Smells Like Stars by D. Nandi Odhiambo

Author:D. Nandi Odhiambo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2018-09-23T19:06:34+00:00

* * *

43 my fiancée!

44 darling

45 Cheers.

46 "In the choir, the angels stand." From Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy."

47 Apologies.

48 Bravo.

49 bathroom

50 No.

51 Nice.

10 Days to Wedding

11:03 a.m. It’s the morning after the comet appeared. Clothes are draped over milk crates in his bedroom while a naked Woloff rests his head on Schuld’s belly, a porcelain plain that ends in a vista of bush.

“Don’t think you’re forgiven for flaking out on me last night,” Woloff says.

“I was inspired.”

“You could have sent me a text.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says. “I thought you’d understand.”

“I worried about you.”

“It won’t happen again,” she replies.

He grouses. “I worry.”

“I really am sorry,” she says. “How are you dealing?”

“Better since you stopped by.” They had talked until the songbirds welcomed the dawn. “I’m not obsessively thinking about the foal and questioning everything that happened with Rick.”

“We can talk more if you want,” she says.

“No need,” he replies. “Today is all about your art opening.”

His phone dingles, and he sits up against a pillow to read a text from Precious.

Rafiki,52 I’m happy to announce my engagement to Eric

Jones (a lawyer with the International Development

Organization (IDO)). Cheers.

Attached is a JPEG of his ex wrapped in the arms of a bespectacled brother in front of a tent at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. For reasons better explained by a therapist, Woloff fixates on Eric’s hand tucked snugly under Precious’s elbow.

Oh, wait. Schuld jumps from one cluster of ideas to the next, trying to find a fit for what she feels so she can lapse back into quietude. It’s like ironing out wrinkles in cotton. She has a plan to divert the Nile River from the southern into the northern Sudan, thereby turning the desert into arable land. Soon she is talking about money, and of her estranged father’s deep pockets, and how her mother won’t take money from him, even with her modest income. She hates money “unless it’s a tool” to get the only thing she needs, the financing to divert the Nile River from the southern into the northern Sudan.

“How lucky you were to have grown up with parents who had a modest income,” Woloff replies, shutting off his phone.

“Lucky? How?” Schuld asks, pulling him down next to her.

“I was born after the salad days. The ones where our family lost its land in the locust infestation of ’73.” He stares into her differently coloured eyes. “I never had the luxury to hate money the way you do.”

Schuld laughs. “Du spaßvogel.”53 Her fingers play along his ear, meandering, full of bop, into his tangled hair. “Are we still cool about my painting Demarion?” she asks.

He’s going to be an installation piece roaming around the gallery nude at the opening tonight.

“We cool,” he says, trying to convince himself.

“Really?” she asks.

“Of course, bae,” he replies. “I encourage it. It’s art. That shit has to be real.”

She drapes a leg over his backside before digging thumbs into his upper back to search for knots.

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