“I don’t walk in my dream,” shouted Kambangane, waving a stick at his wife. “You’ve been repeating the dead’s names,” whispered Kanairombe, placing a sponge-soft hand on her cheek. “You’d walk in your dreams,” she hissed, crisscrossing a finger over her forehead.
Instantly, her remarks angered Kambangane, and a rope-thick vein grew on his forehead.
“I’ve never visited the graveyard,” shouted Kambangane, jumping out of his camping chair like a nail from a plank.
Later, the shining moon went to sleep, and a naked-neck rooster called his name. In response, Kambangane peeled off the sweat-perfumed blankets, creaked the door and shuffled his sandals. Darkness crept like a passing shadow as Kanairombe flashed a torch, while hubby jaywalked past the bush-fenced kraal. This time, she slammed the door and rained her stone-hard pillow with stinging tears.
In the middle of nowhere, a rhino’s tail spanked Kambangane’s face after bumping into a walking wall. Somewhat half-awake and half-asleep, he grabbed something and bit it off; it was a horn. The rhino charged at him, but he stabbed the rhino with its horn and flogged it with his walking stick. His stick broke during the scuffle, and he bathed in the pool of blood. By now, the grapefruit sun screened the drama, and he galloped home, while blocking the dazzling sun. Soon, he crept under the sweat-smelling blankets and could hear the ding dong coming from his heart.
Later, Kanairombe ballooned her eyes after hearing the episode as Kambangane stuttered it over again. “I’ll inform everyone that you’ve killed a rhino with your bare hands”.
Upon hearing this, Kambangane squatted on a log and pounded his chest like a baboon. The ground swirled, and thoughts of a rhino crushing his body into mincemeat flashed back like a film. Immediately, he praised his ancestors, his heart skipping a beat. Meanwhile, the villagers gathered around Kambangane like ants on a dead moth, after Kanairombe had spiced up the near-death encounter with a rhino. Afterwards, a radio announcer recorded the jaw-dropping incident as Kambangane retold the story from the beginning. First, the part where he snuck up on a warthog’s grunting in his kraal, then wrestled it before the cemetery.
Later, he twisted the plot to a moving-pictures paparazzi with truthful lies that the rhino pressed him against the cemetery’s fence. First, the villagers cupped their mouths and raised their eyebrows, but when they spotted the rhino’s carcass and Kambangane’s walking stick, they blinked rapidly. Instantly, the villagers carved a rhinoceros’s trophy from wood and gifted it to Kambangane.
However, the Department of Fauna reported that the GPS-collared rhino was not a threat to Kambangane. “You’ve orphaned a rhino’s calf,” cried a whiskery-bearded man. The rangers mimed swearwords at the poacher, while Kambangane rubbed the guilt feelings written on his face. Soon animal lovers mixed powdery milk and forklifted the zoo-destined calf into a flying car.
In the end, the Omusarakuumba’s Royal House fined Kambangane two orange-headed lizards for killing a mama rhino.
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