All these white people believed they were scoring a point with the monkey thing, but they were not: they were just scratching their own assholes. - Moses Isegawa

Uganda was in a state of siege, writhing like a dying moth on the floor. The bugles of defeat were poised, waiting to blow the walls down. The inside of the country was like a grenade whose pin had already been drawn.

The razor crackled and filled with stubble as I dragged it across valleys and ridges. Birds chirped fussily in the tallest gray-skinned mtuba trees. They jumped up and down on one branch.

Every migrant soul was now a compact little ghost captured in words, invoked from the lacuna by the oracle of Grandma and Grandpa and made to inject doses of old life into our present truncated existence.