The Woman Next Door

~an extract from an up coming short story~

Time ticked towards midnight and outside the July light showers had turned into heavy rainfall and showed no sign of slowing down. The wild drops came down hard against the old rusty roof and faded whitewashed walls of Aisha’s small house. They rhythmically tumbled down, closely following each other, and at times simultaneously, landing heavily like soldiers. They later mingled smoothly but powerfully on the rusty iron sheet corrugates, before doing a parade downwards in as many single files, along the length of the ridges and joined other drops of the rain on the ground below.

The drops had been pouring like that for close to four or so hours. They pelted firmly from all sides of the sky turning the ground into slush and a territory of small muddy rivulets flowing crazily. Top soil was scattered madly in every direction, flushed out by the deep rain drops.

The showery night was biting cold. The iciness droned down, engulfing the neighborhood with chilliness like that of a blanket writhed out of a deep freezer just moments ago.  

Cursing bitterly under her breath, Aisha sat slumped and cross-legged on a tattered creaky Sofa occupying the right side of her small. A paraffin lamp dimly lighted the small sitting room. The single Sofa was the only tangible piece of furniture the whole house. She was only putting a piece of Chitenje, wrapped around her body. Local music from an old, corroded and ready to fall into disuse Nzeru radio hit her ears without necessarily entering her mind; with her mind in fusion with the outside sopping atmosphere. The radio was a rundown panting piece. She had inherited it from her late mother, together with the dilapidated Sofa her fully grown bottom now found solace. She generated, as she sat there, an appearance of a shadow in that poorly lamp lighted room; a lamp showing all signs of running out of paraffin. However, unlike a shadow, Aisha was breathing, thinking and cursing.

Her ears now picked the barking and piercing long cries of dogs in the midst of the cloudburst.

“Witches,” she whispered softly and shivered at the thought. ‘A bad night,’ she thought but quickly dismissed the belief as nonsense.

“It’s the best night,” she encouraged herself. It did not sound convincing though even to her.

She had come from an out of form topless iron shack, people found the audacity to call ‘bathroom’, stationed a stone’s throw away from her house. It was a structure also at the mercy of other nine households within the compound. She was there scrubbing herself ready for the night, the soggy night, the night she was not yet out to do her business, the delay that burned her whole inside. The bathing was tantamount to torture in that wet biting night; especially being done in the roofless falling into disuse iron shed. But she found congratulating herself for doing the activity three hours earlier not minding the ferocious rains; what with the thoughts of witches bombarding her mind and being in an enclosure for minutes alone. She shivered again at the thought before trying with failure to purge it again from her mind.