How to Outfox a Fox
— Short Fiction —
1. How to talk to a fox
My grandfather was always telling us how he had climbed Kilimanjaro in his twenties. He would stop midway through swirling his ugali through his stew and declare that none of us had ever known real cold. “We got to the base camp, and once there, none of us showered.“ His cheeks would glisten and his eyes would glint. “Let me tell you, me I didn’t even drink the water on Kilimanjaro; it was too cold!” Having said this, he would proceed to regale us with stories of his mountain-climbing exploits, as if we hadn’t heard the stories several times before.
In hearing and rehearing this story, what stuck with me wasn’t a picture of my grandfather as an all-conquering mountaineer, but rather images of my grandmother’s face as she welcomed home the stink of this unshowered man. “Eh, Wuod Patila, was there no water? What will people say if they smell you like this? Dhiang’, today is the day I leave you.” In my imaginings of the two of them, my grandmother was the slick, sassy, no-holds-barred one. In another version of this story, my grandfather claims she was to climb the mountain with him, but, once in Arusha, remained holed up in the hotel, defeated by the cold. I don’t know which version of my grandmother is more real, or which one I prefer to be real.
