I

       Cordelia comes to us one sunset in June. She comes with a winter evening’s biting chill and the grumbling of a truck. Noku (my only friend) and I watch Cordelia arrive from behind my wire fence. Our hands, mud-caked and cold, clasp tightly the fence’s rusting iron mesh. Off-white is the truck, though patches of rust mired the entire contraption. Silhouettes of various household furniture sail past me: jerry-built      settees, a ’70s refrigerator, vegetable racks, buckets of cutlery and crockery, one leaning wardrobe with a cracked mirror, and a worn mattress with a great dip in the middle. Set atop a cupboard is Cordelia. Her feet are shod in blue Made-in-China mapata-pata, and her crepe dress snaps softly in a wind howling down the street. She has small breasts. She could be anywhere from nine to sixteen. Cordelia is a new neighbour. I feel she’s been delivered to me like an ice cream cone on an afternoon ablaze with heat.

       Cordelia will replace my old friend Yesterday. Yesterday was a compulsive bed-wetter, made to sleep on the floor of the one-room lodging her family of five was renting from a sick nurse who lived and worked in England. One night, Yesterday drenched the floor so much that piss crept on an exposed wire. The next morning, Mutsonzowa Road, the street I live on, woke to the sound of soft keening. A motley crowd had gathered at the gate of Yesterday’s house. They witnessed grimacing police ferry a long, tin coffin into the back of a police Land Rover. Yesterday’s small wet corpse slid down the tin coffin whenever it was tilted slightly. The more superior of the police officers screamed into his cell phone.   

       “Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, I said death by electrocution! Electrocution! E for Elephant, L for Lion, E for eh”

      Since then, there haven’t been many other children to play with. Many families have moved out as of late. It’s not for Rudo, but Operation Murambatsvina (Say No to Shit! in English). I have no one to race up my leafy peach tree with; Noku has no one to hold the other end of the jump rope so I can skip all afternoon. I also like baking mud cakes, and when Noku tires, I work at it myself. My only other friend is an adult neighbor named Pepe. He re-reads old novels in whatever is left of his father’s Anglia, watching my lonesome play from a distance.

       The truck roils our street’s dusk-quiet. Window panes rattle. Walls shudder. They are mere three-roomed dwellings here, half-a-century old remnants of what Pepe calls our country’s colonial era past: an ancient time when white people called Rhodesians packed black Africans into cramped spaces. The Rhodesians summarily boasted yards accommodating swimming pools, gazebos, garden features, tennis courts, and manicured expanses of lawn for the Rhodesian children’s play. Many of my neighbors—Pepe included—inherited cupboards for homes from their black African parents who’d once led a working-class life.

       August finds us sleepless most nights; its gusts accost our asbestos roofs. Cordelia’s truck drives roosting murders from roofs and many trees bordering the narrow road, and more from the wild banana plantation behind the houses on my side of the street. The truck tramples little flower-beds, struggling vegetable patches and overflowing refuse bags. It scrapes, in the heavens, hanging telephone wires.

       The truck’s halt brings the street to a still    

       Neighbors trickle out of homes. They used to be surprised by the recent surge in move-ins. Mufombidale, a high-density suburb somewhere in Harare South, offers egregious habitation. It isn’t only the state of the three-roomed homes or the narrow pot-holed streets these homes line. These homes are burgled and witches are found naked at roadsides. Newborns are dumped by rubbish heaps. Bottles of cough syrup, abused and then trampled on, streak the stretches of earth.

       Then there is the banana plantation behind my house. In its shadows, men with bare torsos mimic Malawian Nyau rituals. They snap and wring the necks of chickens for their many masquerades. They wear flat-faced red, black, or green Nyau masks. Some don porcelain faces of Jesus. They outfit costumes fashioned from feathers or hairpieces, tall honey-hued grass, and bright shredded cloths. The ensuing masquerade is more of a drunken incursion than a cheerful parade. Skirts are upturned. Babies are wrenched from arms. Roadside vendors are looted.      

       Even mud-cakes know a lot changed since Operation Say No to Shit! It came after the government began demolition of all structures built without council permit. In late-night news reports, Mugabe’s plump and grey-haired ministers spoke evenly about how Harare was fast descending into disrepute, like Soweto or Lagos or Kampala already had. The government attributed this to the rise of scrap-metal slums. I saw them on the news: bulldozers driving into scrap-metal slums, prosperity churches, brick houses, farm sheds, and market stalls. Owners stood still before crumbled mortar. They marvelled at how so quickly it took to destroy something necessitating ardour and eons to build.

       Somebody bulldozed Cordelia’s home.                          

       Men in loose-fitting T-shirts unload furniture from the truck’s trailer into Cordelia’s new yard. Cordelia’s family shall rent one of the four rooms from our neighbor, Mai Ronnie. Mai Ronnie is making a living from the carnage of Operation Say No to Shit! Her husband left for Johannesburg, for greener job pastures. This was the last she ever saw of him. Mai Ronnie’s sons work as taxi drivers in Harare’s C.B.D. This revenue (including a cake-selling enterprise whose office is the gate of a petrol station) saw sporadic increase when Mai Ronnie evicted each of her sons from their shared bedroom; the kitchen floor would suffice. Two other families have already moved in earlier this month. Because the families couldn’t fit all their furniture in the petite rooms, wardrobes and sofas and tables are strewn around Mai Ronnie’s house.

       Cordelia is helped down the truck by one of the men. She flitters about the sailing cupboards and settees aimlessly, starry-eyed and her blue Made-in-China mapata-pata slapping tarmac.

       Pepe opens his gate a little to peer out onto the street.      

       He’s nicknamed after a famous Congolese rhumba singer for his morbid obesity and small moon-like face. Pepe attended university in America once. He says it was in a city called Waltham, in a state named Massachusetts. It was years ago, before either Noku or I were born. Before Cecil my older brother was born, too. Pepe returned for his father’s funeral, but never went back to America after. A lot of whispering and sniggering made rounds at the funeral (when people weren’t crying). Some said Pepe had been expelled, others said now for his father’s untimely death, he had to stay to attend family business. Now Pepe spends his days in his father’s decrepit Ford Anglia (bequeathed to him, the one and only son). Mutsonzowa Road decides him strange. They say the White Man’s English possessed him. He wears violet morning gowns with prints of flying flamingos. He re-reads books like Wuthering Heights or A House for Mr Biswas, and drinks café au lait. He doesn’t seem to mind the Anglia’s airlessness, its four flat tires, shattered windscreen, termite-eaten seats, nor thin vines lacing its lime-green body. Pepe maintains his peering into the street for a while longer. I call out, and Noku waves. But Pepe so uncharacteristically doesn’t respond.

       “Get inside the house, you monkeys, you.” Cecil laughs from behind us. He laughs, voice hoarsening and deepening by the day. “It’s cold, and both of you look like you were bathed in shena.” He’s come from playing football in the stretch of dry expanse before a nearby church. Cecil holds a makeshift football fashioned from melted polythene bags. Cecil’s free hand runs through my hair. I remonstrate, arguing how I wished to witness the entirety of the move-in. Cecil mocks the pitch of my voice. He says, “I’m the oldest. What I say goes.” 

       Noku and I let go of the wire fence. I make a beeline for the front door. For a moment, I think Cecil, too, is running behind us. I reach the rust-mangled doorway. The door itself creaks as it yawns into the dim-lit interior. Mai offers only her back to a gaze. She’s occupied with baking cakes for work. Our kitchenette is a cake store, and Mai is stern in telling me even a mere lick will warrant flogging. I look back and catch Cecil lingering at the fence still. Nailed is his gaze to Cordelia pondering this home and the little street it came with. She sees him and smiles. She waves at Cecil. Cecil waves back woodenly. I’m not the only one to see a sudden softness glaze Cecil’s eyes. Pepe’s yellow-eyed peering sees this, too. He throws Cecil a baleful stare. Pepe shuts his gate forcefully.

 

II

       Mai Ronnie visits the next day to borrow a cup of sugar for her cake business. Mai only obliges as the selfsame Mai Ronnie rescued us from homelessness in introducing Mai to the business of roadside confectionery. Mai needed the money after Baba died. The tiredness of Mai’s replies belies a displeasure at lending a cup of sugar. Mai Ronnie, oblivious in a spaghetti top fighting for the modesty of her nipples, gibbers on about her new tenants, Cordelia and her mysterious father. I overhear Mai Ronnie say Cordelia and her father used to live on a big settlement. “Ha, it was one big public toilet. Those kinds of places where people with nowhere to go just go. A place of desperation, a place of suffering.” Mai Ronnie adds the settlement used to stand on the fringes of Harare. “Baba Cordelia and Cordelia lived there after Mugabe made white farmers crawl out of their white farms. Even a rock knows Mugabe wanted those farms for his ministers and their minister prostitutes. Baba Cordelia worked on such farms. When Mugabe came, Baba Cordelia barely escaped the torching with his underwear!”

       Mai offers Mai Ronnie the cup of sugar. Mai Ronnie accepts it, continuing with the death of Cordelia’s mother somewhere near the Zimbabwe Mozambique border. She’d succumbed to one of the myriad complications following childbirth. Cordelia grew to sick-nurse her blind grandmother in rural squalor. Her Baba returned to his in-laws one Christmas, and said Cordelia would leave with him. Baba Cordelia brought the girl to Harare. He locked her away from the horrors of the city in a hastily-built shack. Anxiety subsided, Cordelia’s father let the girl out to cook meals and wash what little laundry they owned. He makes soap in a soap factory. He glares at Cordelia whenever she so much as smiles at a dog.

       Mai Ronnie leaves. Mai, shutting the door behind the guest, wonders out loud how this Mai Ronnie woman learnt all of this in a night. Mai scoffs at Mai Ronnie’s hot pink spaghetti top, at the queen cakes Mai Ronnie vends at the front of some filling station. The muffins land on tongues with the bitterness of soap. They are unlike Mai’s own cooking. She brings out left-over sadza netsunga for lunch as if to demonstrate. I ask Mai how Cordelia’s father could possibly expect Cordelia to do all the cooking and cleaning at so young an age. Mai tells me to keep quiet and finish the meal. “Some things only make sense in the grown-up world.” She adds, not once looking me in the eye.

 

III

       Five-hundred millimeter Vaseline containers and Camphor bottles have lids that make the best cake-tins. I find them in overflowing trash-bags set at gates (or the bare space where a gate is supposed to be). Each time I catch a glimpse of Cordelia carrying out a bucket of laundry or dish of crockery, I’m careful to wave at her, beckoning. She looks to see no one around. She smiles and beckons back. I catch Cordelia like this on what Pepe calls my post-lunch constitutional.

       I arrive at his gate-front three afternoons after Cordelia’s arrival. Pepe is at the Anglia’s steering wheel. A high concrete wall borders Pepe’s yard. Entry is possible only through a sliding aluminium gate. Pepe had the walls erected after his father died. Whatever lies behind those walls invites a circus of gossip. Pepe’s mother, freshly widowed, slowly receded into the darkness of her house. It was an unhurried process how she moved. Covered in dark sequined shawls, Pepe’s mother sat hunched in the ghosts of flower-beds her husband had commissioned. All day, in the shadow of leafy Avocado trees flanking her home, she brooded over the death of her husband. As time progressed, she moved to the doorstep, to the front doors of frosted glass. The widow passed days by languidly contemplating different people passing along Mutsonzowa: crockery vendors astride bicycles, borehole bound gossips, long-time friends embracing, lovers holding hands, shrilling children let loose from school, and even the occasional Nyau masquerade. One day she didn’t come out of the doors of frosted glass. Summarily, men in overalls, under Pepe’s orders, put up the wall. The Anglia sits outside the wall, body tilted slightly, front end higher than the lower. It rears for a drive it will never make.

       “Man shall not live by bread alone!” Pepe lowers the driver’s window. “But––as you children see fit––by even garbage, by imagination.”

       His moon-like face shines down on me.

       Presently, Noku is beside him, comfortable on the front passenger’s seat. She beams at me through Pepe’s window with a smile robbed of three teeth. It’s unclear how long Noku has been in there. I join the party. On some occasions Pepe calls me “Rare Specimen of the African Ghetto Child.” He recounts how unusual it is for my kind to sing Destiny’s Child songs atop peach trees, to obsess over mud cakes. My kind is wont to make toy airplanes from grass stalks, to mould melted polythene into makeshift footballs and roll worn tires down streets. He narrows his yellow eyes and runs his fingers through his beard. He says I ought to feel like a newly-discovered species of grasshopper. Most times he humors my mud cakes and offers me old and valueless Zimbabwean coins for the chef’s choice. I feel important in his gaze, an actual somebody to consider. Mai comes out on occasion to scold my grubbiness. Pepe alights his Anglia to warn her sternly about what he calls the “ephemerality of childhood.” He warns Mai adulthood is fast coming for Noku and me. Mai should let us relish what he also calls the “obliviousness of childhood”. Owing to his having lived in America, no one debates him on his opinions. His ideas, reiterated with big words and a wooden Shona-American accent, are law. Neighbors avert gazes. They sidle back into homes. On lighter occasions, Pepe invites us into the Anglia’s      back seat as presently. There, he re-reads us his many books. Quietly we relish the gravity of Pepe’s deep voice, the smell of leatherette seats cooking in the heat, and the faded yellow of the ancient pages the driver flips. 

       Now the air in the Anglia feels vaguely ominous, like Pepe and Noku were holding a most serious exchange before my arrival. Noku explains to me that Pepe isn’t doing well. He feels his heart sunken, loses the sense of sentences now and again.

       “It’s Cordelia, that’s her name handiti?”

       “Yes, we see her every day!” Noku and I chorus.

       “How can you children be so happy when your kin is scrubbing, nay slaving, away her little body, her childhood on pots and pans?”

       “Me? She smiles and waves at me whenever I see her,” I confess.

       Pepe sits upright. A flush of new life colors his face. “She talks to you?” He says softly.

       “No, but I could make her.” Noku and I stare at each other with puzzled expressions.

       “But you’re making us sad, too, Pepe. Read us a novel, please!” We break into a song, and slam the dust off the dashboard with little impatient fists. “Read to us! Read to us!” The Anglia’s vine-laced chassis creaks.

       “That’s enough!” Pepe snaps.

       The chill in his “Enough!” runs down my spine.

       Noku’s mouth falls into a perfectly-shaped O.

       Quickly, Pepe grows perceptive of the small terror he’s caused. He covers his moon-face in shame. “Forgive me, children,” He says softly.

       We nod unsurely.

       “Cordelia is deeply sad. This means I, Pepe, am also deeply sad.”

       “We love you, Pepe. We don’t like you sad. It’s scary.”

       “You want me to never scream at you again?” He asks, stroking Noku’s hair leisurely.

       We nod.

       “You want your Pepe happy?”

       We nod.

       “Or maybe you want Pepe to bring out a real cake? More delicious and bigger than the ones your mothers make!”

       Our eyes widen, mouths water.

       “Bring Cordelia to Pepe then, sweet children.”

 

IV

       Later, Noku and I forage for Vaseline lids in front of Mai Ronnie’s yard. The privation of our situation is now quite apparent. Noku barely conceals excitement at the prospect of eating real cake. I’m more excited at replacing Noku altogether with someone newer and exciting as Cordelia. She is older; she’ll protect us from the boys stomping our mud cakes or girls wrenching away our skipping rope. If I were a girl, I’d be Cordelia. As much as Cordelia makes girlhood out as a kind of martyrdom, she makes it look fun with all the attention she attracts.

Cordelia quits the small interior of Mai Ronnie’s house.

       She looks around, and says, “Hey wena! I was trying to sleep. What are you doing in that rubbish?”

       Cordelia comes to us, arms folded at the chest, inspecting the fuss with humored curiosity. Her skirt blows slowly in the wind. I marvel at how she really is real: the Made-in-China mapata-pata, scent of Camphor body cream. She asks us again what we’re doing. Through the fence we’re careful to explain mud-cake baking. All one needs is water, fine-grained soil, and a broad lid. You take the soil and pour it into an empty lotion bottle with a wide opening. Then you add your secret ingredients for the day (seeds for raisins, smooth-green tree leaves for mint, and when in season: actual chopped fruits). Then, when your mother’s humming isn’t in earshot, or washing not in sight, pour in the water from the back     yard tap. With a sturdy twig, we mix everything until it attains a thick consistency. Then pour the red-brown mud into new-found lotion bottle lids.

       I’m willing to teach all this to Cordelia if she agrees to be friends.

       Cordelia laughs.

       She begins to turn away.

       “Hey—” I call. She offers only her back.

       I feel slapped. I can’t hurt what is beautiful. Her elegant effrontery (the twirling skirt, the mincing away) stirs inside me a curiosity about modeling that same skirt. Suddenly, Cordelia turns. She looks back, saying, “There’s this boy. He always walks past here at sundown with a plastic football.”

       “Cecil?” Noku asks.

       “Cecil. What a lovely name. Is he your brother?”

       “He’s mine,” I say.

       Cordelia looks at me with renewed interest. “Is that so?”

 

V

       Every sunset after, Cordelia comes to see Cecil. She excuses it to Mai Ronnie as a small grocery run. She seldom sinks her pretty and lean fingers into the mud mixtures. She winces as I wash the Vaseline tins of the left-over petroleum jelly and rubbish grease. She only chides in and holds clean lids up whenever Mai slips into sight. Then, when Cecil (who’s come to check the whiteness of his teeth every time he leaves home) returns from the soccer field, Cecil walks Cordelia back home under a darkening sky. They speak in unhurried tones. Every so often, when their shoulders touch, they stop to giggle and gaze at each other.

       Soon, Cordelia becomes a regular sight to Mai, too.

       Mai pours herself over Cordelia’s beauty–––the sand-beach colored skin, lush jade mane, and bright almond eyes. Mai explains my fixation with mud-cakes by recounting to Cordelia her muffin and queen-cake business near a primary school. Baba, my father, was a coffin maker. He came home with wood-shavings in his ears and blue slipshod overalls. He got a cough that never went away. It shredded his insides into a bright bloody paste. Cecil helps Mai cart home buckets of sun-hardened confectionery. After, Mai usually sprawls herself on her three-legged bed for a breath of respite. She shuts her eyes. She pleads with the world to temporarily silence its din. But lately, Mai’s post-work inward wondering is ceasing. She looks at Cordelia like a mirror. Every smile of Cordelia reminds Mai of her own, more youthful one. Mai whiles away the time now with curling Cordelia’s hair and professing how much she wants Cordelia to enjoy youth.

       Cordelia visits one afternoon when Mai is away selling cakes.

       “But the idea is simple: Let’s sneak into your Mai’s bedroom, and wear her high heels and put on her lipstick!” She says. Cordelia adds how she’ll teach me to put makeup on my face. “Don’t take so long to think!” Cordelia nudges me. “Your Mai won’t be mad; didn’t she say she wants me to have more time to play?”

       We scuffle into Mai’s bedroom.

       A blonde Jesus at the head of the bed welcomes us with steely blue-eyed disapproval. A wardrobe leans against the brick walls to one side, and a dresser cluttered with combs and cold creams sits across it. Cordelia reaches for a hair brush, and begins running it in her short glistening afro. “Women should always look beautiful. Lipstick gets you a boyfriend.”

       “Give me that lipstick. I want to put it on, too.”      

       “No, lipstick isn’t for boys. Ties and trousers are for boys.”

       “I’ll put the lipstick on my lips if I want! Give it to me or I’ll tell her you were here…stealing!”

       “She loves me, your Mai. You think she’ll believe you?”

       “Get out of my house, homeless waif. Return to your shack poverty.”

       Cordelia drops the lipstick. Her eyes tear and she runs out of the room. I follow her out. Pepe is taking an evening walk in his morning gown with prints of flying flamingos. He witnesses Cordelia’s sob-filled retreat. She has no time for him. Made-in-China mapata-pata slap tarmac. Pepe makes sure no one else is around (neighbors’ curtains are drawn) before he skips to my fence. He kneels before me, thick be-ringed fingers tightly clasping rust.

       “What do you want, you?” I say, trembling.

       “She doesn’t want to play with you like I?” he says.

       “Why can’t I be Cordelia? Oh, how I'd like everyone to fall in love with me.”

       “Child, have you ever learnt of puberty?”

       I stare at tarmac, at the cigarette butts and small bits of broken glass glistening weakly in failing light. Like a sour mud cake, the word rolls back into my mind: P-U-B-E-R-T-Y.  “What is it? What is puberty?” I hear myself quietly ask.

       “Aaaah, Cordelia is the answer to our question. She’s important. Cordelia is the patron saint of Moving On.”

       “Can I also be the patron saint of Moving On?”

       “No. You’re a newly discovered species of grasshopper.”

       “How can I even bring her to you? She hates me.”

       “Steal her away from everyone like you would a piece of your mother’s cakes.”

 

VI

       A knock nearly unhinges our door one night. Cecil opens the door, and a broad-chested Baba Cordelia lumbers through the doorway. He dons his blue slipshod overalls still, the ones he wears at the soap factory.

       “Who brings Cordelia here?” he booms.

       Cordelia follows, forcibly smiling. “Baba, please, don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

       I look up at Cordelia’s father, and feel a wave of fear wash over me. Cecil trembles under the man’s shadow. “Is it you?” Baba Cordelia booms at Cecil. Mai holds both of her sons back. She threatens to scream. The street will pour out of their homes, rearing for his beating. He says Mai Ronnie catches Cordelia bounding to our house almost every afternoon. Mai Ronnie warned him about the many mangy men inhabiting the street. “She knows to stay inside unless there is washing or cooking to do.” He slaps Cordelia loudly across the face. She falls. She quickly rights herself with a small laugh.

       “He’s only tired. Please.” Cordelia fends off Mai’s efforts to stop the man.

       Cecil leaps onto the father’s back. Cecil tries to pull him away from Cordelia. Suddenly, the television drums, announcing the evening news. We all freeze in the television’s intermittent glowing. A news report comes on about the current state of Operation Say No to Shit! Video footage of familiar Mfombidale locales rolls. All is crumbled mortar. We see stretches of rubble. Children skip on fallen ceiling beams and grown-ups vacantly look on. They wear cricket jerseys for the June cold. Another of Mugabe’s portly and bespectacled ministers comes on screen. His bald head gleams with Brilliantine. He says the operation is advancing to our neighborhood of Mfombidale. He is interviewed in an office furnished with teak. Beneath a large gold-framed photograph of Mugabe, the cabinet minister says, “There is absolutely no reason to worry about the process we are undergoing. If you…eh… read your history books, you will find that Paris and London were once like Harare. The government had to clear the filth of their slums, too. Now look at the beautiful cities they are today!” The report ends with a black-and-white photograph of brooding Victorians in a dank and narrow alleyway, mattresses and clothes heaped beside them. It slides to another photograph of today, of a conservatively populated London street. Baba Cordelia begins to weep. Cordelia holds her rocking father in visibly tired arms.

       Mai says she’ll make everyone sadza.

       Cordelia and Cecil shuffle out of the house. I follow. At the wash basin, Cecil wipes away Cordelia’s tears. Their faces grow closer until lips meet. Cecil has never spoken to me as gently. I hear Mai inside distracting Cordelia’s father. Mai asks for Cordelia’s birthday. How wonderful would it be if she baked something for the occasion? I turn away, making for the fence. Is the home I’ve known for years tumbling down before me? Only Pepe’s Anglia winks back.

 

VII

       It’s not Cordelia’s birthday. Nonetheless, Mai insists Cordelia learn baking as a money-making prospect. This arrangement only comes after putting Baba Cordelia under much duress. Light urban grooves play from inside the house. After Cordelia sets the cake inside the oven, Mai volunteers we children go outside to play as the baking ensues. Noku, Cecil, Cordelia and I find ourselves at the wire fence. Each of our hands clasp the iron of the wire, and feeling the warmth of the sun on our skin and back, we look out onto the silent street. For the impending Operation, neighbors hide and commiserate in their cupboards for homes.

       The music inside stops and Mai calls for Cecil to fix the stereo.

       Cecil runs to Mai. I tell Noku to follow him inside.

       I've decided to steal Cordelia.

       I can never be loved as long as she stands beside me. I’m not curious what Pepe will do with her. What matters is that he’ll take her away.

       “Want to meet someone?” I tell Cordelia that Pepe wants to meet her. Pepe might gift Cordelia something.

       “Ho-o? I always see him in that old car. Reading. Sometimes I think he watches me bent over doing laundry.” Cordelia seems excited at having captured the attention of a real man––without lipstick. She asks to visit Pepe for a while until Cecil returns.

       Crossing the tarmac to Pepe’s Anglia is crossing an old, frozen gray river. The tarmac twinkles with broken glass. Tea-colored potholes mottle its length. It is then loud ululation, baboon-like gibbering and heavy footfalls impinges themselves against the quiet street. Bounding down the street is a Nyau masquerade. The incursion sports skirts of long honey-hued grass and headdresses plumed with black feathers. The leader emerges from the stirring of flat-faced masks. His own is the porcelain face of Mother Mary. He dances towards us on stilts. Aloft are a knobkerrie and a bloodied chicken with a twisted neck. Cordelia screams as the Nyau leader forces her into a waltz.

       “I want to go back home! Let go of me!” She cries.

       The masquerade doesn’t seem to notice me. I’m left untouched, unseen, in the dust that bare footfalls stir.

       Suddenly, Pepe shoves his morbid obesity through the crowd of masked dancers. Set down somewhere is an old book and a cup of café au lait. “Let go of that girl, I say! Let go of her at once!” What follows is a fashion show-down of some sort. Pepe is only missing a mask, but his morning gown with pink prints of flying flamingos can billow just as the Nyau leader’s. It’s also the threat of Pepe’s belly knocking easily the leader of his stilts that seals the leader’s loss. He edges away (presumably to search for another little girl to waltz with), and follows the current of shrieking dancers. Pepe carries Cordelia’s fraught body in his arms. I follow closely, reminding Pepe of our agreement. “I want my cake now––and I want it bigger than the one Mai made for Cordelia and I want it to be something else besides chocolate.”

       I protest, clawing the hem of his gown. Pepe brushes me aside at the foot of his gate.   

       “Go home, child. A million cakes await you there. Your wish to be loved even more has come true. Cordelia is going away now!” Pepe looks down on Cordelia like a moon. “Barbaric these masquerades are, but oh! Look how it’s brought you to me.”

       “Who are you?” Cordelia says, struggling.

       “Come, Cordelia. Let’s go see Mother,” Pepe says.

       Pepe hurriedly shuts the gate against my curiosity.