All Things are Possible
— Part I
Jason Bruner
It’s January, before the rains come. A film of dust casts the world in a dull sepia. The city responds with a unified determination: parking attendants ceaselessly splash grey water over the cars under their supervision; women, torsos perpetually perpendicular, scrape their handmade brooms along the sidewalks and storefronts. Still, the dust smooths the city’s creases. It piles in soft ridges beside streets. It covers unpaved roads with a rusty snow that never melts. I complain to Stella that I can’t keep my black dress shoes clean.
«You don’t know how to walk,» she tells me.
The scraping and sweeping and splashing keep the dust swirling down the sloping streets. It’s easy to move downhill in Kampala because in Kampala, everything rushes into a thousand whirlpools — always coming, always leaving, always pushing, always going nowhere. To survive here means not being carried along to someone else’s eddy.
The dust settles, finally, at the bottom of the city, where it’s held in place by the minibus taxis’ thick diesel cloud. You can’t linger here, of course; just passing through twice a day turns my sneezes black at night. But if you cut your way out of the old taxi park and head east towards the city centre, you might climb a steep, uncertain sidewalk with loose cinderblock steps. And along those steps you might notice that while the advertisement is squared with the tile, something of the image is askew. You invent history to remove the dissonance: a tailor asked for a banner displaying Italian shoes, and these looked smart.
I have not yet learned how to be smart — in the local sense — when I walk: graceful, deliberate. I wake up the next morning to find that Stella polished my shoes after dinner.
I have not yet realized that my shoes will be no cleaner after the rains.
Editor's Note
Jason Bruner is an associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His essays and creative work have appeared in The Revealer, Image Journal, Religion & Politics, River Teeth, 100 Word Story, and Breadcrumbs. He lives in Tempe, Arizona with his wife and three children.
All Things are Possible
— Part I
Jason Bruner
It’s January, before the rains come. A film of dust casts the world in a dull sepia. The city responds with a unified determination: parking attendants ceaselessly splash grey water over the cars under their supervision; women, torsos perpetually perpendicular, scrape their handmade brooms along the sidewalks and storefronts. Still, the dust smooths the city’s creases. It piles in soft ridges beside streets. It covers unpaved roads with a rusty snow that never melts. I complain to Stella that I can’t keep my black dress shoes clean.
«You don’t know how to walk,» she tells me.
The scraping and sweeping and splashing keep the dust swirling down the sloping streets. It’s easy to move downhill in Kampala because in Kampala, everything rushes into a thousand whirlpools — always coming, always leaving, always pushing, always going nowhere. To survive here means not being carried along to someone else’s eddy.
The dust settles, finally, at the bottom of the city, where it’s held in place by the minibus taxis’ thick diesel cloud. You can’t linger here, of course; just passing through twice a day turns my sneezes black at night. But if you cut your way out of the old taxi park and head east towards the city centre, you might climb a steep, uncertain sidewalk with loose cinderblock steps. And along those steps you might notice that while the advertisement is squared with the tile, something of the image is askew. You invent history to remove the dissonance: a tailor asked for a banner displaying Italian shoes, and these looked smart.
I have not yet learned how to be smart — in the local sense — when I walk: graceful, deliberate. I wake up the next morning to find that Stella polished my shoes after dinner.
I have not yet realized that my shoes will be no cleaner after the rains.
Editor's Note
Jason Bruner is an associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His essays and creative work have appeared in The Revealer, Image Journal, Religion & Politics, River Teeth, 100 Word Story, and Breadcrumbs. He lives in Tempe, Arizona with his wife and three children.
