Chapter One - The 10 O'Clock Bus
850 Words
The bag wouldn't close.
Zara sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it the way you stare at a person who's disappointed you — not with anger, just a tired, particular kind of resignation. She'd overpacked, obviously. She always overpacked. Bought a leso she'd probably never wear in Nia, two jars of coconut oil she could've ordered online and a small wooden elephant she didn't even like that much. The coast did that to you. Made you believe you needed things.
She pressed her knee into the bag and yanked the zip.
It gave.
Small victories.
Outside, the ocean was doing its morning thing — that low, rhythmic shush against the shore that she'd been waking up to for four days and had already started to mourn. Back home, her mornings sounded like traffic and her neighbor's generator and, if she was unlucky, her landlord.
The DJ downstairs had switched from Rhumba to soul, and she found herself mouthing the words before she even registered it. Her hips moved once. Twice. She caught herself and stopped.
You're leaving in forty minutes. Stop pretending this is your life.
She hauled the bag off the bed and stood it by the door. The room looked smaller already — the way rooms did when you'd removed yourself from them. Just walls. Just furniture. The little vase Abedi had refilled with frangipani yesterday sat on the window ledge, the flowers already starting to droop at the edges. She almost took one.
She didn't.
Breakfast was waiting when she came downstairs. Abedi had clearly been up since sunrise. Doughnut , a small bowl of mango slices, tea — the kind with too much ginger that she'd complained about on day one and had come to crave by day three. He stood at the counter, arranging things that didn't need arranging.
He'd heard her come down. She could tell by the way his shoulders shifted.
"Lamukadze musena wangu," he said, not quite looking at her.
"Lamuka." She set her bag against the wall and pulled out the chair. "Simanya nawe."
The smile he gave her was — God, it was too much in the morning. Wide, unguarded, pleased with itself. He dared to be that handsome before 9 AM and act like it was nothing.
"Mwiro?"
"Nambola." She looked at the food. "Abedi, this is too much."
"It's not enough," he said. His English was clean, deliberate, like he'd pressed it. "You eat like a bird. I've been watching."
"That's slightly concerning."
"It's my job."
"Right." She picked up a doughnut. "Your job."
He finally looked at her then — directly, the way he'd been avoiding all morning. Something moved across his face and then tucked itself away. She felt it in her sternum, which was annoying. She was leaving in thirty-five minutes. Her sternum had no business doing anything.
Don't. Don't you dare.
She ate her doughnut.
Ayub arrived at quarter to ten with the calm of a man who had timed everything perfectly and wanted you to notice. He picked up her bag without asking — the presumption of someone who'd decided he was useful and had been right about it enough times that it stopped being presumption.
"The bus is never on time," he said. "But you should still be."
"Wise."
"My second wife says the same thing." He said it without irony.
"She sounds exhausting."
"She's practical." He glanced at her sideways. "Like you."
Zara pulled her sunglasses down from her head. The sun was already an argument. "Is that a compliment or an assessment?"
"Both."
They walked to the matatu stop. Abedi stood in the doorway of the hotel watching them go. She didn't look back. She'd decided that before she'd even finished her tea.
Don't look back. It's not yours. None of this is yours.
She looked back.
Abedi raised one hand.
She raised hers.
Ayub said nothing, which was somehow the kindest thing anyone had done all morning.
The bus smelled like diesel and someone's lunch and a faint, insistent note of old plastic. Zara found a window seat, shoved her bag into the overhead rack with the dedication of a woman who'd learned to make herself fit in spaces not designed for her, and sat.
The woman beside her was already asleep.
Useful.
She plugged in her earphones. Outside, the coast slid past — salt-bleached buildings, a child chasing something, a row of boda bodas parked in the shade of a baobab tree like they were in on a secret. The ocean appeared in gaps between the trees, flat and shining and completely indifferent.
She thought about Abedi's flowers. The way Ayub had said practical like it was the highest possible praise.
She thought about the question that had been sitting in her chest since day one, quiet and stubborn, the kind you don't say out loud because saying it out loud gives it weight.
Do I actually belong anywhere?
The bus lurched forward.
Nia was six hours away and waiting for her like a bill she'd forgotten to pay.
- Writer
