Clik here to view.
This Fiction Friday, read a short story by Nigerian author Wole Talabi that has been longlisted for a 2015 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award.
The BSFA longlists in the categories Novel, Short Story, Non-Fiction and Art were announced on Tuesday, and include six African authors.
Talabi’s story, “A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You”, is longlisted in the Short Story category. It was originally published in Omenana, a magazine edited by Chinelo Onwualu (who is also longlisted for a BSFA), in June 2015.
Talabi is an engineer by day, but writes and edits part time, mainly science fiction and fantasy. He is currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and edited the anthology These Words Expose Us in 2014.
A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You
Your name is Asake and you can tell that you are being taken south because the wind is in your face and the clayey redness of the soil is slowly becoming a yellow sandiness. The soil is all you see.
Everything else is a blur.
You scream for help in desperate, high-pitched shrieks but it seems there is no one willing to save you. Desperation claws at your belly like unanswered hunger.
You remember that you had only stopped walking briefly, pausing as you navigated your way back from your mother’s farm at the place where the Imu and Buse pathways met. You paused to make the seemingly mundane choice of which route to take when a powerful arm suddenly wrapped itself around your torso, hoisted you onto a sturdy shoulder and began to run. A moment was all it took.
Screaming even louder, you consider that you did not really need to go to the farm today, or any other day for that matter. There was no need for the daughter of the great hunter Ajiboyede, the niece of the Baale of Olubuse, to go to the farms – your family has never lacked anything. Your father’s lands began along the banks of river Elebiesu and ran all the way down to Olubuse’s limits where great big trees stand like soldiers guarding your uncle’s territory. But you went anyway because you like to work with your hands, you enjoy the feel of soil beneath your feet and you relish the sight of verdant life around you. You decided to go to the farm today because the quiet beauty of the rising sun at dawn had spread over the sky, cloudless and taut like a drum skin. You went seeking nature’s touch.
Now, you are being carried along a snaking pathway carved into the reeds that stand beside the river like a loyal spouse – a path that takes you far away from home. You writhe and wrestle and fight with all the might you can muster but it is futile. The hands that have you are iron and do not loosen their grip. You remember the stories that sad visitors from nearby villages would sometimes tell of children who had been kidnapped and sold to strange men from faraway lands, and you wonder if this is what is happening to you. Just then the wind carries the unmistakable briny tang of the ocean air to your nose.
You scream louder.
#