In Kenya they have two paved highways.
Commuters throw garbage out the windows to baboons
so used to being fed this way
they wait at intervals like pets or trashcans.
One day a man threw out an orange
he’d filled with chili powder just for the hell of it
to see what would happen (it
rolled in the red dust at the highway’s
edge) because the man hated those fucking baboons
or whatever the word is in Swahili, the way
they jerk off at the side of the road, or show their
disgusting red cans
to each other, and this one not especially orange
orange
got picked up by one of those fuckers, who pushed it
into his mouth and bit down. The white man in the green car
on the liquid red highway
under the burning blue sky (or whatever the baboon
word is for hellfire) — the man in the green car went
his way.
Baboons scream as only baboons can.
The man felt merciful: no more living trashcans.
He forgave his wife. As the sky turned the brilliant orange
of an African sunset, he drove home. It
gratified him to see the sides of the highway
deserted, the entire baboon
population he’d driven away.
For a while, he went out of his way
to be nice to his wife and children. He let them
watch American
T.V.; on the weekend he bought a six-pack of orange
pop, packed it
in the car and took them all for a drive along the highway.
Of course the baboons
were back; he expected that. Baboon
Attacks, however, he did not expect, especially the way
it seemed to recognize the green car (uncanny,
the papers called it), hurled itself at the open window
when an orange
shape glistened briefly there, and ripped the man’s throat out. Call it
whatever you like, poetic justice, but people aren’t safe
on the nation’s highways,
the papers said.
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