The knife descends. Ribs are torn asunder. Dad has the firmest grip in the world, portioning out the roasted meat one rib at a time.
Still, she imagines if the knife had slipped from Dad’s hands, as knives do, and cut open someone’s jugular. She can see the sensational headlines (“Family dinner gone wrong”, “Killed for a 200 shilling meal”) the neighbours leaning into outstretched microphones, whispering tantalizing secrets drawn from their musty made-up memories (“Hawakukaa wameruka kichwa, but you never know with such people”). She wonders if Dad would face the cameras, defiant, or if he would cover his face and slink away from the public’s voyeuristic gaze.
Bile rises in her throat. The meat drips, not as fatty as she likes it. She would not be able to bring it anywhere near her mouth, tear the tendons with her teeth, tease them with her tongue, chew three or four helpings of stringy meat until her teeth ached. Yet she would rummage for leftovers in the fridge later—midnight is too early; perhaps at sweet, languid two o’clock, when everyone is too loose from the meat and beer to be alarmed by furtive, thief-like noises coming from the kitchen—and stuff the cold tasteless ribbons of meat into her mouth until her stomach ached and she had to steal Mama’s Eno.
So what is it she wants? To look at the thing called life full in the face and say, “I won. You didn’t beat me down”? No, that was not it. Life could not be overcome; it sat heavily on one’s chest, forcing one to breathe softly. Life always won. But at least there are people to share life with, people you ‘love’ like the ones gathered at this table. Yet her ‘loved ones’ appear grotesque, so equally ethereal and sharp-edged that it hurts to look at them, even from the corners of her eyes. They are unknowable shadows, demons with sour faces and slippery tongues that twist on another’s language, another’s God; she can smell betrayal on their skin, underneath musky cologne and rank sweat from playing touch rugby with a stolen ball before lunch. What does she really know about them, about the secret selves they indulge when she isn’t watching? They must leave her house, leave her life, leave the face of the earth.
She eyes Dad’s knife, admires how it glints with grease. “Pass the cabbage,” what’s-his-name asks, nudging her with his ashy elbow. She does, then leaves the house.
Sitting on the veranda, sun rays flitting across her face, she takes out her phone and scrolls through Reddit reflexively. In ten minutes, she is lost in a tunnel of posts at r/FinlandConspiracy, burrowing through claims that Finland is not a real country, there is no landmass between Sweden and Russia, just an expertly concealed piece of ocean. The elaborate joke intrigues her. It has enough kernels of truth to seem probable. Does Finland exist? She has never seen it. She has never met anyone from there. Sure, she has googled and ogled the Finnish Alps, but everything on the internet is fake, absurd, only a story, except the things you want to believe.
Whenever Finland is discussed (in clubs, on a bus to Somewhere, at Mama Shiko’s shop at 7am on Palm Sunday) the speakers use reverential, too-good-to-be-true tones: there are many jobs there; the government will pay you to have children; there is no inequality; people there are almost the happiest in the world. It is better than here.
Last week, she used her old primary school atlas to search for Finland on the world map—it was easy to trust the atlas’ solidity, its heft, its bright colours, the smudges left by her greasy eleven-year-old fingers—then rolled its capital off her tongue and into the world (Hel-sink-i). Fin-land. The promised land. Fin. The end: of suffering, of pain, of depravity. Fin. The flash of a torpid shark as it laps up your blood.
what’s-his-name walks out onto the veranda and crouches next to her. She doesn’t look at him; there’s something lurking behind his golden-flecked eyes—knowledge or wisdom or mystery—that repulses her. They breathe together.
He says in his soft, I-know-you-and-you-are-real voice, “Auntie’s wondering where you are.” And she remembers first meeting him, when she saw six, at Kuka’s makumbusho ceremony. She had been following him around to make sure nobody was following him around, inhaling the air he left behind, stepping on the shallow imprints his feet left on the wet grass. That night nothing had felt real, anything could happen, and no one was safe. And then she had promptly forgotten him, until now.
It startles her to think of him is part of her family, even though there is no other reason for him to be at a family dinner. “What’s your name?” hovers on the tip of her tongue. It strikes her as a great injustice, not knowing his name, not knowing him, not knowing herself as he knows her. But instead, she says, “Let’s go to Finland. Let’s confirm it really exists.”
They don’t have—will never have—that kind of money. He chuckles softly, “Sawa.”
They lie next to each other, content to just be.