To Exhale Sky
Kila has always been able to turn grief into tiny little things.
When Dimples, the family dog, dies at age five, Kila pulls all the sadness inside her and breathes out a cowrie shell. A small greyish cowrie shell that shimmers when the sun shines on it from a certain angle. Her grandmother makes her a necklace while singing a song about how the cowrie shell—such a small thing—became the totem of her tribe—such a big tribe. Every time Kila breathes something new, her grandmother sings a different version of this song.
Years later, after getting off her stage at Kencom, Kila runs into a man in a deserted alley near Kenyatta Avenue. He has a gun and tells her to run, but only after she gives him all her money. It is just after 6pm and the Nairobi sun is starting to set, the darkness taking over the space the light has left.
The man grabs the shell necklace Kila’s grandmother had made for Kila. “Please no, tafadhali I beg.”
The man hits her. “Shut up!”
Kila holds her purse up, her eyes squeezed shut. The man freezes when Kila opens her mouth and screams out stars. Two bright balls of fire the size of pupils float out into the air between them. He drops the necklace and runs away, blinded by their light, but they follow, penetrating his skin, burning into his core. Kila places the necklace back around her neck and takes a shaky breath in.
A few years after this, Kila falls in love with Tam, who she first saw on a Tuesday morning grabbing a coffee across the room at the Java on Mama Ngina street before work. Tam makes her inhale big, beautiful things into herself. Brown eyes, slightly slanted, small, locked dreads, dimples that accompany a smile, and two nose piercings, one on each nostril.
All small things attached to this big love which tumbles and unfurls over a glance, two numbers exchanged, first coffee date where dawa is spilled onto white pants with yellow daisies, hand grabbed to prevent a tragic death by accident on the of course crazy busy streets of Nairobi—laughter—so much laughter about everything and anything and nothing, and bathroom kisses in restaurants between whispered secrets of big love.
When Kila dreams of Tam and their secret big love that carries pasts and presents into the spaces between them, she feels herself inhale buildings, taste cities, and swallow continents. With Tam, Kila forgets what—if anything—is big and what is small.
Tam loves looking up at the sky, pays attention to the clouds, constantly contemplates the sun, and sighs at the moon and stars. Maddening as a wordless poet.
“Tell me,” Kila teases her love, gulping down the picture of Tam’s eyes. Tam is the shape of the world within Kila.
“Everything looks so small from down here,” Tam says, “so far away. While up there, it is this whole expanse. Yani, we can’t even imagine how large and fierce those balls of fire are.” She kisses Kila’s neck softly. “And in our little humanness, we have the audacity to sing, twinkle twinkle little star.”
Kila touches the cowrie shell attached to the necklace on her heart. That night she dreams of swallowing the sky. The little big thing for her little big love.
Cancer is the thing that steals their time.
“Who are you?” Tam’s family asks.
“A friend,” Kila responds, as she holds in her crying. A love, she thinks as she tries not to exhale, scared she will breathe out things instead of air.
And with the chemo comes a world of brown eyes, still slightly slanted, now with tired wrinkles, small-locked dreads that fall one at a time to the ground leaving parts of scalp visible—vulnerable—dimples that never go away—thank god they never go away— accompanying a smile that these days leaves for extended periods of time without notice.
At night, Kila throws up continents. Coming out of her, they slice her open from the inside out until they are in the toilet bowl and they become tiny things again. Only totems of bigger things. She holds on tightly to the sky within her chest, refusing to let it go.
Kila is scared that if she throws up the stars, she will lose Tam; she convinces herself it is the only thing that keeps her tiny big love alive.
One day Tam is coughing up phlegm stuck with tiny specks of blood on her hospital gown and says to Kila, “Let us go see the sky.”
Kila wants to say, “It is in my chest. I have saved it for you,” but instead she says, “You are not allowed to leave your room this late at night.”
And there is a little twinkle in Tam’s eyes but Kila is not fooled. She knows it is a ball of fire. “Live a little.”
When Tam laughs—and Kila will do anything for that laugh—she says, “If we get caught, they will have more pity on you, so I am going to say I tried to stop you.”
Tam says, “You are going to blame the patient. How cruel!”
And they are both holding in their laughs and sneaking through hallways and past nurses falling asleep on desk duty until they are at a balcony on the east wing under the night sky.
“We’re not all the way outside.” Tam sighs.
“Close enough.” Kila wraps her love in her arms and inhales Tam’s scent.
Tam touches skin, turns around and lifts fingers to the necklace around Kila’s neck. “Tell me again of your grandmother’s song?”
As Tam touches the cowrie shell that Kila breathed out when she was five, it glows. Kila does not know if Tam can see it, but the warmth seeps down her neck into her shoulders. “There are so many versions of it.”
“We have all the time in the world, baby.”
Kila laughs and stops pretending she can hold in her tears. She starts telling the version of the story of the big tribe being protected by a small spirit that lives in the cowrie shell. How the spirit taught the big tribe that time doesn’t exist in the conjunction of big and little things.
Tam looks at the stars in the sky. “I think I am going to be a big ball of fire pretending to be a tiny twinkling star.”
And Kila thinks time doesn’t exist at the conjunction of big and little things, so she inhales her tiny big love in and exhales the sky.
© 2021 Shingai Njeri Kagunda
About the Author
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Uncanny Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.