The narrow lane between the buildings had opened onto the smallest plazas. Or was it a plaza at all? Hunched shoulders and thick scarves hustled through the alleys on thin sticks wearing fine shoes, protecting the residents from the shopkeepers’ glaring wrought iron gaslights. For all, the cobblestones were of critical concern. There was a place in the background to be had for the price of a drink and a small dish of anchovies and pickled onions, but whether one was a large shape passing in the streets or a pair of beady pupils and the tip of a nose in the inky interior of a bar, the whole scene was dominated by a dramatic horizontal yellow gesture across a black canvas.

 Abioye watched as the older man stood in the middle of the muddy skid in the otherwise dusty clearing. He was pissing. And not just pissing. It gushed from him like a broken dam, churning up the mud at his feet and flecking his legs until the dry, wrinkled skin was glistening like a tree trunk of an acacia trees after that morning’s cloudburst. 

Termites!

Nipping and throttling the intruder to drive it out, a good haul clung to the thin, straight switch Una had selected and stripped of its leaves. Finally. success. 

She quickly forgot her technical victory and savored its reward, her lips too busy plucking the morsels off the stem one by one to concern herself with the implications of achievement. Her first few attempts had left her almost whimpering, as her thick and gnarled stick barely fit into the entrance hole of the termite mound. Every time she pulled it out she was lucky if there was a smashed little soldier on the end.