Good The Beginning Of A Short Story Essay Example

Keegan was constantly thinking about his mother, Keyshia. He had not seen her for a long time. Keyshia had been more of a friend than a mother to her only son. However, he husband’s constant friction with the police had seen them separate. Now Keegan had been in this country for three years. He had come with his father to a village known as Ihururu in Nyeri, Kenya after he fled the United States. Dave, Keegan’s father was in the illegal drugs business. He had been suspected of killing a teenage boy, just two years older than his fifteen year old boy. Keegan’s life had been a roller coaster ride to nowhere. He and his father were always moving to different neighborhoods after the police showed interest in his father or after he rubbed important people the wrong way. This time, however, it seemed that they would be at Ihururu for a very long time.
Ihururu was a quiet place and one could say that it seemed stuck in the greenery that seemed to obscure any development. The small shopping center still comprised of the same buildings that had sprung up in the sixties after Kenya gained her independence from the British. All the people in the area knew each other. Their grandparents had grown up together, been circumcised together or had fought the British alongside each other during the Mau Mau war. The congregants at the Presbyterian Church, the largest in the area, gossiped about everything. When the white man and his son bought a large parcel of land in the area, everyone wanted to be associated with them. He seemed to have lots of money to throw around to the villagers, who were all too eager to tend to the lawns around his big brick house. Keegan was always quiet. He took in his surroundings with keen eyes and an expressionless face. Nothing seemed to make him happy. He was constantly brooding over the fact that his father had not bothered to look for his mother before leaving the United States. “Get in here and eat your supper,” Dave would shout, making Wanja, the village cook he had hired, wince at the sharpness of his voice. Keegan and his father were always arguing.
Dave was short-tempered. Although he had stopped beating his son when he turned eleven, the marks of the thrashings were always in Keegan’s memory. He hated his father for bringing him to this “hell-hole” as he had called it. Keegan and his father spent most of their time isolated from the rest of the village. Dave always drove his VW Passat to the nearby Nyeri Town where he ran a cyber café and other small businesses. He was always online chatting with his associates in the drug business.
It was now holiday time and Keegan would be at home for a month. He sat on the front porch of their big house which overlooked a slow-flowing stream. His father had read about this area from the internet. This very land, where their house stood was once sacred ground for the Kikuyu community. Rituals to strengthen their bodies against the British colonialists had been performed at this stream. As Keegan searched the area half bored, he saw a girl. She seemed a little bit older than he was and was very beautiful. She had lowered the opening of a large bottle to the surface of the water and was waiting for it to be filled with water. She looked at him and smiled before readjusting a woolen scarf over her exposed neck. Before he could wave at her, she was gone.