Things They Lost

Chapter 1


December staggered in like a weary mud-encrusted vagabond who had been on her way to someplace else but whose legs had buckled and now she was here. On the second, which in Mapeli Town was known as Epitaph Day, the townspeople awoke while the sky was still silver, still tinged with ruffles of pink and blue. They gargled salt water. They greased their elbows. They tucked a flower in their hair or pinned it on their lapel. They marched to the schoolhouse, where the flag flapped at half-mast for all those who had drowned in the river or choked on a fishbone or stepped on a puff adder while walking to the marketplace. With eyes bleary and heads bowed, the townspeople thought of all the ones they had ever lost. They sang Luwere-luwere-luwere until their voices crackled. They murmured, Go well, Opembe, or, Greet our people, Makokha.

Then Mama Chibwire opened her shack and the townspeople gathered inside. They sat on the wooden benches with strings of sunlight spilling through holes in the tin roof and burning their eyes. They hunched over their knees and exchanged spittle on the unwashed mouths of their brew mugs. They called all their dead ones by name. There was Netia, who had sometimes chewed on shards of broken glass as though these shards were roasted groundnuts. There was Dora Petronilla, who had never bought any salt of her own, who always knocked on neighbors' doors and said, Abane! I forgot again! Will you help me with some? There was Mwatha, who, after a treacherous pregnancy, birthed a reticulated python. There was Sagana, whose mouth had only wanted to eat wild, wood-rotting fungi. There was Halima, who had sold fried termites by the roadside, and Wambua, who had been born with a patch of gangrene on his calf, and Njambi, who had liked to stain her teeth red with henna.

The townspeople shook their heads, their hearts hurting afresh. Akh! they said. Death is tart, and death is cloying! And they sobbed into their brew mugs. And their

Okwiri Oduor was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Her short story "My Father's Head" won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The New Inquiry, Kwani, and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell and Art Omi and a visiting writer at the Lannan Center. Oduor has an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Germany.

"Astonishing ... Oduor has produced page after page of gorgeous, elegiac prose. Dense and rich as a black Christmas cake and alternately whimsical, sweet and dark, Things They Lost is a complex work, brimming with uncompromisingly African magical realism."
-New York Times Book Review

"In giddily exuberant prose, Oduor gradually reveals a terrifying story of generations of maternal abuse and dysfunction."
-Financial Times

"[A] story that injects the fantastic into the mystery of Kenya's disappearing girls ... [Things They Lost] will appeal to any reader who has survived or wants to understand girlhood as a time of complexity, laced with unparalleled creativity and expansion."
-Vogue