ISSN 1758-6488
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Sudan Fiction |
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In his wallet he kept a picture of his daughter. Held just right, he could barely make out her face in the dashboard light. She was in San Francisco with her mother, the papers signed, custody dealt. Too much worry, too many drugs, too few nights together, was what Carol had said. What she was really sick of, he knew, was the constant reminder of how shitty it was out here. When he got home from a trip he needed to talk it out, needed to show her the pictures, needed to get it out of his system. Sometimes he yelled, once he grabbed her wrist and left bruises. Only once. She wanted a school teacher, Brady thought, a business man in a suit, some pussy with his balls wrapped-up tight as a drum. On a pad of paper he began a letter to Samantha—he wrote her a letter every assignment, in case something happened. Sam, my girl, he wrote, You should see the giraffes here! They’re ten stories tall!! And the elephants have soft, watery eyes with eye-lashes like combs-teeth. No matter where I am, Sammy, I love you. Be nice to your mother. It didn’t matter that there weren’t any elephants here, no giraffes; some fictions were helpful. He folded the letter into his breast pocket and watched the constellations of oil derricks float along the horizon.
Somewhere near four he nodded off, a half-sleep of memory and failed forgetting: a wood of vines and bones, hair on fire, a man with a hole in his chest screaming not to have his picture taken. He finally woke at dawn to a herd of skeletal cattle standing over a dry waterhole; one was licking the dirt as if that would satisfy it.
“Almost there, Mister,” Johnny said.“Almost there.”
Above the village the sky spread like an inverted ocean. There were a dozen thatched huts situated on a rise of land overlooking what had once been a swamp but was now just cracked earth. Some of the hut’s roofs were lined with dried out palm fronds, though Brady hadn’t seen a palm tree since his hotel in Khartoum. Nothing moved.
“Used to be alligator here,” Johnny said. “I’ll stay here. Sometime the tires disappear, ya know?” He motioned his head towards the wheels.
Brady pulled out the Nikon and popped another pill, washing it down with water from the grocery. He felt the weight of the water bottles as he lifted the bag to his shoulders. The crisp, dry air felt as if it would catch fire with the slightest spark. He walked through the cluster of grass hovels, the smell like dry hay locked shut in a summer barn. He saw a woman coming to the door of a hut; he focused immediately and snapped a picture before he noticed the knobs of her knees, her skin pulled tight over the plates of her shoulder blades.
The village was filled with the silence of people waiting; in huts they lay on reed mats with matchstick legs folded in fetal position, they sat beneath thorn trees, their bellies distended and shiny. He switched off the auto-focus; he didn’t need it, the subjects weren’t running or trying to hide. He turned up the aperture and slowed the shutter speed. He wanted to capture the contrast between white ground and dark skin, wanted more depth to the images, more color.
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