: vivid purples and fuchsias, mixed with freshly brewed coffee in an old jebena.
He knew then: Weyzero Asnaku was involved in her own love affair.
Amare put the gun down. Weyzero Fantish left him momentarily to check the bedroom: hiding under the bed she discovered the short figure of Ato Belayneh, the detective. She whispered something in his ear and though he didn’t hear her, he was startled and bumped his head, his breathing suddenly quickening; Weyzero Fantish already knew how much he would lie later to keep his affair a secret.
When she left the detective and returned to the living room, Amare was gone.
Sorrow was her profession. Her voice would come like a waterfall at first, her tone gurgling like deep riverbeds, her eyes wet as algae, an ocean of words fluttering from her mouth with such grace, such harmony, one couldn’t tell how deeply she was actually mourning. Her face too was a poised landscape: eyes as deep as wells, spitting fat tears, cheeks marked with the old razor scars, lips as dry as the earth in mid-bega. She covered her hair in an all-black netela, her arms swinging from her sides as if they did not belong to the same body. Her fingers were lean and nails sharp, and she would later sink them deep into her chest, skin coming undone to reveal her deepest pain, flat palms hitting her own bosom in rhythm. It was a masterpiece in the making; not the woman, but the unbearable sorrow, the art of grief so eloquently and selflessly executed.