beside the seaside

‘Delaksha smiled. “Tell me, sweetheart, what do you love best in the world right now?” Ayaana deflected: “Pate.” Delaksha said: “Never made it there. A pity.” Nioreg asked: “What’s to love?” The ideal of home, which distance amplified. Ayaana tuned into a vision of home as if she were a home-comer. Her face softened as she clothed her island in her mother’s scents and the Almighty’s stars. In Ayaana’s grammar, her listeners glimpsed Muhidin and Munira, witnessed the surge of Pate’s moonlit seas from a sand dune, and smelt a jasmine-infused night. Ayaana’s Pate was an antidote to desecrated worlds, so that, when Ayaana finished her remembering, there was silence. She picked up the chopsticks as the ocean whooshed answerless questions. Nioreg’s tough-man mask slipped. “Miss Ayaana, we shall visit your home, yes?” He turned to his by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor