One

                I was just a girl when my family was put on a boat heading to the Americas.  Not long before that day, my brother came running over the hill into town.  He had been playing a game of stick ball with his friends.  And far behind him, sucking air through their mouths until the spaces between the ribs showed, puffed his friends.  Akin whistled a tune through his front teeth.  He bounced the ball on his knee, hit it with his head, passed it behind his back, and kicked it to hit me in the leg. 

 “Always working.  You’re so serious and never play,” Akin called to me.  He laughed at me as I tended the goats.  I raked the muck from under them and shooed the goats away from around my legs. 

“Your goats will be taken in the night,” said Akin.

            “Without my goats, we would have no milk to drink.  And who would take my goats?”  I called back to Akin, loud enough to be heard over the goats bleating.  “All the families have goats.”

             “The lions are roaming near the village again,” Akin said, close enough now that his boy sour wrinkled my nose.  “Uncle saw them again last night.”  He dropped his voice lower and jabbed me in the arm.  “You better lock your goats inside the fence tonight.  Or you will have nothing but bones in the morning.”  Akin’s mouth twisted and his eyebrows raised up.  His face reminded me of the time Uncle told a joke about an elephant trying to mount a rhinoceros.

We climbed a tree to see out to the grasslands of East Africa.  The waist-high grasses waved in the wind.  A herd of elephants roamed in the distance.  An elephant trumpeted, and I looked further past the herd to see a lion taking down the smallest elephant. 

After school, we all circled around two boys.  Akin spun them with their eyes closed until they were too dizzy to run straight.  One played the lion, the other was the goat.  We chanted the lion’s name, Mbube, Mbube, calling faster and faster as he got closer to catching the goat.  Akin spun them again, and we chanted slower now as the lion, too dizzy to catch the goat this time, fell at my feet.  We sang the song as we walked back across the hills to our houses.  As the sun went down behind the trees, I still sang Mbube softly to myself.  I led the goats into their pen and latched it shut.

In the morning, I awakened to listen for the bleating of my goats.  I looked out over the hilly grasslands at the sunrise and heard the bell on the littlest goat.  I opened the gate to let them out of the pen so they could forage over the hill together.  The lush grasses whooshed and clattered in the wind.  In the yard outside the house, I fed the chickens and swept the litter from the yard.

My mother stood at the doorsteps.  I kissed her goodbye and ran to catch my brother.  At school, Akin’s friend whispered that a lion had snatched an infant child.   The baby’s father had chased the lion away to the edge of the village, but it ran off with the child in his jaws.

The next day, we heard in the village that two lions had come in the dark of night and stolen a family with four children.  The young girl’s toy had been left, but the family could not be found.  Rumors of kidnappings continued to swirl around town.  We heard that the lions were aided by sleek long-necked giraffes who plucked boys right from the trees they climbed to escape.

Then Uncle told us a pack of lions came into the next town just over the hill and kidnapped a whole village of people in the dark of the night.  As children, we had always heard these stories from our parents to convince us to come inside from playing before night turned the town blacker than Uncle’s skin.  When he told his story now, Uncle’s eyes were bloodshot, and his face wrinkled and contorted in the way it did when he talked about the man who cheated him out of money.

School was cancelled in the morning because the teacher was missing.  We walked across the hilltops to the next town.  Nothing was there but a left-behind shoe, dusty and worn, ripped by an animal with sharp teeth. 

A few days later, the lions arrived in our village.  Akin picked me up and ran, but he was not as fast as the lions.  They outran him, beat him senseless, and threw him on a horse.  Akin’s arm jutted the wrong way, and air whistled past the rib bone poking through his chest wall.  My father, my mother, Uncle, the horse carrying Akin’s listless body, and I marched for two days with all the people from our village to the coast where a boat awaited us. 

*Photo courtesy of Fir0002/Flagstaffotos