“I don’t know, baby,” Marla says.
“Do you think I should unwish it?” She looks imploringly up at her mother. “Do you want me to?”
Marla tries to answer but finds the words are sticking in her throat. She thinks it over as Tilly waits, as the monster at their feet howls and yawps and begs for mercy, and as—beneath gobs of melted ice cream, tattered party streamers, and crumbs of soggy cake—the yellow candle spins, and sparks, and chirps: deedledeedledeedleDAH!
The Night Runner
The Class Six girls were bad, and everyone knew it. All the teachers at Butula Girls’ Primary School had a Class Six story—the time the girls had locked a female instructor in the boys’ toilet overnight; the time they’d led the school in a sit-down strike after being fed githeri for ten days in a row; the incident with the goat in the supply closet. After they learned that the American Peace Corps volunteer, Aaron, had been assigned to Class Six, all the teachers gave him sympathetic looks when they passed him in the hallway, and one of the younger ones felt so sorry for him that as she was talking with her colleagues about his dilemma in the lunchroom, she burst into tears.
But when Aaron begged the teacher for hints about how to deal with the girls, she could only say, with a fatalistic sigh, “There is no dealing with those ones. The devil is in them, and there is nothing to be done except—” She whipped her hand through the air to demonstrate.
Thwack.
Everyone at school had served their time with Class Six. Of all their put-upon teachers, though, only Aaron was afraid to drag them outside and apply a switch to the tender backs of their calves. As a result, he could not even turn around to write on the chalkboard (The HIV virus is transmitted//are transmitted in the following ways . . .) without the girls’ endless bubbling mockery boiling over into full-fledged chaos.
The girls mimicked his voice when he spoke, squeaking at him in high-pitched, nasal tones. They flicked things at him: not only chalk, but bits of spit-sodden paper, corn kernels, bobby pins, and flaky greenish balls made up of snot. Once, after he’d handed back a set of exercises, Roda Kudondo sauntered up to his desk and shoved her notebook in his face, mumbling in a slurred mishmash she intended as an imitation of his Texan drawl. The class exploded in laughter, and Aaron, not understanding, ordered her to sit down. But she only repeated what she’d said and jammed her index finger deep in her mouth, poking the inside of her cheek so that her face bulged out. She was propositioning him, and the joke of her offer to take him back behind the classroom and suck him off in return for a higher mark left him red-faced and stunned, while she strolled back to her desk amidst cheers.
Then, one humid afternoon in December, Linnet Oduori trailed Aaron out of the school gates and back to his house, meowing like a cat all the way. Linnet was the smallest girl in Class Six, as pretty and fine-boned as the bird after which she’d been named. Until then, Aaron had made her into a kind of pet, praising her at every opportunity and holding her mediocre work up as an example to the others—a lazy, unearned favoritism for which, that afternoon, she extracted her strange but effective revenge.
* * *
“It is because of your eyes,” Aaron’s friend Grace informed him that evening, when he described what Linnet had done to him, and how the other children they’d passed on the road had all enthusiastically joined in, until he was surrounded by a pack of children all crying out meow, meow in high, teasing voices. “Your eyes resemble a cat’s because of their color,” she continued, as though this were an obvious fact.
Aaron thought Grace’s eyes looked more catlike than his own, which were only an unremarkable blue. Grace was a local Luhya girl, and she had brown eyes, of course, but they curved up witchily at the corners and bulged out a little, so that when he looked at her from the side, he could see the clear meniscus of her pupil, like a thimbleful of water about to overflow.
Grace had adopted Aaron during his first week in the village, arriving at his doorstep one evening bearing a warm Coke and a scorched chapati as an offering. With the slick rash of pimples across her forehead, her dark-gummed, gappy smile, and her air of free-floating disdain, Grace would have blended easily among the girls of Class Six, though she was nineteen, older than any of them. Early on, she’d asked Aaron where exactly in America he was from, and when he had answered, she’d said coolly, “Me, I thought all Texans were large, cowboy-type people, but you are not large. You are only . . . ordinary-sized.” Grace had attended Butula some years before, and she responded to his stories of the goings-on at the school with a stubborn refusal to believe he could tell her anything she didn’t already know.
As soon as night fell, Grace would stalk inside Aaron’s cramped, sour-smelling house, conveying with every shallow breath that she was here on sufferance, and that spending time in such a hovel was beneath them both. Once, she’d come right out and asked him, “Why did you come all the way from Texas to live in this small-small house? Don’t you know that even the cook at that school has a nicer house than this?”
Aaron had informed her that he was a volunteer, that the house had been provided by the school, and that therefore there was nothing he could do about it, though in fact he’d complained vociferously about his living situation to his Peace Corps supervisors as soon as he’d arrived. Indeed, when he’d crossed the threshold for the first time, a smattering of dusty bat droppings had rained down on him from the doorframe, and later he’d found the desiccated corpse of one of the culprits, itself resembling nothing so much as a baked brown turd, trapped inside the disconnected stove.
Despite her obvious distaste for their surroundings, Grace often stayed at his house past midnight, sucking her knuckles and eyeing him across the lantern-lit table. Aaron suspected she would eventually proposition him, and he spent a lot of time thinking about how he would respond, but so far she hadn’t yet done so; at the end of the evening, she would only stand, yawn, and casually rearrange the bra strap that had slipped out from beneath the shoulder of her dress.
The night of the meowing incident, though, Aaron accompanied Grace to the edge of his compound and lingered. Impulsively, he reached for her, but instead of yielding, she lifted his hand off her waist, placed it back at his side, and laughed in his face.
“Very bad,” she teased, wagging her finger under his nose.
Now Aaron had this embarrassment to add to the litany of humiliation that kept him lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling and dreading the arrival of morning.
* * *
Not long after he finally fell asleep, Aaron was awoken by a knocking at his door. His lantern had gone out, so he blindly untangled himself from his mosquito net and stumbled through the darkness to the front of the house. “I’m coming!” he called, but the knocking continued unabated. His visitor was so insistent that he wondered if there had been some kind of emergency, a terrorist attack or a rebel invasion, and people from the Peace Corps had arrived to helicopter him to safety. The possibility was both scary and a little bit thrilling, but when he finally unbolted the door, no one was there.
Confused, he ventured out into the compound. The night air smelled of charcoal and manure, and its chill sent gooseflesh prickling down his skin. The last knock had come only seconds before he’d opened the door; it seemed impossible that a person would have had time to run. But in the moon’s dim light, he could see that the yard was empty, the gate barred, and everything around him still.
“Hello?” he called out, but heard nothing in return save his own heaving breath.
He went back inside, rebolted the door, and rearranged his mosquito net, tucking it carefully under the corners of his mattress—but as soon as he was beneath the covers, the knocking began again. Three times, he flung open the door and saw nothing. Once, he snuck out the back and tried to creep around the house to catch his tormenter in the act, but as soon as he stepped outside, the knocking subsided into silence. He returned to his house and sat with his back wedged up against the wall as he tried to keep
himself from succumbing to panic. That was when the knocking began once more, the hammering on his metal door deafeningly loud. “Go away!” he screamed, his hands pressed to his ears. “Go away! Toka hapa! Go away!” But—madly, impossibly, mind-numbingly—the knocking kept up all night long.
At dawn, when his eyes were burning and his thoughts twitchy from lack of sleep, the door at last went quiet. Thinking his harasser might have left some clues that would be discernible in daylight, Aaron stumbled outside, only to confront a steaming pile of shit coiled snugly in the center of his porch.
The fresh intimate stink of it made him gag. He flung his arm across his nose, ran back inside, and slammed the door shut, but even so, he was sure he could smell it. Later, he drank two bottles of warm Tusker beer for courage and gathered the feces between the pages of a newspaper, its slithering warmth radiating through the thin pages. Then he ran through his yard with his arms outstretched and flung the crumpled ball over the wall and into the street.
Aaron knew that if he didn’t go to school that day, he would lose any chance he had of ever gaining control of Class Six, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He lay on his couch, sweating, his face covered with blankets, and tried to identify the most likely suspect for the night’s attack. Delicate, meowing Linnet? Vulgar Roda Kudondo? Or someone less obvious, like pretty Mercy Akinyi, who’d once turned in an exam sheet that consisted of nothing but the words I love Moses Ojou over and over again? Maybe it was Milcent Nabwire, who, last week, had raised her hand during a lesson and asked, “Mwalimu, is it—is it—is it true that—that wazungu—is it true that . . .” and then, in a great stuttering burst: “Mwalimu, ni kweli wazungu hutomba wanyama?” In an attempt to mask the slowness of his ability to translate, he’d pretended to consider the question carefully, frowning and furrowing his brow so that only when he finally unlocked her meaning (Teacher, is it true that white people fuck animals?) did he realize how perfectly he’d set himself up to be the butt of her joke.
Or perhaps it was Anastenzia Odenyo, one of his class’s many orphans, who served as the head of household for five younger siblings. She came to school so rarely he had trouble remembering her face, although he would sometimes pass her in the village, looking tired and harassed, a basket of shopping balanced on her head, a child clinging to her hip. He’d once offered to pay for the handful of onions she was buying at the market, telling her he hoped she’d be able to return to school someday soon. She’d accepted the handful of shillings he’d given her, then pointed to his iPod and said something in Swahili he didn’t understand.
“To hear music,” she’d said in English, each word enunciated carefully. “I like to listen to music.” Requests for his belongings were common but always awkward for him.
“No, Anastenzia,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” she said. She shushed the child she was carrying, who’d begun to cry. “Maybe later. Thank you for onions, Mwalimu. Good-bye.” He’d been halfway home before the sickening possibility occurred to him that she might not have been asking for the iPod as a gift, but simply to listen to a song.
Yes, it could have been Linnet or Roda or Mercy or Milcent or Anastenzia . . . but it could also have been Stella Khasenye or Saraphene Wechuli or Veronica Barasa or Anjeline Atieno or Brigit Taabu or Purity Anyango or Violeta Adhiambo. The truth was, it could have been any of them, because they all loathed him, every single one.
* * *
The Headmaster came by the house in the midafternoon, and Aaron said he was sick. The Headmaster warned Aaron of the dangers of malaria and offered to send one of the children to bring him some Panadol, but Aaron declined politely and crawled back to bed. Later, Grace arrived at her usual time, and, lonely and shaky, he invited her in. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded as soon as she saw him. He told her an abbreviated version of the night’s ordeal, though he couldn’t bring himself to admit that someone had taken a shit on his porch. Like Roda’s vulgar proposition, its insolence somehow shamed him, the victim of the act, more than it did the transgressor. He expected that Grace wouldn’t believe him when he told her the knocking had kept up until sunrise—he had trouble believing it himself—but when he finished his story, bracing himself for ridicule, she only nodded and said sagely, “Ah. It is a night runner.”
“A night runner?” he echoed.
“They did not teach you about night runners at your Peace Corps school?”
Early on, Aaron had mentioned the eight weeks of Peace Corps training he’d completed before arriving in Butula, and ever since, he’d had the sense that Grace believed he’d spent months in a classroom, being taught every possible detail about Kenyan life, from the right way to greet a grandparent to how to properly slice up a mango. She acted astonished at even his smallest mistakes, and sometimes appeared truly offended by the extent to which these imaginary teachers had failed him.
“Night runners are a very common thing among us Luhya people,” she told him. “They cause too much trouble by running around naked anyhowly.” Perhaps inspired by Aaron’s boggled expression, she lowered her voice into a masculine range, furrowed her eyebrows, and elevated her explanation into performance. “They come around, boom boom boom, making noises like this”—she demonstrated by pummeling her fists against the air—“and they will rub their ninis against your wall”—she poked out her ass and pointed—“and if you are very unlucky, they will leave you a little present.” She giggled and concluded emphatically, “Yes! That is the night runner.”
For the rest of the evening, Aaron tried to get Grace to confess she was making this up. She’d told him wild stories of the supernatural before—one about a man who’d been cursed so that every time he urinated he crowed like a rooster; one about a witch who’d cast a spell on an adulterous couple so that they got stuck together while having sex and had to be brought to the hospital to be surgically taken apart—but always in a way that seemed like a tease, as though she knew he wouldn’t believe her and was daring him to defy her. Of the reality of the night runners, however, she seemed utterly convinced. No, they were not spirits, they were actual people, driven to run by a kind of demonic mental disease. Their identities were secret, because if the community found out you were a night runner—whoa, you were in for it then! Once, three towns over, a night runner had been caught and almost lynched before it was discovered that during the daytime she was the well-respected wife of a pastor.
His skepticism slowly eroding in the face of her conviction, Aaron asked how one went about ridding oneself of a night runner’s harassment. Grace began telling a convoluted story about how the best night runners did their work in pairs, and the elaborate joint rituals they performed to keep themselves from being caught, but then she interrupted herself and shook her head in despair. “No! The real problem is, these night runners are too difficult to stop, because when you chase them, they can become something like a cat or a bird or even a leopard, so how can a person catch up?”
“Grace!” Aaron cried as she burst into snorting laughter. “You’re not funny!”
Grace slapped her hand on the table and shouted, “Wrong! I am funny. Your problem is you are too serious. ‘Oh no, a child is meowing at me!’ ‘Oh no, someone is knocking on my door in the night!’ There are worse things in this world than being meowed at. So you have your troubles—that means a person can’t laugh?”
“I just think you could be a little more sympathetic,” Aaron said morosely, as he drank down the rest of his Coke.
* * *
The next morning, fortified by a good eight hours’ sleep, Aaron decided to venture onto campus. Instead of going to his classroom, though, he presented himself at the Headmaster’s office. The Headmaster’s feet were propped up on his desk, the bottom of one of his shoes blackened with a smear of chewing gum. “Mwalimu, Aaron!” the Headmaster exclaimed. “How is your malaria doing today?”
“It wasn’t malaria,” Aaron said. “And I’m a lot better. But I need to talk to you abo
ut the Class Six girls. Their behavior is out of control.”
As the Headmaster listened, rocking back in his chair, Aaron launched into a litany of Class Six offenses. They threw things at him. They imitated him. They asked vulgar questions. They refused to do their assignments. They failed to treat him with the proper respect. When Aaron recounted the story of Linnet’s meowing, the Headmaster began to frown, but when he described the assault on his house, the Headmaster dropped the front legs of his chair to the floor with a clatter.
“No!” the Headmaster declared. “This is too serious. With harassment like this, how can you sleep? Someone coming to your door, banging, banging, banging, all the night long!”
Aaron was about to agree, but before he could say anything, the Headmaster continued, “This is not just a nuisance, no! It is a real problem in our community, this nasty habit of night running!”
Aaron slumped back in his seat as the Headmaster burst into a wide smile, showing off a mouth full of damp, shiny teeth. He clasped Aaron on the shoulder. “My friend. If you want your class to have discipline, you must discipline them! The next time a small-small girl meows at you—pah!” He whipped his newspaper through the air. “Do so, and I think you will not be visited by this night runner again.”
Defeated, Aaron returned to his classroom. On any other day, the girls would have gone wild in his absence, but today they sat primly at their desks, their ankles pressed together, their hands clasped in front of them. A hundred eyes tracked him as he crossed to the front of the room. As he cleared his throat and prepared to speak, he allowed himself a moment of hope. Maybe it’s over. Maybe they finally realize they’ve gone too far.
“Good afternoon, girls,” Aaron prompted the class.
The sound of shuffling feet and squeaking desks filled the air as Class Six rose, as one, to greet him.
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