The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

since he took it apart to see how it worked. He would fold alone,

a bunch of coloured med students at a bachelors’ party at the Ridgeway – a sloppy night, everyone drunk and handsy. There had been other men that night, that week. It didn’t matter. Sylvia knew she just had to plant the seed of possibility in Lee’s mind and see what sprouted. Clients had made propositions to her before, all with that temporary, almost impersonal passion that possesses men when they’re fucking. But it would take a snare of a less obvious kind to capture Lee. So Sylvia stalled, holding just out of his reach something he believed he’d already had. She knew he was hooked when, one day at the Hi-Fly, he confessed something seemingly insignificant to her, a trivial thing really. Sylvia was washing a customer’s hair. Lee was sitting in a chair tipped

nose at

arm. ‘Ow!’ he flinched,

with The Virus.

take our

Godfrey mentioned

of Matha’s

When Lee Banda’s