HUNTING EGGS
BY
BRIAN MOSETI
Luke and I watch Buku contentedly put three eggs into
his breast pocket, where they will be safe. We have had no luck finding eggs in
our tree and a jealous feeling steals over me. I look at Luke staring longingly
and snigger at both of them.
Luke is my age but he is my uncle, my father’s
lastborn brother. He thinks I should respect him on that account and not call
him Yaa, the name all age mates call
one another. But we are about the same size and I know I can lick him if he
tried anything so I just call him Luke. I am ten, Buku is a year older and
slightly bigger and he insists that both of us call him his senior.
Buku shouts happily, shakes his tree jumping up and
down in the branches and making faces at the girls who are picking guavas on
the other side of the fence. Our side of the fence has dark gum trees growing
forbiddingly. Our egg hunting grounds. The girls live on a farm fenced all
round by a wall and we can never get to the inviting guavas inside. We try to
plead with the girls to throw some our way, even a rotten one, but they just
giggle, show us some very ripe one’s to and then bite into them gleefully. We
salivate silently until we get angry.
“Those little fools! They refuse to give us guavas?
Just guavas?!” Buku shouts to us, “You will see you little devils,” he shouts
at them.
“I feel like shitting!” he shouts to no one in
particular.
Right there and the, he takes off his shorts and
starts cackling with laughter as he bares his naked ass to the girls, squats
and actually starts shitting!
Yellow turds following one another down the green
foliage before a fart like tearing paper sends down a spray of watery shit.
We stare horrified, fascinated!
The giggles from the girls stop, the youngest whose
name is Baby (such a stupid name for a baby) who is about four years old points
and says, “bad manners.”
The other two, one of them Sha is a class behind us
in school starts shouting, “Buku is doing bad manners on a tree,” the other one
who I have never seen before joins in and even Baby catches on and soon it’s a
chorus. All the while we are hanging on the trees making faces and obscene
gestures at the girls. They have also stopped eating their guavas and are
chanting at us.
Mama Sha comes out. “What’s all this racket?” She
asks picking Baby from the ground and looking at the two girls on the guava
tree.
She can’t see us yet and we try to look invisible
inside the foliage.
“Buku is doing bad manners on the tree,” Sha says.
At that moment, Buku slips on a lower branch he had
descended on, to hide. He slips on his own shit too and starts shouting at me.
“Lee, I’m falling! Help Lee, I’m falling,” But his
flailing hands grab a branch which snaps from the trunk and strips along the
bark gently swinging Buku to firm ground where he lands softly.
‘Look, I just swung like Tarzan, did you see that?
That was epic yaa, did you see that?”
But his enthusiasm is short lived when he realizes he is standing in his own
shit and that Ma sha has just seen us scramble down the branches like very
badly coordinated monkeys.
“You fools what do you think you are doing? Don’t you
have any decency? You want to spoil my children ehe?!” finds us running after
the already accelerating figure of Buku into the Maize plantation behind the
farm.
“Your mother will be told of this,” but by the time
this reaches us, we are laughing into the middle of the maize patch and on the
other end where the laughter dries on our lips instantly.
The cows we had been charged to take care of as they
grazed have broken down a fence and are contentedly chewing on the maize stalks
which have just grown to about waist height. They pluck the juicy leaves and
leave the stalks standing.
Now surely, not only our mother will hear of this,
but our father as well. I’m dreading going home.
ENDS
@Mossetti
