The Twist You Never Saw Coming

I once wrote a micro fiction piece here about four gentlemen who were driving at night from somewhere in Murima. I think it was Sagana or somewhere hizo sides.

Then they decided to stop at Kenol for a drink before they proceeded on their journey back to Kanairo.

But one of them hung back in the car for a couple of minutes before opening the boot.

Si you guys remember how I used to throw in a plot twist that nobody saw coming at the end of a story?

The twist was that the car was a Subaru, and there were bloodstains in the boot that hadn't quite washed off properly.

This was at the height of The Bodies of Yala during the previous regime, and anyone keen enough knew that these fictional men were state security agents coming from a dirty mission to erase someone.

I wrote another one too where a family guy is watching the 7 PM news together with his two young sons while his wife makes dinner in the kitchen.

Suddenly there's a news report about a man who is reported to have disappeared and his whereabouts are unknown.

A few minutes later, my guy looks over at his boys fondly, and then steps out of his house to smoke a cigarette or something.

As he chills out there, he thinks of the man who cannot be found, and wonders how long it will take for his body to float to the surface and be discovered in the river in which he and his colleagues had put him.

I often wonder about these people.

The men who kill for the state and its actors. And its friends.

Many of them are family men. They have wives and children. They have parents. They have siblings. They have friends with whom they drink, with whom they invest.

Some of them go to church with their families on Sunday. They are respectable people in their small communities. They contribute at funeral meetings. They are spokesmen during dowry negotiations. When a neighbor's wife runs off to her parents' home, he's the one who takes the husband to cajole his wife to come back home.

They attend their children's PTA meetings. Other parents envy them because they're the ones who seem to come up with all the best contributions. When their kids have birthday parties, all the neighborhood kids want to come because that's the coolest house with the coolest dad.

But

When they're not being these people and doing these things, they're abducting strangers and bundling them in the back of their unmarked police Subarus, taking them to undisclosed locations and killing them on instructions from above.

And dumping them in rivers.

Or pouring acid on their bodies so that no one will ever find them.

Or burying them in shallow graves for wild animals to dig up and eat.

Or simply killing them inside government police cells because apparently, we don't give a shit anymore.

I often wonder about these men.

I'm glad this didn't happen to one young lady in the last few hours since yesterday.

I'm glad you're alright, Nancy Jepkorir.