Your Heart Should Skip A Beat

By Uzoma Ihejirika

“As you eat, you cannot help listening in on the banter of the other men. You listen to them recount stories: funny stories, scary stories, crazy stories, you-must-be-joking stories. A man laments the robbery he faced in the hands of traffic officials; another man narrates how he had sex with a ghost posing as a prostitute; another man recounts his ordeals with a female boss; yet another narrates how he had finished, wait for it, not one, not two, but seven cartons of beer.
Your phone rings. You retrieve it from your breast pocket and glance at the screen. Unknown number. The restaurant has become too loud to answer a call. You hurriedly wash your hands and go outside.”

The Money Shot

By Amy Heydenrych

They have a checklist that demands scenes of abundance, women being employed and hands holding fountains of grain.

These pictures will be emailed to countries their subjects will never see. They will be placed on billboards and websites by men who believe their USD 100 000 grant is enough to transform entire communities.

“Karibu!” The owner of the factory I am visiting clasps my arm with chapped hands. The dank, malt scent of the animal feed they are processing coils into my lungs. I hold in the urge to wheeze.

Amy Heydenrich

Amy is an award winning writer. She is a journalist by training, and detoured into writing fiction in 2011. In the same year, her first short story appeared in People Opposing Women’s Abuse 2011, a women’s writing anthology published by by Jacana. In 2012 she won the inaugural Short Story Day Africa fiction writing competition.…

1968

By Okwudili Nebeolisa

He took his army bag and stuffed it with a few clothes and shoes, for himself and his son. He had money in his pocket. He took the keys to his motorcycle and went out to look for his son. “We’ll be travelling tonight,” he told his son, in Igbo. When the boy asked about his mother, if she wasn’t going to leave with them, he was shouted at to shut up.
Quietly they left for the next village after he draped a bedspread over Gladys.

Breaking Glass

By Saaleha Bhamjee

I expect fucking but this is nearly lovemaking. When he leaves, I am both emptied and filled. I sleep, curled around ‘his pillow’. I smell his hair every time I move. I miss the call from home. The kids want pictures of everything. This is the message they leave me.

Accounts of A Street Urchin

By Jude Mutuma

“Unadai?,” he asked you as he extended his arm to offer you a piece of half-eaten chicken wing. He was always so generous, Yusuf. You took the chicken wing quick and bid him goodbye. He just smiled at you, with that toothless grin.

Jude Mutuma

Jude is a student at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. He is an aspiring writer and thinks of himself as a, “ Student of life. Believer in fact and fantasy. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I speak. Sometimes I’m normal, most times I’m me.” He believes in God above all else.

P.S I Love You

By Sharon Tshipa

Clean shaven, woundless, all body parts intact. He sat upright on the time worn Victorian sofa. Uncle Madi had just arrived from war.

Early

By Michelle Preen

My voice has shunned my body. I hear it over there, dissociated from my being.

“Give me my baby,” it says.