At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep
I head for the room where I am lying
And set fire to it
So that nothing will persist of the consent that has been wrung from me
The furniture then makes way for animals of the same size
looking at me fraternally

 - Vigilance, André Breton

THE COW WAS BORN one year after Independence, and at two years after, she was approaching an age when she could get pregnant and start giving milk. She was with her small herd beside a two-lane highway that had become busier and faster, due to historical developments of which it wasn’t in her nature to know much, other than the intensity of smells and sounds in that place, the blurs of speeding glass and painted metal along the asphalt.

In a moment of confusion, part of her herd on one side of the road, part on the other side, she bolted, tried to cross, and was hit by one of the hurtling, bright, indifferent masses. She was spun and thrown. She toppled over into a ditch on the side of the highway that she’d wanted to get to. She lifted her head, but couldn’t stand. What she knew about her situation then was that she was alone and broken and in total pain.

FOUR YEARS LATER, six years after Independence. A man, a white man, is tugging on the locked lobby door, peering in through the glass, when Yvonne motors up, a helmet on her almost as big as her tiny scooter, a loose end of her green and yellow body wrap flapping behind her like a windsock. After lifting her head to calculate sun angles, she parks the scooter in what will soon be the shade of a palm. Helmet off, hair liberated, skin glowing rose on black like the heat in coal, she approaches the lobby door, and, to the somewhat surprise of the man there, the first applicant, she extracts a ring of keys from her shoulder bag and lets them both in.

This I could observe from my window upstairs.

Inside, Yvonne briskly set up a folding table for herself and folding chairs for herself and the applicant. From her main bag she birthed a sub-bag whose contents she dumped onto the table. She sat, sorted a bit, gestured the applicant over.

“You’ll be Mister B”, she said, and handed him a small, numbered puck, which he pinched up as if it might be explosive . . .

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Cover photo: Street Views Between Kampala and Entebbe, Simisa, Wikimedia Commons
License: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html