Nubian

I've loved this story for two years now (or even more). Sometimes, I forget that I can find it on Granta so I've decided to post it on my own blog so I'll never forget. Enjoy! 🤗  ******************************** If you go inside Nnam’s house right now the smell of paint will choke you but she enjoys it. She enjoys it the way her mother loved the smell of the outside toilet, a pit latrine, when she was pregnant. Her mother would sit a little distance away from the toilet doing her chores, or eating, and disgusting everyone until the baby was born. But Nnam is not pregnant. She enjoys the smell of paint because her husband Kayita died a year ago, but his scent lingered, his image stayed on objects and his voice was absorbed in the bedroom walls: every time Nnam lay down to sleep, the walls played back his voice like a record. This past week, the paint has drowned Kayita’s odour and the bedroom walls have been quiet. Today, Nnam plans to wipe his image off the ...

Some months back, Queenola and I made a pact to send each other prompts to help us with our writing. Of course, me being me, I developed cold feet and days turned into weeks then months. But Queenola is kind and she has agreed that we continue from where we stopped! 😊  The prompt from this story is that it starts with the sentence: THERE WAS NO SALT IN THE HOUSE. I hope you love what I did with it. Enjoy! And don't forget to share and post your comments. 🤗 ******************************* There was no salt in the house and Amanda was in a state of panic. "Why didn't I come with my own salt?" she asked herself. "Infact, why didn't I come with all the ingredients I needed to make the love potion as Baba directed?". Amanda was in such panic that she was on the verge of tears. She loved Jude, she really did, but Jude didn't love her back with the kind of intensity she wanted. And, to make matters worse, there was no salt or olive oil o...