Zenabu’s taxi

Quick! let’s jump into Zenabu’s small chapel of dryness on this big-rains afternoon let’s slide our bottoms up the pew and sit here gratefully as prayer-books while Addis Ababa goes floating past the window like a fish…

Zenabu, whose soft watery name means it’s raining!

whose neck is glistening a rosary of sweat under the hairline this priestly Man United fan born the day God said: enough’s enough! and broke the drought with one huge leather ball of rain…

Zenabu sees it washing over him, that mighty water and the blood!

so now he hangs a Virgin Mary from his crackled rearview mirror gums a Rooney poster-icon on the door and when he jams a tape in the rusty deck it’s got to be his treasured two-cassette collection – the All-Time Greatest Hits of Kidus Uriel’s Boy-Deacons’ Choir…

kidus: saint (Amharic)

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