It's summer in the global north (which is winter in the global south), and for the month of August Literatur.Review is bringing them all together, publishing previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the north and south of our world.

Martin Egblewogbe is the author of the collection of short stories, The Waiting (lubin & kleyner, 2020) and Mr Happy and The Hammer of God and other Stories (Ayebia, 2012). His writing has appeared in a number of collections, such as The Gonjon Pin (2014 Caine Prize anthology), PEN America’s Passages Africa (2015), All The Good Things Around Us (Ayebia, 2016), Litro #162: Literary Highlife (2017), Between The Generations (2020), Shimmering At Sunset (2021) and Voices That Sing Behind The Veil (2022). Martin was the commissioning editor for the anthology Resilience: A Collection (2021), and also co-edited the anthology of short stories, The Sea Has Drowned the Fish (2018) as well as the anthologies of poetry Look where you have gone to sit (Woeli, 2010) and According to Sources (Woeli, 2015). He is a co-founder and a director of the Writers Project of Ghana, and director of Pa Gya! A Literary Festival in Accra. He also hosts the radio show, Writers Project on Citi FM. He is a lecturer at the Department of Physics, University of Ghana, Legon.

Crash
Ke was sliding in to park at the road side when the Honda Crosstour started off and ran into his Corolla. He guided his car into place and got out. The driver of the Crosstour was speaking on her phone. It took some minutes, but she finally opened the door and came out. In the meantime, Ke checked the damage: his car had a slight dent in the driver side door. He could live with that. The Crosstour had one side of the front bumper dislodged.

“You ran into my car,” the driver said, standing close to her car and several feet away from Ke. She was small, slim, elevated by heels, wore stretch jeans, some sort of blouse with frills, and rose-tinted glasses of rather ridiculous dimensions. Her hair was a blooming afro, like that of a 1960’s American soul singer.

It was quite clear that her version of the incident was not correct. At best, it was more nuanced than that -- they ran into each other, in which case, to her credit, it could be argued that she had been turning in her blind spot.

“I believe you were turning,” he replied.

“No,” she replied, and raised her phone for another call. “He hit my bumper,” she said into the phone. “And now it’s spoilt.” She listened intently on the phone, hung up, and said to him again, “It’s spoilt.”

The right end of the bumper had dropped and there was a crack in the plastic above the fog lamp. It was difficult to believe that all this had happened right now.

It was 2.30 PM in Accra in April and hot, bright, and humid. The foliage of the trees, languid in the still air, cast grudging shadows over the street. Ke, already at the limit of his patience due to a surprising run of stressful events, struggled to keep his cool. And to his surprise, he succeeded.

“There was no prior damage?” he asked.

“I am in Ghana for a few weeks, and I want to sell this car. Otherwise what is this? It is a small thing.” She was calm, but it wasn’t hard to believe that she was trying to take him for a mugu.

They were on a quiet street in East Legon, each side lined with restaurants, luncheonettes, and cafes, small shops, and other such urban establishments.  This was Ke’s typical place for lunch, and was a favourite too for the middle class professionals in the offices close by.

Ke had slated fifteen minutes for lunch, of which four minutes were already gone. Four more minutes and lunch was off the cards. He was wondering about the best way to conclude this matter, which he found quite unnecessary and a bloody waste of time.

Two men stepped out of the restaurant, noted the scene, and one asked:

“Everything under control?”
“He hit my car,” the woman offered. “And now the bumper is spoilt.”
“Aw man,” the man turned to Ke and said “ -- these things happen you know. Sorry mate.” Then the pair was off.

Ke was peeved. In the first place, the woman had no proof that he was the offending party. In fact, the facts leaned towards the opposite. And therefore it was slander already, to keep announcing that he hit her car, and that the bumper was spoilt. Added to the fact that the prior state of the bumper was unknown to him.

There was so much on his mind, and the last thing he wanted was to be exercised with this sort of thing.  And he had a flight to catch in eight hours.

“So what are you going to do about it?” she asked. “I’m a nurse in Finland. I came here for some weeks, and I want to sell this car before I go. If this is not fixed, the value will come down.”

What did she mean, “what was he going to do about it?” Why was it suddenly his problem? And what would he care about her circumstance, that she thought to tell him these things about herself? But he was also flying to Helsinki. An interesting co-incidence, but what had that got to do with anything?

He was leaving Accra tonight, with a layover in Amsterdam, and would be in Helsinki on Wednesday. He was slated to make a marketing pitch on Thursday morning.

And what was he to say to her?

They could get the police, of course. And the insurance company.

“This looks something for the insurance people to take care of,” he said. He did not want to get into a haggle of determining who was right or wrong and the whens and hows and whether  there was in fact prior damage. He looked at his watch. Eight minutes left. Now he had to go without lunch.

“They will require a police report maybe. It will take time. And you have moved your car. You should have left the car in place so we took photos.”

Lord, Ke thought, I’d have had to climb out of the passenger door then.

“And I told you I have to go back to Finland in a number of days. I can’t wait. Tell me what you want to do.” Then she went back on the phone. “The man says insurance,” she said into the phone, listened, shook her head, and hung up.

“Insurance will waste time,” she said. “So --”

An image flashed in his mind of him leaping on her and strangling her to death, which he quickly doused.

“You have my card --” he dug into his wallet and proffered the small white rectangle. “Take my car number, let’s talk about this --”

“No,” she said. “In any case I can’t move the car.”

He was stunned. “Why can’t you move the car?”

She placed her right hand on her designer sunglasses and raised them ever so slightly.

“Because the bumper is spoilt.”

He swore under his breath. He doused the image again. Four minutes was all that was left of his lunch break. He had to head home to get ready for his trip. He needed to cut out all the foolery. It had to become his problem if he was to move.

“Do you have a mechanic --”

“I don’t live here.”

Why did he not just drive away? Well, for one thing, these were his digs, and the optics would be poor. The woman was a stranger.

He went to the car, raised the edge of the bumper and jammed it back into place. It hung crooked.

“That’s not how to fix it,” the woman said.

“You can drive it now,” he replied.

“It must be fixed,” she insisted. “The bumper has to be replaced. I want to sell this car. Take it to Honda Place.”

“No,” he said finally. “You take it to Honda Place, and get the bill. I have to be going. Take my card?”

At that moment the owner of the restaurant came through the entrance and walked up to them. He was a Turkish immigrant, lanky, bespectacled, with thinning hair. His demeanour was as reticent as Ke’s .

“Is OK everything?” he asked Ke.

Ke waited for the woman to complete the accusation. Then he said, “I have to go now, but she can take my card, and we sort this out.” Ke turned to the woman. “This is the owner here, and he knows me. I’m a regular.”

“How you sort out?”

“Insurance,” Ke replied.

“No --” the woman begun. Ke had overshot the time by two minutes. He thrust the card into the Turk’s hand and strode to his car.

The woman gasped, shouted, “Hey -- you?”

But he was gone. She did not follow.

Cigarette
He got snarled up in traffic about ten minutes later. The map app, when he checked, assured him that it was still the best route despite the traffic. Start, stop, start, stop, crawling towards the Underbridge, driving to connect with the Spintex Road and on to Regimanuel Estates. Then he needed to pack, which he had left for the last minute and the last minute kept crawling towards departure time...

He wound up at home just before 4.00 PM and headed straight into his bedroom, which was in a state of chaos from an attempted packing session the night before. He needed only a small case -- he always traveled light and he was only away for a few days anyway. A heavy sweater, a jacket, two shirts, two pairs of trousers, a pair of jeans -- and these had to be pressed. Off to the ironing board. Shoes, slippers, toiletries.

His laptop. He needed to make sure that the presentations were actually saved on the computer and the files integrity was intact,  because efie fuɔ and all that. The meeting in Helsinki was critical for business. Speaking of which, his business partner and director of their tech startup had been denied an entry visa to Finland, which mishap he laid directly at the doorstep of a consular official at the Embassy, a short, pugnacious man who wore square eyeglasses and smelled of coffee.  Ninsin, his partner, had called on Friday afternoon with the bad news. “Ke,” Ninsin said, “I didn’t get the blasted visa. Everything depends on you now.”

That was the second blow to hit Ke that week.

The first blow had been dealt on Thursday afternoon, when he had to rush to the 37 Military Hospital to meet his dying friend. Freddie was his dear friend of many years, despite there being more than twenty years between their ages. A former chef, he had dedicated his entire working life catering to the delicate palates of the high and mighty in society, had made quite a fortune and had retired to a quiet life.

Rather unfortunately, though, Freddie had been bitten by a cobra while relaxing with a beer in his garden after lunch.

What were the details though? Was Freddie dozing off perhaps when the snake fell from the palm tree under which he sat? Or had the snake crawled up unawares? But which snake would mistake the large bulk of Freddie for prey, unless, as the family members insinuated later on -- unless it had been sent?

In any case Freddie screamed in pain at the bite, alarming the houseboy who ran out of the house into the garden, just in time to see the snake rapidly moving back into the copse of palm trees. Freddie had been bitten on the right thigh, which he now clutched in both hands while howling, ow, ow, w’aka me.

The houseboy had no idea of first aid for snake bite. Therefore, several precious minutes were lost while he hauled Freddie into a taxi and sped off to the hospital, where the fantastic incident created a mini crisis.

-- A snake bite? In Labone, Accra here? Of all places! 
-- What type of snake? We need to know. 
-- I didn’t see it well.
-- But did you see it at all?
-- When it was running away.
-- What colour?
-- Black.
-- ooooh a mamba? Esi do we have mamba serum?
-- Nancy we don’t have any antivenom serum. Run a saline drip! Call the doctor at once.
-- It had a yellow neck.
-- Esi look on google black snake yellow neck.
-- Gentleman look at the picture was it like this?
-- Yes.
-- ooooh spitting cobra! Esi do we have cobra serum?
-- We don’t have any antivenom serum. 
-- Are you sure? We should ask. Call the stores! Have you called the doctor?

When Ke got to the hospital an hour later Freddie was at the emergency ward, in bed with an IV line to his arm. He did not look good at all. He could barely move and had an oxygen mask on.

“I’m afraid he’s not going to make it,” the doctor told Ke in the consulting room. “The antivenom has still not been delivered. Its a wonder he is still breathing. The beer did not help much.”

By evening Freddie was dead. That was Thursday.

Ke had not slept properly since. Having been the one at the hospital at the time of death he became the primary contact person for the family of Freddie, who seemed more than happy to shift the responsibility of documentation and other matters to him. His phone had rung incessantly throughout the night. The unbelievable turn of events made many family members want the details directly from Ke, which they did not accept in any case. Some shouted at Ke, some said, this can’t be true, others said, that snake was sent, but they did not say by whom.

Then on Friday Ninsin was informed that he could not travel to Helsinki. That meant Ke had to deliver his presentation in addition, and so they had to spend the weekend going over the presentations, the codes, the app, the business plan -- it was very taxing. And to add to that, Ke was in mourning.

To her credit the nurse from Finland only called once, and that was to say, “How could you just leave like that, you no be gentleman at all. We have sent the car to Honda Place and we will send you the bill.”

Ke was unable to fully engage. “Why will you send me the bill?” he asked.

“Because you gave me your card,” the nurse said.

It was an impossible situation. “We’ll see about that,” Ke said.

“The future is pregnant,” the nurse countered.

Ke hung up. Even then, it seemed crazy was radiating from the phone and he turned it off for some time.

By the time it was 6:15 PM Ke was ready to leave for the airport. He was dressed in a light blue shirt, a black pair of tailored trousers, and swede sneakers. He called his mother and updated her on the trip; she wished him well and asked to see him when he returned.

He called an uber, estimating an hour and half at least in the fucking Spintex traffic before he got to the airport,  and sat on the porch smoking while waiting out the ten minutes before it arrived. The cigarettes were a menthol-tipped brand from Egypt -- a gift from the late Freddie -- and were quite remarkable in flavor. The Arabic inscriptions on the packet added to the mystery of the whole thing, and aromatic smoke hung about his head.

The uber arrived after just after 6.20 PM, and Ke thought he would be lucky to get to the airport before 8.00 PM.  The red-eye to Helsinki via Amsterdam was taking off at 10.00 PM, and he had to complete check-in by 8.00 PM.  He  really would not be able to get any food. Perhaps on the aircraft. The one-hour layover at 4 AM in Amsterdam did not promise anything more substantial than a coffee and pastries. He would be hungry till he arrived at his destination.

Fly
It was a race through check-in. Actually, he had to run into the departure hall as well, which  lost him time because he was promptly stopped on entry, questioned, and searched. Then it was a race through check in. The airline attendant looked at him with only a little sympathy and checked him in. “Any baggage?” she asked. “I’m taking this with me,” he said, indicating his carry-on bag. She weighed it. 8.5 kg. She looked at him. He smiled tersely. She handed him his ticket. “Have a good flight.” He was the last passenger for the flight. When he left she started packing off.  

The boarding call was ringing through the PA as he made his way through the security checks, and he had just got into the departure lounge when the final boarding call was made. The other passengers were already in queue ahead of him. He joined them, and mopped sweat off his forehead for the umpteenth time.

The harsh lighting was beginning to hurt his eyes, and the low hum of the air conditioning suddenly felt oppressive too, now that he was stationary. The people in the queue looked in need of sleep. It was, after all, close to 10.00 PM. 9.28 PM, in fact.

There was a newsreel on the TV -- images of fighter jets taking off. The ticker said something like “F-15s SCRAMBLED IN RESPONSE...”

The queue moved.  

Three more people till his turn. It seemed some of the passengers in the departure lounge were paying close attention to the screen, but Ke could not really be bothered. He wanted to get on board and sit down. Even the cramped seat in economy would be welcome respite after the stress of the past few days. Maybe he could sleep, but that never really worked for him when flying.

The TV was back in his view. There was a podium, black and imposing, with a glinting coat of arms embossed in front. There was a fat white man in military uniform behind the microphone. He looked stern. Ke could not identify him in the shot. The ticker said, “... ALARMING EVENTS OF THE PAST FEW HOURS. PRESIDENT ASSURES OF ‘STEEL RESOLVE’...”

It was his turn. The two women at the counter did a quick check of his documents and he was handed his pass with a smile and ‘enjoy your flight’. He followed the others down the stairs and outside.

A light rain was falling and the drops blew into his face. Ke found this quite refreshing. They were ushered into the waiting bus, which took off immediately at speed. He grabbed the upright in a one-armed hug and steadied himself as the bus sped onto the tarmac.

It was a big bird - a 737 -  sleek and glistening in the rain, in full view as the bus lurched in a wide turn approaching the aircraft. A beautiful sight -- Ke felt the tension inside him drop as he looked at it. He took a deep breath and his clutch on the bag loosened slightly.

He had a window seat to port. He slid his bag under his seat and fixed his seat belt immediately. He leaned back and shut his eyes. The cabin was in embarkment fluster and he wanted to ignore everything.

There was an interesting conversation going on behind him, carried out in measured, low tones.

“Valour in war...” “...On the balance... does not carry value...” “We forget the second world war...” “The horrors cannot be countenanced...” “A vessel was torpedoed in the pacific... weeks on the open seas...”

He could not properly follow the conversation, and besides the PA came on and the pilot sent his greetings. The engines pitched higher. More voices came on the PA and the safety video was enforced on all screens.

And then the wheels were rolling and then they were aloft, climbing steeply over the sea from Kotoka.

Whiskey 
Ke was on his second beer, having been refused a whiskey (the refusal accompanied by a knowing nod from the hostess, a pretty, tall red-head with a removed attitude) who instead pacified him with three cans of beer. Drinking beer after midnight while racing through the atmosphere at 700 km/h was very agreeable to Ke. Whiskey would have been greatly preferred though.

The cabin was settling for the night, most passengers were trying to make a comfortable rest of it. A few people were reading. Someone across the aisle was fixated by the navigation video.

Ke took another sip, and when shadows fell on his side of the cabin his first thought was that the beer could not be that strong.

But then the cabin begun to lighten up, light flooded in from below, first touching up the roof, and then very rapidly, brightening, red then amber screaming amber and a blistering lurid yellow that seemed to burn through the aircraft walls, and lit up the cabin from end to end --

brighter than the light of a thousand suns...

and screams erupted throughout the cabin. Shouts rang out, there were expletives in known and unknown languages, calls upon Christ, Allah, the mother of God, a glossolalic eruption that quickly smothered for unknown reasons, but no one moved -- all were seemingly transfixed in their seats, or standing in place, if they were they on their feet.

the aircraft held steady and flew on ...

Lit from below, the cloud was mushrooming upwards, billowing, sparkling with lightning, and then on the ground the brilliance began to die, steadily, steadily...

Ke had instinctively lowered his head and covered his eyes, but even then the blood in the veins of his hands burned bright in  his eyes, and the shadow of the bones were a mock x-ray...

But in a few moments the the brightness began to wane, and Ke, opening his eyes, beheld through the starboard windows the smouldering thunderhead of death, the destroyer of worlds...

They were still flying, rather smoothly, given all that was happening, given the now muted panic on board,  and the absolute shock of it all --

Ke, now apparent master of his emotions, drained the can, opened another, and considered things from the pilots’ perspective. How long before the shock wave struck the aircraft, and would it survive the shaking and the rocking and the buffeting, would it be expedient to climb, even above the service ceiling to where the air was thinner, or would it be better to turn away from the epicentre and avoid being broadsided, or would it be best to remain on course, the only route with clearance from the tower... and was this trinity of choice the only possibility..

The PA system crackled. Most of the screams had died away, but there was inconsolable weeping and moaning throughout the cabin, and the sound of retching from time to time.

This is your captain speaking [inaudible].

Fuck [static]. Fuck [inaudible].

[Bump] there seems to have been [inaudible].

[Pause] cabin crew, emergency stations.

The aircraft computers are reporting no faults and we have the aircraft in control. There seems to have been a serious incident on the ground and we have lost radio contact.

[Static]

This is the first officer [Inaudible].

[Sound of weeping].