One Night Stand

That night, a woman clutched at her handbag tight. Another one shrieked when a man snatched her phone through the window of the Matatu she had boarded.  He smiled at her, lifting it up on her face as he walked away, as if to give her an opportunity to pay her last respects to a gadget that she had come to idolise. Her whole life was in that gadget. It was where she turned to when the world seemed unresponsive, unappreciative, un-accommodative...the world seemed to give her a little too many sad faces wherever she turned her face to it...And that little gadget was her friend. It pleasured places that not anyone had dared to get close to. She could be anyone she wanted to be through the already fallen techno-soldier. She could put on her little black dress and not wonder about her legs. In this gadget, she could put on bold make up, a little bit of mascara here, a little bit of eyeliner here...a little bit of boobs up here. In this gadget, she danced freely. It was her shield from a world that had refused to see her for who she was, so she chose to put on a face through this gadget. But she lost it to a stranger on the street, through a matatu window, on that night.

That night, a woman fell in love with a man on the dance floor. After seven shots of tequila, a woman fell in love. She saw him dancing gracefully, alone, at one corner of the dance floor. He had a jacket whose colour she couldn’t recognise, a skin complexion that lay in between ebony, dark chocolate and light brown-she didn’t know. These seven shots of tequila were working on her, but she still fell in love with this man dancing alone at a lonely corner on the dance floor.  She walked over, said hi, he hi-d back...and he fell in love too. That night, they took a cab to his place. In the morning, her roommate couldn’t reach her on her cell phone. A month later, two months, four months.  She was dressed in red that night she disappeared with a lonely stranger dancing at a lonely corner, that night.

That night, a man broke a woman’s heart. He hopped in bed with his girlfriend’s best friend. She caught them exchanging a little too many hellos in between the sheets. New Obscene swearing words are what she constructed and hauled at her best friend. She didn’t talk to him. She rushed home crying. Two months later, they met at a friend of a friend’s birthday party. Things got heated over a bottle of beer. He said that her best friend is the one who had come on to him. That he loved her with every fibre of flesh in his heart. That night, they went to his place. She always knew that her best friend came on to him that night.

That night, a family in Kiambaa went to bed hungry. Mama had gone to Nairobi to hawk some clothes that she had bought at Gikomba early that morning. But mama was arrested by City Council askaris. She gave them the only amount of money that she had managed to raise from the sale of two tops. They released her but took the rest of the merchandise and threw it in a  garbage- collection track parked on the side of the street. Dad did not have a job. When he came back home, mama had to plead with him not to get worked up because there was no food for the night. Papa was worked up. He shouted at mama, called her all sorts of names. He lifted his hand and struck her across the face, saying that she had spend all the money that she had raised drinking in Nairobi town, that he could smell beer in her mouth. That night, the family of seven went to bed without food. That same night, mama slept at Mama Belinda’s house. That is was she did when papa got all worked up and struck her. But she would come back. She always told the children that papa doesn’t like being provoked, and that for those many nights that she had slept at Mama Belinda’s, she was giving papa time top cool off, just like that night.

That night, under some clouds, the sun shone from a distance not sure whether to rise or to fall. That same night, some saw stars in their sky, others saw stars breaking loose from the sky, and others didn’t see stars at all. Their sky was a whole flesh of heavy dark clouds, pregnant with rain. Still, the moon smiled somewhere from a distance, and all these people in this one night, were connected together by a distant warmth that reminded them that joy still is- joy still is, even on that night- that one stand of a night!