The wedding guests look upon the cracked,
pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom. They look at Rosie's own lips that owe their
reddish pinkness to artifice, they think, and not disease. Can Rosie see what
they see, they wonder, that her newly made husband's sickness screams out its
presence from every pore?
Disease flourishes in the slipperiness of
his tufted hair, it is alive in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes
whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath
fighting to erupt through the broken skin.
He smiles often, Rosie's bridegroom. He
smiles when a drunken aunt entertains the guests with a dance that, oustide
this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene. He smiles
when an uncle based in Manchester, England, calls on the mobile telephone of
his son and sends his congratulations across nine thousand kilometres shortened
by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other. His smile broadens as the son
tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a
wedding gift; the smile becomes broader still when the master of ceremonies
announces that the gift is worth two hundred million dollars on Harare's
parallel market. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the
heightened colour of his gums.
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Extract from a story in Petina Gappah's
collection, An Elegy for Easterly]
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