When the City Weeps: Chapter 2 – Salt In the Wound

 

By Emmanuel Mihiingo Kaija

 

Kampala did not mourn in daylight. By morning, the city had already swallowed the headline. The newspapers that had escaped the knock were now tucked in back pockets, crumpled in taxis, whispered over in market stalls. A few were torn, burned, or smeared with red dust. But the story had leaked — and like oil in wet soil, it would not be cleansed easily. Isaiah sat on a woven mat in Joan’s flat, ribs wrapped with a strip of white cloth still stained with yesterday. His face was purpled where silence had been struck into him, but his eyes were clear — not with peace, but with a kind of righteous ache. Every blink hurt. But pain had become prayer.

 

Joan stood by the window, phone pressed to her ear, her tone clipped. “We don’t need pity. We need copies. Today. Five thousand. Cash on delivery.” She hung up, muttering, “God helps those who wire money on time.” She turned to him. “Your face looks like a sermon no one wants to preach.” Isaiah tried to smile. “Then maybe it’s time we became preachers.” He reached for the notebook. Red leather. Pages fluttered like wings. His fingers hovered over the words he’d written in code — phrases even he barely remembered translating. His mother’s photo watched from the windowsill, framed in a cheap plastic square. The notebook had survived. So had the mission.

 

“What now?” Joan asked. “We go back to the mothers,” he said. “They know things the state has no language for.” She hesitated. “They’ll be watching you.” “Let them.” He moved slowly, painfully, rising like an old prophet from ashes. Every muscle sang of the beating. But the story — ah, the story — sang louder. Kisugu was quiet when he arrived. The Sunday morning sun slanted lazily through corrugated roofs and unfinished balconies, casting long shadows that stretched like fingers toward memory.

 

Mama Shakira opened the door before he knocked. She took one look at him, hissed through her teeth, and said, “Eh, so now they send soldiers after truth?” Isaiah bowed his head slightly. “They send shadows. But I’m still standing.” She let him in. The house smelled of millet porridge and wood smoke. On the wall, above a cracked portrait of her daughter, a small crucifix leaned askew.

 

“She’s still not home,” she said, without preamble. “But I had a dream. Last night. She stood at the edge of a river. Not speaking. But she looked back.” Isaiah paused. “What river?”

She shook her head. “One I’ve never seen.” Dreams. Symbols. Visions. The city was full of them, if one knew where to listen. If the police sought bodies, Isaiah now knew to seek the spiritual footprints they left behind. He opened his notebook. “Tell me about her last day again.”

 

Mama Shakira’s voice was tired. But her memory was sharp, like a knife that refused to rust. “She had started humming things. Strange songs. At night. I thought it was just play. But one night, she told me, ‘Mummy, when they come, I won’t scream.’” A chill moved through him. “Did you tell the police?” “They said it was trauma. Said I was projecting.” Isaiah clenched his pen. “And what do you think it was?”

 

She looked at him with eyes dark as storm clouds. “I think… I think they already had her name.” Later, Isaiah walked the narrow streets alone. Kampala wore its Sunday mask — church bells ringing, suits ironed, choirs rehearsing salvation. But under the hymns, the city whispered a deeper liturgy: grief, power, complicity. He passed a wall painted with a political slogan half-peeled: “For the Future of the Nation”. Beneath it, a smaller scrawl in charcoal read: “Whose Future?”

 

At the taxi park, a boy no older than ten slipped him a folded flyer. On it, a child’s face. Smiling. Below, a single line:

“Have you seen me?” Another girl. Another silence. He looked up, but the boy had vanished into the crowd. His phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number:

“Stop digging graves you can’t fill.” He stared at it, thumb hovering. Then he deleted it.

 

Instead, he opened a new note. “Chapter Two: Salt in the Wound. The city knows. It just refuses to remember.” He met Joan at the press house on Mengo Hill. The building was old, almost forgotten — formerly a bakery, then a Pentecostal bookstore, now a rebel newsroom dressed in dust and defiance. The roof still smelled of ink, fire, and fragile hope. Joan handed him a stack of fresh-printed flyers. “We’re running them in the women’s pages too. Obituaries, classifieds, even under horoscopes. If they silence our headlines, they won’t silence our mothers.” Isaiah nodded, grateful. “They tapped my line,” she said flatly. “They’ll come. Maybe not today. But they will.” He sighed. “Let them come. But when they do, make sure the world has already heard.”

 

She reached into her drawer and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. “One more thing.” He unwrapped it — a cassette recorder. Old, scratched, battered. Sacred. “It belonged to my brother,” Joan said quietly. “He used it during the war. Said sound holds memory better than paper.” Isaiah cradled it like a relic. “Thank you.” “Use it well.” That evening, he visited the next mother — a woman named Auntie Grace. Her daughter, Teopista, had gone missing four weeks earlier after attending a youth rally at City Square. The police claimed there had been no such rally. Her home sat near the railway line in Nakawa, perched like a fragile thought between the noise of trucks and the silence of the missing.

 

Grace welcomed him with weary warmth. Her eyes were kind, but hollowed — like someone whose faith had been held too long in the sun. “She was wearing red,” she began. “A dress I stitched with my own hands. Said she wanted to feel powerful. I told her she already was.” Isaiah pressed record. “What happened after?”

“She never came back. But that night, I heard three knocks. Soft. Then a voice saying ‘Mama, forgive me.’” He looked up. “You heard her voice?” Grace shook her head. “Not her voice. But it wore her sadness.” A silence settled between them. Outside, a train groaned past, iron on iron, grief on grief. “I went to the church,” she said, quieter now. “Even Father Kintu avoided my eyes. Said I must surrender. But how do you surrender a child to shadows?”

Isaiah’s throat tightened. He knew that kind of surrender. Knew it too well.

 

The sun was low when he returned to the newsroom. Joan was at her desk, sorting footage. A new poster had been pasted on the wall — a girl with dreadlocks and defiant eyes, missing since June. “She was only sixteen,” Joan whispered. “And brilliant. Wanted to be a pilot.”

Isaiah stood beside her. “They are trying to erase the future.” “No,” she said. “They’re trying to sell it.” He looked around the room — dim light, sagging ceiling, scattered papers. But here, something sacred stirred. Not just resistance, but remembrance. A war waged not with bullets, but with truth. He opened his notebook one last time that night. “The city bleeds in silence. But its mothers are prophets. Its children, gospels. And we — we are scribes with ash on our fingers and thunder in our lungs.” Later that night, the power cut. Joan lit a candle. Isaiah sat across from her, the tape recorder between them. “Want to say something for the archive?” she asked. He cleared his throat. “Yes.” She hit record.

 

“This is Isaiah Akena. Journalist. Son of Esther. Citizen of a city that forgets too easily. If you’re listening to this… know that we tried. Know that there were names. Faces. Mothers. Songs. Prayers. We carved memory into every stone they tried to bury. We were not silent. We will not be.” A pause. Then, in the darkness, Joan whispered, “Amen.”

 

 

END OF CHAPTER TWO