~ ~ ~



But, she thinks, the eight or seven or five seconds are endless; he takes so long to answer. And now she wishes that she pressed the journalist to explain how he knows what he thinks he knows, so that she can put Sheba’s father’s no in a context of pain or fear or the same rejection by which he so long rejected fatherhood. “No,” he says for the third time, either to make it final or to protest one time too many.

Viv’s last night in the hotel she is too distraught to sleep. Outside her window a storm blows into Addis, and lying on her bed in the dark she feels the room tremble around her, the floor tremble beneath her; as the wind picks up though the balcony doors, she thinks the rumble of the room is from the storm but then realizes that the thunder coming up through the bed is percussive and mesmeric, and it’s music. Full of wrath and sorrow at everything, Viv hurls the sheets away from her, gets up. Beneath her brief lowcut nightie she pulls on some jeans and shoes and throws a wrap around her shoulders and heads downstairs to the lobby.


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