This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction / Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Fiction / Dystopian, Fiction / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies
ISBN: 9781455529407
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

When Christopher and I married, it was a bright Saturday at the end of the harvest season. We married at the cathedral in our hometown, Blantyre, like the proper city people we were—him in a beautiful dark suit and me in a white wedding dress, with a veil that covered my face. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-four and had just finished at the Polytechnic college of the University of Malawi, and because his brother was in the civil service it was a leg up, as they say, for him to get work with the civil service too.

That was during what would turn out to be the last couple of years of President Hastings Banda’s rule, when all Christopher’s friends were protesting for democracy. “Multiparty rule” was what they called it then; we stayed out of it, mainly because of Christopher’s hopes of working for the government someday. On the day we married, there was a demonstration downtown, and we could hear the tear-gas canisters being shot off not far from the church. We could smell the tear gas even beside the altar, and somehow it made us both smile: perhaps, I thought, our marriage will be lived out in a world different from the one where we fell in love.

The wedding was modern, but at our feast we ate nshima cakes made from the freshest, finest ground maize, and so many relishes it would have scandalized the queen of England. So many relishes: groundnut and rapeseed and chibwabwa, and mlamba fished fresh from Lake Nyasa, and beef relish made from a calf bought for the occasion by Christopher’s brother, and we had a wonderful banana beer my mother brewed for us. And we sang, and we danced, and I loved Christopher with all my heart.

A month later, he got a position with a small office of the local government—his brother’s friend had a few strings to pull, it seemed—and soon we were living the life of a young married couple, all smiles and sweetness and longing when he was away at work for the day. Such long workdays. I made nshima cakes every afternoon, experimented with relishes, and hummed happy songs to myself as I did the washing.

Sometimes, when I sit by the fence, staring into the tent village inside the camp and waiting, I think of the night we sat staring into the sky, at the stars. It was on a trip up north in ’94, to visit some of my relatives living in Mzuzu—very near where I work now. I remember sitting by his side and looking up into the glittering sky.

“My father used to have me sit on his lap when I was a little boy, and he would tell me stories about the stars. The constellations, you know?”

“I don’t know any of those stories,” I said. “Why did he tell them to you? Was he some kind of witch doctor?”

“Ha, no, my father was an accountant’s assistant, at least before independence. Before he went to prison.

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