*Fiction — December 13, 2018
The Black Unicorn
“There was a unicorn on the Isle of Man,” Father Colum told me, right after I told him about my intention to be a priest. He leant forward, eyes closed, and tapped his feet on the floor. “But she could only be found by one who was pure of heart, Kigen.”
I felt shadows crawl over me. Naturally, I turned and looked. But the living room was what it was when I entered—tiny and neat. Just a wooden bookcase pressed to a corner, the grey sofa we sat on, and a wooden table before us, our mugs of tea placed on zebra-painted coasters.
When I looked back at Father Colum, his eyes were still closed. But this time, his mouth was shaking as he held back words that threatened to tumble out. Then he hunched, in the same manner I would when I wanted to hide my shame.
This was not to be expected. At church, that same Sunday morning, he had been a god. When he took short steps to the altar, with the choir’s high voices shredding the air, he had my tears falling. By the time he lifted the white, round sacrament bread and prayed, I was seeing swirls of holy-looking light skitter across his forehead.
Later, when the service had ended and he had changed to the Manx man he was, who wore brown khaki pants and plodded silently on the ground, I followed him. When I reached his house, I tried to hide in the spread of avocado trees that surrounded his compound, but he saw me and beckoned. I walked to him with English falling in lumps from my mouth.
“I wanted to become an priest.”
He laughed and spoke back in Swahili.
“Karibu kwa nyumba kijana.”
Inside, he made me tea, then told me that he had seen me somewhere. That was easy. He had visited Mama and I two weeks before, in the shed of twigs and ripped tarpaulin that we now called home. He came with a tilapia as long as his arm, three new blankets, Exe all-purpose flour, a kilo of Mumias sugar, and a sachet of Ketepa tea. I told him how he sat down with us that Saturday and read a verse from the Bible to explain his visit: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” I did not tell him that after he left, Mama threw the fish on the muddy slope our house stood on and said, “Who is he calling a widow? My George is here in Limuru. I just need to find him.”
Father Colum smiled as I refreshed his memory. His eyebrows gathered into a small furry animal while crow’s feet multiplied and ran down his face. When he told me that he had fished the tilapia from the swamp inside the cedar forest, I frowned. I had never heard of anyone fishing in Limuru. That swamp was an excavation site that filled up with water after the murram was mined. It produced nothing more than the thickest scourge of mosquitoes to bite us at night. But Father Colum stretched his hand and held my shoulder.
“There are miracles in this world, Kigen. Many wonders we never get to see!”
I tried asking about priesthood then, about my wish to put on a white cassock under a green chasuble. But he was now talking about unicorns.
“Do you know what they are?”
He looked at me intensely with his liquid-grey eyes and I couldn’t answer. I remembered other things instead: the way water slid brown and thick over our feet in the shed when it rained; the sufuria at the corner, in which Mama cooked everything other than what was familiar. “Kigen, how do I find kisakya and isochot! They call them with Kikuyu names here!” I remembered her gazing east of our home, at the brick houses that stared down on us. How similar they looked to the one she once owned!
Seeing that I was not answering, Father Colum pulled a book from under the table and opened it wide. Inside, he showed me a drawing of a tall, white horse with muscles as solid as slabs of granite. The horse had a long horn on its forehead that ended in a sparkle of light.
“Kigen, it is not only the gospel that brought me here to Limuru.”
He laughed and lifted the book, then pressed it on his chest.
“But love. That is what I wanted.”
He closed his eyes once more and became so stiff that I was tempted to touch him and see if he could still move. But I remembered my shame and held my hand back. In Iten, four months before, when men with machetes invaded our home and forced us to flee, Mama had seen how I looked at them, how my hand had trembled, eager to join.
Inside the lorry provided by the police, which ferried us to Limuru with eight other families, Mama had carried that shame alongside the sack of clothes, the sufuria, and the small knife she had managed to grab. She sang loudly about having given birth not to a man, but to a shadow of a man. Her words were so poisonous that I expected the world to have dissolved the moment we stepped out. Instead, she had grabbed my arm tightly as if her hand was a metal vise and told me, “You will not shame me here among your father’s people. This is our new start. Make me proud.” When we were allocated land down the slope by the Limuru chief, and had built our shed, I would try to look her in the face but she would turn away.
I moved forward on Father Colum’s sofa and noticed the candle wax stains on his table had joined in a manner to resemble a map of Kenya. Iten was a splotch of brown wax near the table’s edge. I pressed my finger on it and closed my eyes. I wanted to feel the guava tree Mama had grown at home, whose fruits I loved to eat.
“I once thought just like you, Kigen,” said Father Colum, interrupting my thoughts.
“How do you know how I think?”
He didn’t reply, but took his time to sip the last dregs of tea from his mug.
“The solution is not priesthood I am afraid. At least it has not been for me.”
He squeezed his thighs as his skin paled.
“But there is a unicorn in the forest. You will find her if your heart is pure.”
I could not wait for night to come. I walked down the V between two ridges. Brick houses lined the eastern slope while a tarmac road crossed the ridge to the west, with our shed of twigs and ripped tarpaulin lying at the bottom. There was just enough space for our bed and the clutter of utensils besides it. I sat on the bed and waited, trying to ignore the stultifying heat and the scourge of mosquitoes that bit both day and night. But then I saw the gunny sack we had placed on top of the bed, in which we had stuffed all we could when our home was invaded. I pulled it out and untied its sisal knot. I dove my hand inside and sifted through the piles of clothes till I touched a soft, white belt that I had been unable to leave behind. I took it out and stretched it in my hand.
Back in Iten, I would tie the belt round the leso I had wrapped round my waist, imagining that I had wide, swaying hips. I searched again inside the gunny sack and came out with a small, folded, black polythene bag. I opened it. Inside were the soggy seeds of the pink cosmos we grew in Iten, whose petals I would pluck and lay over my finger-nails. I wondered if they would sprout here in Limuru. But evening had come and shadows were stretching down the slope, signaling Mama’s return. So I put the items back inside the gunny sack, tied it shut with the sisal string, and placed it back.
Twenty minutes later, Mama walked in. Limuru had turned her darker than usual and removed soft flesh from her face, leaving behind tough skin that tightly defined her skull. She was dressed differently from early morning, when she had stepped out in a long black skirt and an oversized, brown sweater that had swallowed her form. Now she was in a long white robe. Her eyes shone red even in the impending dusk and she held a Bible firmly in her hand.
“Did you talk to the priest?” she asked.
I watched her mouth curl as her eyes roved about. She was looking for something new. At times, this had been a comb I had picked along the road; a blanket received from church; a small sack of maize flour that a shy woman had walked with, down the eastern slope, eyes curious to find out who we are. Mama would stare at each new item for long as if ready to thank me. Then she would silently pick it up and place it at a corner of the shed she considered hers. Today there was nothing, so she just slapped her thighs.
“What did the priest tell you?”
She walked to the edge of the bed where we lay our firewood on ripped carton boxes. She scooped a few logs and laid them in the fold of her arm, and with the other free hand picked up the black sufuria, a mwiko, a paraffin lamp, and a knife.
“If I were you, Kigen, I wouldn’t even go to the Catholics,” she said, before pressing her lips. “I found a new church today. They gave me this robe. They say they are going to teach me how to pray in tongues. They say they will make me worthy of the promise Jesus gave when he said, ask and you shall receive.”
Her eyes swelled. She had more to say. But the manner in which I hunched made her tighten her mouth instead. In Iten, Mama still insisted on being Catholic. In the evening, she would light a cigarette and place it in George’s mouth, then kneel beside him and twirl her rosary beads. George would laugh at her, his voice loud and terrifying.
“I met Father Colum,” I said finally.
Mama lifted her eyes as her jaws relaxed. This was my chance. I had practiced the speech. “He said I can register for seminary on Monday. They are willing to sponsor me because of my situation.” That would make Mama release the shame. I would be the man she expected me to be, who could stand in honour at the pulpit and be respected by a congregation. But Father Colum had only told me about a unicorn, so I kept quiet. Mama narrowed her eyes.
“You are killing me without reason,” she said and marched out of the shed.
I sat and listened as she made fire. When it finally crackled, night had fully come. I moved to the door and peeped. I saw Mama pluck leaves off the nderemia that crept over the slope. She boiled them and the odour filled the shed with hopelessness. It turned worse when she began to sing a song she had learnt at her new church. The words and images were pleasant—Jesus will never leave you, God holds you wherever you are. But it was how she sung it, her voice twisted and malformed, as if the song fully belonged to the darkness that held tightly over the land. I walked back to the bed, shaking.
Thirty minutes later, she walked in, the paraffin lamp swinging from her elbow. She had plopped the ugali she had made inside the sufuria, and it had sunk under the green muck of the nderemia she had boiled. She walked to the edge of the bed and placed the sufuria down. Her hands moved in a flurry, before emerging with a piece of the ugali and lots of the nderemia placed on a cracked piece of a plastic basin. She handed that to me.
“These are tough times, Kigen,” she said. “You have to adapt to a hard life.”
Her voice was soft then, just as it was in those days in Iten when George was far away with his transport trucks and it was just the two of us in the house; those days when we would hear neighbours pass by saying, “These Kikuyus are not like us. They are so hardworking. Look at this man George. He lives in a better house than all of us.”
I closed my eyes and forced the food in. All the time, I thought of Father Colum seated on his sofa, about his kind, grey eyes, about the honey he had mixed in my tea. I held onto those thoughts so that time would move. Mama sat on the edge of the bed, faced away from me. She ate quickly as she talked to herself. I gritted my teeth to avoid listening to her utterances. Luckily, she made her nights in Limuru short. There were no flowers to water outside. No lights for her to cut her nails or read an old copy of Reader’s Digest. As soon as she finished, she wiped off her hands, blew off the paraffin lamp, and crawled into the bed. I sat as still as I could beside her. When sleep finally curled her like a baby in a womb, I grabbed the paraffin lamp and a matchbox and walked outside.
Surprisingly, the texture of the night had turned pleasant. All that was unnerving had been hidden—the mud we stood on, the brick houses up the eastern slope, the absence of flowers outside our shed. I lit the lamp, afraid at first that it would flicker and die. I lifted it high and it lit well the path on the west side of our shed, which went up a ridge where eroded soil revealed jutted eucalyptus tree roots. The eucalyptus trees were at the top of the ridge, lined to seal the tarmac road that stretched between Nakuru and Nairobi. They looked sad at night, as if grieving the native trees in whose space they stood. I crossed the tarmac road, that now shimmered like a river, to the other side where the cedar forest began.
There, in the morning, it was common to see old men herding sheep, or to stumble on lovers torn between hiding and holding tight. At night, it was a place to wonder whether my heart was pure enough to find a unicorn, a place to recall how I got an erection when our barbed wire fence in Iten was ripped off and our fields of millet, maize, and beans flattened underfoot. So I kept moving, eager for this mystery that was this night, even when each turn only revealed trees and flickering bats. Then I heard Father Colum’s warm voice whisper in my ear, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed.”
I turned, waiting for the lamp to reveal his face, his yellowed teeth and compassionate eyes. Instead, the wicker blew out and I was swallowed by the dark. I held my hand out before me but only felt a biting cold. Then I stepped into water. I had reached the swamp. It was then that I saw the unicorn standing before me. A black mare who illuminated from within. She gracefully bowed and pointed her horn at me. I touched the tip and felt myself dissolve in sparkles of light.
“George used to love you, Kigen. But then you turned different. He used to carry you on his shoulders and walk you down to Viewpoint. Now you smile too much. Now, you walk as if you are carrying a woman’s breasts.”
Mama told me those words in Iten. Our barbed wire fence still stood intact, shielding fields that grew millet, sorghum, pyrethrum, maize, squash, and beans. Our house was made of brick, the roof painted green and the floors inside carpeted. Outside, our compound was awash with pink cosmos. But George had not been seen for six weeks. For the first two weeks, there were phone calls to make us understand that he was a busy man. “My trucks are stuck in mud near Marsabit.” “I am waiting here in Kitale to close this maize deal with this idiot.” Then those stopped. Mama panicked as the cash he left us dwindled. On the fourth week, I had to go to the shop and ask for sugar on credit.
I knew George was leaving us though. The light had changed in his eyes as if he no longer needed us. Happiness seemed to wait for him outside our fence, among those girls who sold milk in kiosks, who would call themselves daring when they took off their plaid jackets to reveal blouses without sleeves. Among them, George would relax his shoulders and put his hands in his back pockets like a young man. He would smile and trade jokes, when all he had for us was a solid silence accompanied by far-away eyes.
Even more strange, he stopped bullying me. In the sixteen years of my life, I had gotten used to his habit of punching me, painfully and spontaneously, on my upper arm. “That is to make you hard, you softie!” Or him forcing open the bathroom door when I was showering to pour icy water from a bucket on me. “Look at you cringe like a little, delicate girl.” The worst was that Christmas when I was thirteen years old. Mama had left for Eldoret to buy fairy lights. I was arranging rose stems in a glass vase on the dining table, with my blonde-haired, plastic doll beside me,when he staggered into the living room, his eyes a livid red.
“What are you doing, Kigen?” he screamed. “Today I will make you a man.”
I remember being lifted as if I were a rag. I remember my hands being bound tightly with rope. I remember being suspended over the door. I remember that scent of cheap alcohol on his breath and the tap of his steps as he walked away. I remember holding back my tears as the veins in my hands began to swell and my feet itched to touch the floor. That was the last time I called him father.
The morning he left was an ordinary one. There were no shouts or unexpected grimaces. The sun was fully out and the pink cosmos outside waved excitedly to the slight wind. He dressed well in a white, pressed shirt and black trousers that layered easily over his polished shoes. He walked out of the gate without turning back and I smiled in relief, almost as if I knew he was not coming back.
But his absence turned Mama’s words sharper.
“How can you sit in the house just like that when you can see that I am all alone?” she would ask, even when I had washed the curtains and folded the napkins in the kitchen according to colour.
By then, the 2007 presidential elections were fast approaching. Boys would walk in gangs outside our gate. One even pointed at us and said, “Remember you are Kikuyu. Tell your president not to dare win this chair.” I tried shouting back at him, to tell him that Mama was Kalenjin, that I grew up in Iten and spoke as good a Kalenjin as he. But my tongue was never swift and he was already gone.
Days passed by and Mama began walking faster, a constant frown on her face. She would walk to weed-choked fields with a kiondo and pluck chepkarta, kisakya, and isochot. These she would boil, squeeze out the water, then place inside the freezer. When KPLC came to cut our metre because we had delayed on our electricity bill, we locked the gate and hid inside the house. We never opened the gate again and would leave our home by walking to the sorghum field, where we would squeeze out through the barbed wire fence.
“Do you think I am a bad person?” Mama asked one evening, when George had disappeared for three months and Kenyans had begun to vote.
I looked at her and she was shaking. I didn’t want her to cry so I answered no. She cupped her hands in her thighs and began rocking back and forth.
“Why did he leave us? What are we going to do with this big house?”
I tried to recall George’s face but I couldn’t. He had left like a shadow.
I was outside our maize store the next day in the afternoon, removing husks from maize cobs, when Mama rushed to me, her face contorted with fear.
“It is Kibaki who won. Not Raila. Not Raila.”
Her face froze as if the word Raila had turned solid and choked her in the mouth. I looked over Iten and saw angry men froth thick like molten lava. They flowed to our land and melted our fence. They scorched our land as they poured in, fire wherever they stepped.
“Kigen, our house,” Mama screamed.
I followed her inside. She already had a sack in her hand, in which she was shoving everything she could. I just stood and waited for the men. They tore away our roofing. They kicked our brick walls till they caved in, were quick to take away the fridge, the cooker, the sofas, the TV—every valuable thing that could be damaged by falling brick. When they pointed at me with their machetes, asking if I was Kikuyu, I would repeat, “I am a person of the mouth! I am of this land.” They would walk past, leaving behind a sharp, manic scent that made me grow hard. When they left, leaving our land bare of every effort George had put on it, I came hard. My semen trickled warm down my thighs as I stood beside Mama.
“We are going to Limuru, Kigen Kimani,” she said. “That is where George is from. That is where you belong.”
Then she turned and saw my wetness, and her mouth curled.
The unicorn healed me. In her eye, I found truth. Not just mine but everyone else’s. I rode with her across the cedar forest. At dawn, we stood at the tallest point in Limuru, the wind a pleasant bath to my skin. I looked down the land and saw the church where I met Father Colum. I also saw the market at the edge of the forest, which was still bare of people. Limuru seemed small then, almost as if I could close it in my palm.
I had lost my clothes. I was now dressed in a long, flowing, black robe, which was tied with rope around the waist. Whether it was the unicorn that stripped me, I cannot tell. I felt like a priest. The unicorn took me to places where wild flowers grew. I stuck clematis, leopard orchid, and spiderworts to my hair. I plucked a blood lily and stuck it on my goatee. The world was what I had always wanted it to be—a flighty, thrilling rush.
When it was time for me to go, the unicorn walked me to the edge of the cedar forest where the market was. A few women were already up, dressed in woolen leg warmers and thick sweaters, unwrap-ping sacks of vegetables they would sell for the day. They couldn’t see us because, as Father Colum had told me, a unicorn chose who saw her.
I slid off the unicorn’s back and she bowed to let me touch her horn once more. When I did, I felt myself swell, as if all my life I had been a flaccid ball and now I was fully becoming. She disappeared then. I didn’t even see her gallop away. I hid behind a tree and waited for the market to fill up. By 9 a.m., it was bustling with hundreds of people who squeezed through narrow spaces left by tomatoes, onions, capsicum, carrots, and potatoes piled onto waterproof, plastic sacks. Their voices sounded excited.
When I walked in, I was not afraid. I parted through the people and walked to a woman at a stall, who was dressed in a pink, polka-dotted apron. She looked at me with wide-eyed wonder, her nose flaring as if she had seen a ghost.
“I want a kilo of shelled peas and carrots for forty shillings,” I said.
Her hands fell slack on her sides as she saw her truths in my eyes: how she lay beside a snoring husband at night and reached for her pudenda; how affectionless she felt when her grandson was laid in her arms, even when she had smiled and said, “Waa! Si he is handsome!” But it was the truth of the child she had strangled and buried secretly in a patch of arrow roots that had her break down and cry.
The other market women gathered. But even before they could inquire, they met their truths in my eyes—secret lovers, fetuses flushed out with malaria medication, truant children, skin infections that had them scratch surreptitiously, doubts on whether God existed or not. They were hit in the gut and began to wail. But I had to tell them what was important to me.
“You have not been kind to Mama. She feels so alone here in Limuru.”
I paused and licked my lips, surprised that they were enthralled.
“Yet my father, George Kimani, is from here.”
They threw the name George Kimani about. But there were many George Kimanis: George Kimani who left for Marsabit twenty years before to herd camels; George Kimani who was in Mombasa, trapped by the sexual ploys of Mombasa women; George Kimani who was a pastor in Kawangware and seemed to have gone soft in the head. But then they spoke of a George Kimani who had moved to Iten and married a Kalenjin woman, and I nodded. A woman, whose eyes were swollen from fresh tears stepped before me.
“You are one of ours—a child of this land. You are very special and have been sent by the One above to punish us. Ask Him to spare us from our sins.”
The women ululated as I prayed. Later, they carried their selection of pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, and shelled peas, then followed me across the road and down the slope to our shed. They lay countless leso over our shed as we prayed some more. Some even rushed to their homes and came back with pots of mukimo. They held Mama’s arm and swirled her around as they sung. But Mama looked dense, even when she smiled back. In the evening, when the women left, their gifts piled in front of our shed, I saw her sit and hunch. I reached over to hug her but she pulled back.
“I saw you take the lamp outside at night,” she said. “What did you find?”
I wanted to tell her about the unicorn. But when I looked in to her eyes, I saw that all she wanted was George and that her desire for him was drying her soul. I closed my eyes and searched for George. I saw him four ridges away, drunk as hell, in soiled jeans and a tattered shirt, a different man from the one who left our home in Iten in the morning. Mama thanked me for the first time in my life when I told her where to find him. She fetched water in a pail and wiped soil off her bare feet. As she skipped up the ridge like a little girl, I wondered if I would see her again. But the sun was sinking west and spraying its orange light over the eucalyptus trees up the ridge. It was impossible to grieve. When I heard a different set of footsteps behind me, I didn’t have to turn to know that it was Father Colum. He grasped my shoulders and I sank inside the curve of his body. I trusted in the soft timbre of his voice when he said, “You are now free.”
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 6. View full issue & more.