At the checkout counters, I silently stand in line with my fellow men and wait my turn at the cashiers. I look past them and see the carnage we have left in the aisles—the supermarket floor awash with spills of Bokomo Oats, the fizzy lakes of Coca-Cola in between overturned tubs of Toss Detergent. Yet another battlefield.

And I hope my fellow men are waiting for their sisters, too, or their girlfriends or their mothers. Otherwise, I have seen men sing about Jesus Christ in crazy ways in the streets where our battlefields are, the men who are now dead again and mad with a bible in hand, nailed to corporate crosses and not even a mother, sister or lover around to watch their crucifixion. Dead again.

My sister comes. She holds me by the hand. Warmth on my palm. Sisters of my fellow men come. They hold the silence of the supermarket and crush it with gripping gossip. “So, today morning, the self-appointed chairperson of the house asked me for the utilities money, I gave it to her and said, ‘Next time, please show me the bill.’”

“You should ask for the bills, don’t pay without seeing them.”

“So, she came to the office and told the admin that I called her a thief.”

“What did he say?”

“He says, ‘Wait for the MD to come kesho.’”

“This guy has no powers.”

“I kept to the topic of the bills, but she kept trying to assassinate my character.”

“You should not react.”

“Are you kidding? She was shouting at me, then she called me stupid, then she hit me with the door.”

My sister takes me home. We drive through night time Nairobi and the sky is perfect black, because the stars are all shining down here at city level. Traffic lights, headlights, building lights, disco lights; driving deep, deep into the Saturday lights. When we come home, she cooks me dinner. She dances before the kitchen stove. I think of how she makes the world small like this, turns it into the five-thousand-square-foot size that is this house. The dimensions of home. How she eliminates the sprawling battlefields out there, and I can now lie on the sofa and smell the haldi scents and hear the mirch popping in the frying pan.

Over steaming palak murg she asks, “How was your day?” I say, “I don’t know.” I dream, in the deep night, of Kenya Defense Force submarines parking themselves inside Lake Victoria. Then an Eastleigh-built petrol tanker is struck by underwater-to-surface missiles outside Jinja. As a result, Rwandan macroeconomics face instability. Then, ten-million cubic- square meters of natural gas catch fire underground in South Kordofan, and 12 Tanzanian managers of the gas field are immolated. In retaliation, a computer virus manufactured in a Dar-es-Salaam suburb attacks and immobilises all Apple laptops in downtown Nairobi. Mombasa banks loan two billion U.S. dollars to the Khartoum government. Kampala is evacuated.

I can’t sleep well. My Mount Nyiragongo is itchy. I walk to the steps outside the house. My sister is seated there. It’s a pure dawn. The sun is giving birth to shade. Nairobi is asleep and birds are singing and a breeze rustles through tree leaves. My sister has always sat here on Sunday mornings, being nothing but peace. Like this, the Kenya Defense Force submarines dissolve into water, missiles evaporate into wind, Mombasa banks turn into sandy beaches and there is celebration in Kampala. We don’t even say a word. She is simply my Sunday morning.