Void of Care

He did not care about them. He did not give a hoot about any of them. Matter of fact he didn’t give a damn about the whole fucking community. He was the meanest, most vile, self-pleasing egomaniac my village had ever seen since the days of Iddi Amin(May his troubled soul roam restlessly in Hell) . Pinto didn’t concern himself with community affairs or even the least of his three children’s welfare. He was to the community a fiend ( Idiot, fiend is what I said-not friend). Pinto was a brute to the community, destroying and stifling all efforts to the good of the entire community. To his mother and father, he was a shame, he was the ogre they mistakenly brought to life-a miserly of their actions they had to live with for the rest of their days. No one spoke about him at home. His name was only whispered in hushed monotones in the guise of the dark. When he got home, a bizarre silence seemed to engulf the entire house and all his household would suddenly fall back into the silhouette or seek refuge in the ill-comfort of their beds. Only when he left home or fell asleep would the other people under his roof come back to life with a sigh. Pinto was the reincarnation of the fierce Pabolo Bitek that my grandmother recounted with an aura of fear. Each time she recited that episode in which Pabolo fought an entire village at the local village bar over a plate of roast maize and boiled beans injuring himself and a dozen other brazen men, our little bodies were without fail left with humongous goose bumps on our limbs.
Today Pabolo the reincarnate had called for a meeting to announce that he was taking a second wife-Anite who was the only daughter to the local merchant in the village. Being only barely 19, Anite was being forced into this unholy matrimony with the man who was born with the heart of a Zebu bull and the dumbness of an African wild ox. Anite was the proverbial rabbit being given away as bounty to the village hound after a very successful hunting spree. Anite’s father having been indebted to Pinto was forced to abdicate his only daughter to Pinto to settle the debt. Pinto wore his biggest smile as he passed on his horrid communication to his and Anite’s family members. Later when he had dismissed the gathering, a dark shroud of gloom hang low other the village. The usually vibrant weaver birds that sang and tweeted in the giant cactus tree that was heavy laden with thousands of their grass weaves seemed to have been visited by the angel of death-the same angle that visited the Egyptian’s houses taking all their male first borns on the night of the Passover.
With the taste of bile on her tongue and the weight of the deathly mistletoe poison on her heart, Anite waited alone, scared and distressed in the dampness of the darkness of Pinto’s malevolent bedroom. She quivered and her body perspired with every passing moment. She knew what awaited her. She was afraid that she had woken up into her worst nightmare. All her life’s floral dreams sped before her bleary eyes like a movie in fast forward. Dead dreams, unfulfilled wishes and shattered promises gouged her once vibrant spirit choking her with acrid tears. A lump of bile in her windpipe maintained a choke-hold on her throat. All those beautiful smiles, happy moments and events flooded her writhing body causing her heartbeat to race two fold faster. She first heard the sound of those heavy footsteps approaching and soon after the deafening slam of the door that shook the little house to its foundations. she bit her lip, writhing in suppressed fury. She knew time was at hand. She pleaded to God to forgive her for her unforgivable sin with incoherent incantations. Like a ghost, Pinto stood in the doorway with his shadow cascading on the stout wooden bed from the wall making him look like Besigye with the face of Museveni and Amama inelegantly swathed together by a mundane artist to achieve the kind of caricature results that enthuse trepidation and evil. Her heart beat raced more rapidly and she knew the time was now. A jolt of electricity battered her from the core of her heart and the force of it paralyzed her vitals.
She was already growing limp by the time Pinto tore her legs apart and started abusing her sacrosanct womanhood. She felt nothing. She only heard voices and echoes of a doomed song wafting over a very still darkened sky towards the cliff where she stood. The sound that carried a certain chill to its notes engulfed her and she was no more. She was dead. The Mistletoe poison that finally taken its full toll on her heart. Pinto gulped and yelped as he bored himself into her lifeless body towards one of his usually vile and disgusting orgasms. He screamed , scratched and smacked her face with both fists was he climaxed. Her eyes were wide open, a look of horror lay in her inert face. Pinto slumped off her corpse and almost instaneously went to sleep. In his dreams, he saw an ox. A big black hairy ox with huge balls-the size of two fully grown men’s heads and a very small penis-the size of a Bic ball point pen. In his dream the ox walked towards him and he noticed, he had dog-like teeth and no tongue at all. His mouth was a gaping black hole that carried painful cries of a dying baby. The ox reached him and put its pint-sized penis in his ear and he could hear violent, heart-wrenching struggles of a man dying at birth. The baby he thought he first heard crying was actually a man being born and the sound of it overwhelmed him with a feeling only his master could relate to. He’s body started to stir as though he was having another orgasm except that for now, his blood seemed to be boiling as it flowed through his dilated vessels. He was too weak to scream or move. The morning light reclaimed him for the death-pit nightmare and he woke up to the sight of Anite’s dead body.
The whole village gathered at Pinto’s house with fire in their eyes and more fire in their hands…The world quivered and the ground underneath seemed to be giving away as Pinto stepped out of the house bare-chested with Anite’s corpse in his arms. silver bows and gaudy ribbons hang low at his door entrance. He never saw the first flaming torch that crushed against the nape of his neck instantaneously setting his nappy hair ablaze….