“Marta said I must be proud of all I was able to accomplish despite my time in prison. She added, ‘Sometimes, things even out in the end. Karma, justice, and all of that.’ ‘Like an equation,’ I replied. ‘That we’re always balancing.’
“She said something I couldn’t hear over the rain, so I stepped a little closer, and when she craned her head to see if the minibus was on its way, I fixated again on the light glistening off her hair. I reached out to her by instinct. A car sped by and honked and I pulled myself back, which sent her umbrella out into the darkness, as if a strong gust of wind had caught it. Marta lost her step. She slipped on the muddy curb and fell onto the street, her ankle stuck in the gutter.
“She reached out, and I leaned toward her. She needed me — for once. So I reached for her, my hand nearly touching hers, and Marta whispered, ‘Kind stranger.’
“And I froze, because even now, especially now, the Marta of my dreams and nightmares and fantasies, haunting Marta who had scolded me for wearing those old shoes, who had failed to recognize my achievement getting the new pair, who had talked to me for half an hour that very night and still had no idea who I was, now called me a stranger.
“I realized then, as she held her hand out to me, that she hadn’t even introduced herself that night, hadn’t told me her name, nor asked for mine. I was a stranger and always would be to her. I was frozen and the cars honked their horns, unable to stop, the beams of the headlights closing in, overtaking her, and she lunged desperately for my hand, almost a helping hand, almost a friend.
“When the ambulance came, there was really nothing left to do. I knew I could say with some degree of honesty that it had been an accident — a horn, the umbrella, Marta stumbling, me somehow not being able to get to her in time. I try to make sense of that moment. I thought it was my chance to leave the past behind. But that was not the way, was it?”
He was posing a question, but not to me, whose name he’d never asked, a stranger who was there for him in his moment of need, something he didn’t seem to recognize.
“Tell me what you think of my story,” he said, and I didn’t speak, didn’t move as he leaned forward and rubbed the dirt off his shoes, caring for them like they were his salvation.
A Double-Edged Inheritance
by Hannah Giorgis
Shiromeda
Meskerem didn’t believe in fate.
Fate was one of those silly things her Orthodox aunties whispered about in their singsong voices, starry-eyed and full of desperate, ill-advised hope for something, anything. Fate was for people who had abandoned control, the last refuge of the weak and uninspired. Fate was for women who didn’t know any better.
So when the call came from back home that the aunt who had named her — the great-aunt who shared her birthday — had died, she felt no grand cosmic realignment, only a churning grief, the kind that empties out your stomach and makes unseasoned mincemeat of its remains.
Almaz had loved Meskerem with a kind of uncommon, unreasonable fervor that bordered on desperation. From the moment she first learned of her youngest niece’s pregnancy, the stern woman had softened her heart for the child no one else wanted. This child would be born into blame; this child would need protection.
The whole family had recoiled in performative horror as news of Tigist Negash’s pregnancy snaked through their networks. Tigist, the youngest and brightest of seven girls, was the beacon on whom all their hopes had rested. She’d received the highest marks in her class at Kidane Mehret, a future engineer whose first semester at Addis Ababa University had been so impressive that her professors called her mother on several occasions to insist she consider sending Tigist abroad to continue her studies.
It was Tigist who had turned their offers down with a sudden, furious anger. The flash in her eyes was quiet, a lightning-fast break from the pools of warmth with which she normally saw the world. She didn’t want to leave — Addis Ababa was home. What could exist beyond it? She hardly left Amist Kilo. Quiet and pious, Tigist spent all her time studying or following her emaye.
Until, of course, she met Robel.
Robel Girma smelled like whiskey and freshly printed birr. It was nauseating at first, his scent so strong it knocked Tigist off balance when their shoulders bumped against each other in Shiro Meda one early kremt day.
“Yekirta, ehitey,” he’d whispered through a crooked grin that sent her head spinning. He reached down to help her up, gold rings on three of his calloused fingers. “Asamemkush? Be shai le’adenish?”
She’d been shopping for gabis that morning, nervous about her first night in university housing. Her oldest sister had moved back home after her husband’s disappearance, carrying two children with a bad back and a broken spirit. Tigist’s room in their mother’s house soon became the children’s playground, their constant tugs at her netela a consistent interruption to her strict studying regimen. But still, she loved them. And so she planned to spend more time on campus, burrowed in the libraries. That would have to do.
Almaz was a literature professor at her niece’s university, a stoic career woman who lived alone in an apartment tucked between Siddist Kilo and embassy row. Sharp and poetic, she prided herself on her pragmatism — even and especially when others told her she didn’t behave like an Ethiopian woman should. Almaz wanted Tigist to take her professors’ advice and leave; she didn’t understand why a bright young girl would want to stay in Addis tending to her family when the world was calling. Almaz had never taken much interest in her nieces and nephews, but she found housing on campus for Tigist the moment she heard the girl insisted on staying in Addis Ababa.
“Don’t thank me,” Almaz had said, less a demure platitude and more an agitated demand. “Please, ebakesh, just meet people who do not live inside your books or your mother’s house.”
Tigist had been thinking about her aunt’s directive as she shopped for gabis, pressing them against her face. They smelled strange and dirty, unlike the gabis her mother had washed meticulously each season. None of them were soft enough; none of them felt like home.
When Robel Girma bumped into her, Tigist Negash stopped thinking of home.
Girma Woldemariam never wanted his son running around with some common girl in the first place.
Girma was the Ethiopian army’s most respected general, and he had a reputation to uphold. Robel could spin lies to these college girls all he wanted, but the oldest Girma son did not have time for romance — and he certainly couldn’t be seen walking around Siddist Kilo with his hands intertwined with some girl from a balager family no one could name. Robel had business to attend to: his final year of law school was coming to an end, and his father wanted him to spend more time accompanying him to work. His path had been forged for him, and all the ungrateful brat had to do was show up.
All he had to do was stay away from distractions.
When Tigist told Robel she felt sick, fingers fidgeting in her lap as she sat across a table from him at Enrico’s, he joked that the cake must have gotten to her. She shouldn’t have eaten it during tsom anyway, he insisted, before noticing a quick flash in her eyes.