Nakola held down her 10 year old flowered patched dress as the gushing wind threatened to reveal her chalky thighs. Her left hand gripped the hem of her dress so tightly that she could feel the veins on her palms suffocate from the pressure. She liked it.

It was her rehearsal for how she would flex her palms on that pig’s throat. Okay not really a pig, but a human cum pig. To be polite, he was human, but with attributes exactly like that of a pig. He ate 24/7, and ate everything he could find. He was also very oily and black, like the roof of Nakola’s mom kitchen, burdened from soot. His blackness was the only thing that distinguished him from a pig- at least that made him more human, or maybe we should call him a black pig, Nakola’s subconscious suggested.

Before Nakola could further her dramatic and sadistic scenes, she saw something wriggle in the grass a few feet away. She knew what it was. Her left hand released her now crumpled dress and aided her right hand lift the pot of water from her head, putting it down on a flat triangular rock.

Tiptoeing, she made her way forward, fixing her glistening eyes on the grass, just like a predator hunting for prey. With a quick spring, she grasped and pulled. Grass stuck out on her clenched hand like a cat’s whiskers and she felt something tickling her palm. Her face lightened. She unrolled her palm slowly and grabbed the brown grasshopper which was semi-lame; it couldn’t fly, thanks to Nakola’s fetish for clenching her palms.

As if in a restaurant, Nakola found a spot and plucked a leaf from a queer plant to be used as a plate. Plucking the grasshopper’s wings one by one, her stomach couldn’t wait to be occupied by this delicacy.

When the grasshopper was wingless and Nakola was ready to feast on it, hindsight intruded. Her wings of freedom would be clipped in two days, just like the grasshopper’s. The only difference was that her freedom would be plucked by an oily hairy pig, sorry, an oily beefy character.

The grasshopper could hop no more and it lay helplessly on Nakola’s hand, waiting at the mercies of the 14 year old whose appetite had been trampled by her pursuit for freedom.

Staring at the stream across, Nakola’s eyes were transfixed like a doll’s. She pictured how Mr. Mutagamba, would make her his prisoner, fondling her chalky thighs, forcing her to lay her head on his greasy chest, worse even, how she would spend her youth in the kitchen roasting grasshoppers and slaving for his ungrateful abyss he calls a stomach.

Nakola tossed the grasshopper in her mouth without thought (nothing could separate a Ugandan from their grasshopper, not even bad news). She then took her pot and hurried home.
“Banange! What has kept you this long?” Nakola’s mother exclaimed as she took the pot from Nakola’s head and hurriedly made her way to the kitchen before Nakola could respond. Nakola followed her mother to the kitchen.

“Maama, I don’t want to get married, not to Mr. Mutagamba or even to anyone, I want to go back to school and live my life just like a normal…” Nakola paused dropping the bombshell when she saw that her mother still like Lot’s wife.

Unannounced, her mother quickly turned like a top and looked at Nakola pokerfaced. She made two steps to Nakola who anticipated a hefty slap. Instead, her mother examined her face close, eyes wide open. After awkward seconds, her mother pated her lips and spoke.

“This is the only way out, you have to do this for… Your father died and now we are left on our own, no breadwinner. You just have to do this.”