1/25 I’m signing off Twitter until 2020. It’s been wonderful to share my travels, book stuff, thoughts, gain new “followers”, follow many more in return. To say THANK YOU to my Twitter readers, old and new, I’ve adapted in 25 tweets my shortest story from AN ELEGY FOR EASTERLY. 
2/25 It’s called THE CRACKED, PINK LIPS OF ROSIE’S BRIDEGROOM. Highly experimental and narrated in the unusual third person plural, it’s the story of a wedding from the viewpoint of the guests. It’s about those most beloved Zim pastimes: rumours, gossip and hypocrisy! Enjoy!
3/25 The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom. Can Rosie see what they see, they wonder, that her newly-made husband’s sickness screams out its presence from every pore?
4/25 Disease, they whisper, flourishes in the slipperiness of his tufted hair. It's alive, they’re certain, in the darkening skin, in the whites of the eyes, whiter than nature intended, in the violently pink-red lips, the blood beneath fighting to erupt through the broken skin.
5/25 He smiles often, Rosie’s bridegroom. He smiles when a rural aunt, drunk on urban wine, entertains the guests with an out-of-tune rendition of ‘Dai Ndiine Mapapiro’ that she accompanies with sweeping motions from the two mitsvairo straw brooms that are her wedding gift.
6/25 ‘Honaiwo, honaiwo,’ she sings as she sweeps. ‘Honaiwo, honaiwo. Honaiwo, honaiwo, honaiwooo!’ Her voice hoarsens to a whisper on the seventh and most vocally-demanding ‘Honaiwo’.
7/25 He smiles when an uncle based in Manchester, which Rosie calls Men Chester, calls on the mobile phone of his son and sends his congratulations across 12 663 kilometres, shortened by Vodafone on his end and Econet on the other.
8/25 His smile broadens as the son tells the master of ceremonies that the uncle pledges two hundred pounds as a wedding gift. He smiles and smiles and smiles and his smile reveals the heightened colour of his gums.
9/25 The rented marquee is resplendent in the wedding colours chosen by Rosie: cream that Rosie says is buttermilk, a shade of green that she insists is not actually green but sage, and shining gold to provide the contrast.
10/25 The wedding guests chew rice and chicken on the bone and wash it down with mouthfuls of fizzy drinks, boxed wine, beer and an intensive colloquy on Rosie’s bridegroom’s reputation.
11/25 This is his second marriage, everyone knows.
He buried one wife already, even Rosie knows. What Rosie doesn’t know: he also buried two girlfriends, possibly more.
He buried one wife already, even Rosie knows. What Rosie doesn’t know: he also buried two girlfriends, possibly more.
12/25 The evidentiary weight of his appearance, circumstantial in isolation, is corroborated not only by the death of that one wife and those two girlfriends, but by other incidents in the life of Rosie’s bridegroom.
13/25 For instance: it is known that he was often in the company of Mercy now deceased, the late lamented Mercy with men from Kambumu to Seke Unit J. Mercy of whom her mourners, wishing to speak well of the departed could only say: Ende Mercy aiva akasununguka. Mercy aifara!
14/25 Another thing: he was always at MaiTatenda’s shebeen, MaiTatenda who has one Tatenda and no BabaTatenda, MaiTatenda of the home comforts and then some, MaiTatenda who was seen only last week, just skin and bones, coughing-coughing in this sweltering December.
15/25 And finally, incontrovertibly: Rosie’s bridegroom’s car was seen parked outside the house of Sekuru Muchawa who lives on Mharapara in Mufakose, he of the hands that can drive out the devil Satan who has chosen to appear as an incurable virus in their midst.
16/25 Sekuru Muchawa has placed an advert on all the trees in the Avenues. He responded to that advert, Rosie’s new husband, he must have, for his car, the silver Hyundai that was always in front of MaiTatenda’s house, was seen outside Sekuru Muchawa’s house.
17/25 There is but one disease that drives men to turn their cars in the direction of Mharapara. There is only one illness that pushes both the well-wheeled and un-wheeled to Mfombi. It is the big disease with the little name, the sickness from which no one dies.
18/25 They are gifted with prophecy, the wedding guests. They look at the cracked, pink lips of Rosie’s bridegroom and in them see her fate. She’ll die first, of course, for that is the pattern, the woman first, and then the man.
19/25 They will keen loudly at Rosie’s wake; they will fall into each other’s arms. Their first tears shed, they will talk in tones, now urgent and now languid, of the manner of her death.
20/25 In the public spaces they will say: “She just fell sick. Just like that, no warning, nothing. She woke up in the morning; she prepared food for the family. Around eleven she said: ‘My head, my head.’ And by the time she should have cooked the supper, she was gone.”
21/25 ‘So quickly,’ they will say. ‘Where have you heard that a person dies from a headache?’ ‘It grieves the heart,’ they will say. ‘Shuwa shuwa, musoro zvawo, musoro chaiwo shuwa shuwa?’
22/25 But in the dark corners, away from the public spaces they will say: ‘Haiwawo, zvipiko zvacho zvamuchataura pamusoro paRosie. We knew it all along. From the day of her wedding, patakaona miromo iya, we knew that it would end this way.’
23/25 ‘Her death was there in the cracked, pink lips of her bridegroom, how far did she think it could go? Remember the first wife, remember Mercy, remember MaiTatenda, remember the two girlfriends, possibly more? How far did she think it would go?’
24/25 But that day is still far, it is not here, it is not now. Here and now, the wedding guests clap and cheer and jeer and sneer as Rosie and her new husband dance a dance that, outside this celebration of sanctioned fornication, could be called obscene.
25/25 They eat rice and chicken with their own reddened mouths, and with their own cracked, pink lips complain there's not enough to eat, not enough to drink. As ‘Totutuma’ blasts through the marquee, the wedding guests dance. And the master of ceremonies cries ‘enko, enko.’
