SAFARACHA THIS🇬🇭

Kevin Appiah-Kubi

“Open Season”, 2017

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

GO OFF BESTIE

I stopped admiring the sky  By Kelsy Bellahon

On an icy day in February, when the morning was gray, the clouds dark, and the best pieces of me lay still in the frozen mud. Lungs drowned in jet fuel, my flyboy’s wings splayed out beside him, a blood eagle execution, my backbone exposed, a victim to a flight in winter. I put all my faith and all my future in the hands of a sky that never once promised to set him down slow or set him down easy. Now all my curves have gone rigid, my heart, once soft, is now a rock. And I can’t tell if it is the weight of it, or the way gravity has its wrists shackled to my ankles, but every evening, I am taunted by the color drained out of me, and hung up in the west, held by a tourniquet on the horizon. If mortality would lose its grip on me, there would be sunsets smeared with scarlet, drenched with wet crimson, my knuckles bloody, my nails jagged from clawing through a sky to reclaim what is mine. Hell hath no fury, because it all belongs to me. No, there is nothing beautiful about a sky that stands between a widow and eternity.