“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Elizabeth asks her bedroom mirror immediately when she wakes up. “In your circle of friends, among your relatives, and in the office none is as fair as you.” “That’s what I thought,” she says and begins getting ready for work. After she’s done, she takes her handbag and rushes out the door. She rolls down her car window in traffic and yells, “Will you get a move on? Clear the way for the fairest of them all.” A makanga in an adjacent matatu groans with boredom and a woman in a Volkswagen looks at her peculiarly. She shrugs, they don’t know the burden of carrying the weight of the fairest of them all. She gets to the office and immediately goes to the bathroom. She touches her makeup before sitting at her desk. She’s a junior advertising executive at a printing company at Industrial Area but the senior position is what she’s really after. “Just tell me who I need to sleep with?” she had asked Beth who was recently promoted.
The thing I wanted to do so much once I got my ID, was to go to Coco Savanah and dance inside there like an adult. Many of my older friends told me that that there was where they got their first girlfriends. That sentence is not important because I already had a girlfriend. And another girlfriend had me but I did not have her. Again, that detail is not of any importance to you especially. 18 came and I got an ID. I went to Coco Savanah. It was the F2 of Nakuru. That place was dark. Noisy. Smoky. Seedy. Smelled like an open cask. And people shouted at each other's ears to communicate. I lost track of time because I was dancing to Ali Kiba's songs. That one of Usinisemee. Where Ali eats and eats and eats. I loved the choreography of that song. It was saa tisa asubuhi, majira ya Afrika Masahariki kulingana na kopo la saa la Swaleh Mdoe. Taxi people were charging 500 to get me home. Which was 5 times my expected rate. Moneyed people were just whistling down taxis and entering back