Dominion by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, short stories, poetry, specultive fiction, Afrofuturism
Publisher: AURELIA LEO, LLC
Published: 2020-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

SLEEP PAPA, SLEEP

SUYI OKUNGBOWA DAVIES

Max Aniekwu stands in the shadows of an abandoned danfo under the bridge at Otedola, where he always meets his buyers. Grime lines his wrist and tucks under his fingernails, making his increasingly sweaty palms greasy. Dark clouds splotch over a sky as gray as TV static, announcing an impending thunderstorm; yet Max sweats and juggles the Ziploc bag from one slimy palm to another in search of some friction. He shifts from foot to foot and wipes his gleaming forehead with the back of his free hand, leaving dark stains.

Max knows something is different this time. Beside the fact that the buyer is late, something in his chest simply doesn’t sit right. He should never have taken this job, not from Chidi of all people. Max wipes sweat from his brow again, now rethinking it all. Chidi, whose tips and contacts have twice gone bad and landed three colleagues in the police net. Chidi, who every trader worth his salt in the black market has blacklisted.

He should turn around right now, dump the bag inside the abandoned danfo and leave. But that’ll ruin his cred on the market. Rule number one: never stand up your buyer. He’ll struggle with finding another buyer for sure, and God knows how he’ll eat then. Remember, Maximus. Remember why you gats to do this shit in the first place.

There’s a couple peals of thunder, and a mild drizzle begins to bathe the bridge overhead. Max, unable to shake off the spiders marching up the nape of his neck, considers a break for it. Worst case, he’d ask Chidi to call the buyer, apologize, and set another delivery time and date. He’s tired from all the digging, anyway.

He’s still thinking this when a shadow falls upon all other shadows around him. Max looks up, into the scraggly face of a gangly dark man. The man wears a long, gray kaftan that cloaks a sheathed curved dagger clamped to his belt. He’s draped in an equally gray shawl over his head, hiding most of his features, but Max can still see two lines of vertical tribal marks etched into each cheek, right below piercing eyes.

“Ne Maximus?” he asks. His accent is heavily northern.

Max swears under his breath, his anger flaring. Not only did Chidi tell the buyer his full name—you never tell a buyer your name because you never know what they’re going to do with it—Chidi the idiot also brought him a northerner.

Was he not clear enough about his preferred client types or was Chidi just stupid? Even after Max made him repeat it like a mantra: get only middlemen who buy and smuggle to storage centers in Cotonou and Yaounde for shipping to boutique museums that do live exhibitions in China, Mexico and Poland, Chidi still defied his instruction. He knows that anyone else is a big risk with the police, especially these northern guys who everyone says only buy to eat, even though no one has ever been able to prove that, which makes it even more of a problem.

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