Natura: Uhuru Genesis

SONIA

SONIA

3. ARCANE ASSASSIN

Thence, there was a song

Of gun-thunder

- Edmund Tembe "The Praises to King Mswati II"

"Fake smile. Fake hair extension. That one looks like a pink pig," Sonia snickers, with a crooked curl of her lip. Her face is out, as their yellow, three-wheeled Lexus goes by a new neighborhood shopping mall. She hasn't bothered to read the name, but she's gloriously pointing out the hologram models.

She bites her fingernail, "oooh! That one needs braces." She laughs, putting her finger on the edge of the half-slid window, indicating a model stepping into a yellow sky taxi, the floor beneath her heels suddenly turning to a silver pond, her eyes, overly blown and vivid as tapioca balls, "that one looks like bionic woman. What do you think, Anansi?"

Anansi, whose hands are on the driving console, shoulders pushed back, keeps her head straight, "I prefer not to judge, miss." East Way Avenue is empty, the parking meters standing idle on the roadside, resembling lovelorn biker boys drowned in fog.

"But you're always judgy with me," Sonia punches her cheekily, on the left shoulder.

"I just try to make you better. Our best selves are always ahead of us," she looks at Sonia, with her serious brown eyes, "I think it's not too late to make for a terrific mother." Sonia flips her head at that, her hair blowing a whiff of lemon-scented hairspray. She thinks of herself, at fifteen, shushing Ando to sleep, her breast milk acting up. Ando wouldn't even look at her, hungry; his chubby cheeks threaded with silver tears. She'd try to show him the star-spangled orange wall stickers, which glowed in the dark. Well, that was before Yoko, and her were priced out of the apartment. Then she'd met Riku, a cool guy who ran a mobile dessert stall, dishing out sweet crepes on Takeshita street. He'd told her she was pretty, and could make money off pretty, with a modeling agency in Bangkok. Well ...that went well, she sighs in exasperation.

"I only gave birth," Sonia says dully, "I am not a mother." She stares at the slender dashboard, pondering playing some music, tropico pop perhaps. Then it hits her, in a dizzying wave, that it's white cathedral night. Kashta had actually swiveled, and struck her scarlet, across the cheek, the first night they traveled. He was mad; that she couldn't stay still, touching buttons, knobs, drumming her fingers on the white, fur-lined leather headrest.

Anansi frowns at her, "don't say that, miss. You might be young, but a mother all the same."

"What kind of mother can't feed her child?" Sonia snaps, "Or, goes about sleeping with men in the name of fending for him?"

"The fierce kind," Anansi reminds her.

Sonia looks at Anansi with an incredulous arch of her inky brow. She melts, at last, "do you think I'm a bad person?"

Anansi's eyes slit. She makes as though to put her hand on Sonia's then somehow, thinks better of it, "I think you're a young mother, and you should be forgiven for acting juvenile sometimes."

"Sometimes, I just miss the simplicity of being a normal girl," Sonia flicks her violet-black bangs out of her eyes. She squares her shoulders, like Anansi, and means it, in all seriousness. "There are moments I wish I didn't leave Tokyo. There would be no Red Door, no Lacquered, or White cathedral. My soul wouldn't have been murdered in the cold in Soi Cowboy, by the filthy deeds of monsters and men."

"Then you wouldn't have met me, miss," says Anansi with a note of hurt.

"I have a feeling I would," Sonia says, examining the backs of her hands, "you're like unavoidable. That's what makes you, like, a guardian angel."