“Don’t swallow me,” said Zakueeua, mocking Kambangane, who was yawning on a tented chair. Zakueeua squatted on a termite-nibbled log and sharpened a knife, all the while twitching his nose at the smell of sliced onions.
Thereafter, Zakueeua hid some crushed chillies under his tongue, as he salivated over the chunks of meat, which were served in large bowls. The two glued their eyes to the three-legged pot while cracking belly-turning jokes, such as riding on a rabbit’s back with a saddle. First, Zakueeua cleared yellow mucus from his throat and pointed a stick at the wind-blown papers hitchhiking on thorny branches.
“The thorns had pierced plastics into flowers,” said Kambangane, pressing his eyes at the blue birds beautifying their nests with plastic bags.
“Ka-mba-nga-ne!” stuttered Hijazombapira. “Come read the gut of the skinned cow.” Meanwhile, a boy cupped his mouth and poked fingers into his itching ears ,as Kambangane scratched the intestines like a rooster.
“You’ve swallowed a shard stirred into the thick porridge,” said Kambangane, interpreting the wormy intestines on a slab stone. Instantly, the wax-blocked-ear boy galloped to the pastor’s house.
“There’s my teddy bear!” cried a thumb-sucking girl, picking a chewed teddy that Kambangane had fished out of the belly of the carcass.
“The cow died from eating nylons,” shouted Zakueeua, mining a plastic bottle from the cow’s intestines.
Afterwards, a naked chest boy jumped on Kambangane’s lap and sobbed with hiccups. “What’s it?” asked Kambangane as the tots played hide-and-seek with a stubby toe that belonged to the boy on his lap. In response, Zakueeua bandaged the blood-spraying toe with nylons. Minutes later, Kambangane shot out of the camping chair after spotting a black plastic bag blown by the wind towards him. The old man flogged the plastic bag, but it snaked around the stick. Later, the plastic cuffed his c-shaped legs. Suspecting it could be an ongura plastic, he shuffled his feet towards the pastor’s house. Immediately, the pastor peeled the nylon from his ankles and threw it into the trash bin.
“Make a necklace out of ants’ bones and strings of spider’s web,” said the pastor, slapping Kambangane with a black book, while the spooky wind flicked the pink pages to the ‘Do not litter,’ verse.
Meanwhile, Zakueeua had tracked down his friend’s footprints, and snitched that a truck had crashed against a fence of spider webs. This time, a flying car dropped wheeled dustbins together with a braided plastic mascot.
“The meat will give you runny stool!” shouted a nurse, licking her fingers and serving the straying dogs.
Soon, the singing and dancing mascot schooled Kambangane and Zakueeua on the dangers of littering.
In the end, the children collected a mountain of trash, and the villagers built two huts: a circular hut for Zakueeua out of brown bottles and a square hut for Kambangane using sweetened water cans. The roofing bolt-nuts of the two huts were screwed with bottle caps.
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