Hedwig Sanzi Joe, aka Heddie, is an innocent high school girl who falls in love with a reformed criminal working in the church. When she becomes of age and decided to give the man of her dreams her heart, she doesn’t know that she has signed up for the greatest hurt, betrayal, and confusion she would ever experience.
I woke up with a start. The smell of burning flesh congested the air. I did not know it was my skin singeing until I screamed in pain.
I’m dying. Oh God, please no. I can’t breathe.
My body gave to unknown force, and fell into a dark abysmal hole, head first.
In the afternoon of this day, Elizabeth’s Buick and Val’s Honda were in the garage. I cursed the senseless fiend for invading our privacy. The front door was locked, so I used the back door. As I entered, two floral bikinis caught my eye on the sunbathing decks at the swimming pool. Soft music played in the house and I was immediately aroused.
Halfway up the stairs to the bedroom I heard low soft moans and whispers. The door was ajar.
“The most abused drug is heroin, commonly known as Brown Sugar. Cocaine’s there too, liquefied, commonly known as the White Wine, or just whites. Heroin, the most abused drug comes from Afghanistan. Of late Kenya is not only a consumer but also a processing hub, and the largest in East Africa for that matter.
Maisha Raha aims to create sex robots as much of a physical likeness to actual women but with more intelligence (albeit artificial) as technologically possible. My bots feel human to the touch; they mimic the movement of a real body, get real wet, and can talk to you more nicely than women nowadays. The good thing is that they cannot break up with you or walk out; no independence or anything that may disrupt the fantasy of total servitude.
I see them go down. They couldn’t all be dead, but I want to make sure they stay down, forever. I aim and traverse the gun in the room, on the two lumps I assume to be them on the bed. And I don’t stop. Even if I don’t get them, ricochets will. I can see the door out of the bedroom; it is still closed, now riddled with bullet holes; if any of them survives, I won’t let them get to the door.
When I stand to go, the first step is the hardest, but I take it. All I am thinking is I want to get myself out of the curse of being her ‘only child’. My spirit is bubbling from deep inside. It is that liberating. I will go and forget I had an elderly mother. I won’t look back, I decide. Even when, and if, she realizes that daughters too are children who can take care of their parents, I won’t come back, I tell myself. I am getting away from the curse, taking back my life.
Flashes of Vice: Vol III is a collection of flash fiction stories on terrorism, the distant near future, conspiracies, why aliens have beef with humans and the scars of war.
“By the year 2080, our women were not marriageable,” I say, take a sip of the water placed for me on the podium, and continue. “There was a wave of misandry all over the world propagated by feminists, women leaders who instigated a revolution against the man, and government systems that sided with the woman no matter what. Women were the mouths that restored order and justice of the land, prosecutors, and executioners. In their court, men stood accused, guilty, never proven innocent. When one woman managed to create a synthetic sperm in a Petri dish, men were no longer needed. Lysistrata Uprising, they called it.”
Mira was the best of them all. When she bared her boobs during one of my performances at Carnivore, my mouth went like ‘Whack!’ stopping me mid-lyrics. Her perky breasts pointed to the heavens as though her bust was thanking the gods of beauty for such a blessing. After the show, we went to my crib, where we stood the whole night and the morning after, I told her I wanted her to be mine for keeps.
This night, Pope John XII the Young shagged me rhythmically as if having sex with an African was a mystical ecstasy. When he looked into my eyes, I wondered what it really felt to listen to people’s sins, and no one listened to yours. When he emptied his holy seed in me, he rolled onto his side panting. I almost called his personal doctor, afraid his heart was attacking him.
Bodies were everywhere. Human bodies tied to trees, nailed to X crosses, stakes driven through their hearts, sprawled spread-eagle on the forest floor at odd angles. People painfully resting in peace.
