Mefloquine

I wake in unlaced hiking boots, dishwashing gloves and a headlamp. Every piece of clothing I own is flayed out across the tiles: unzipped, unbuttoned. Ben is standing in the middle of it all—this floor of empty wives—incredulous, like he has missed the rapture.

‘You did this?’

‘There were echidnas in my wardrobe,’ I tell him. ‘Caught in the clothes.’

And it still feels so true, as I explain how I worked to slip the dream animals loose—how I slid the snared fabric back and over every claw and spine. My hands remember the squirming weight of them.

I ask Ben what he thinks it means.

‘The problem with dreams,’ he says, buttoning his shirt, ‘is that they’re only interesting to the person who has them.’

He’ll sweat through that shirt before the drive to work is over. He’ll arrive at his embassy job as wet as if he’d dressed straight from the shower. The Accra humidity is difficult. That’s what we tell ourselves—it’s just the humidity, it’s just the traffic, it’s just the new weight of our wedding rings.

A local woman comes to the house and irons Ben’s shirts. Our bedsheets too. I pile my clothes in a restless heap, and she puts them back on their hangers. And I let her.

In the second dream, I’m back in the kitchen of the seafood place where I worked as an undergrad for under-the-table cash. I’m slicing a pineapple. I’m running my knife underneath its crocodile skin. Stripping it down. The mud crabs in the live produce tank press their stalked eyes to the glass to watch me and my knife. Their claws are bound with rubber bands. The water in the tank fizzes, like it’s shot with aspirin. Soon, I will be going home to wash the fish-gut stink off me and forget the kitchen boys and their hands. I will be going home to the apartment I share with Ben—that first little place we had with the leaky gas oven and the scrounged futon and the pair of white mice we loved too much.

I wake early, my hands tacky. I slip an index finger into my mouth, and it tastes of candied acid. Downstairs, the kitchen bench is covered in pineapple—crude, weeping chunks of it, pulsing with sugar ants. My good knife is silver fire in the morning sunlight, but the tip has sheared off. It’s lodged deep in the chopping board. I have to prise it out with pliers.

I wrap the knife in a dishtowel and take it down to Makola. Deep in the market, past the fruit and vegetable stalls and the fufu stands, past the piles of bras and belts and refurbed Nokias and spark plugs and mosquito nets and hair relaxer, is the kitchen section where there’s a man who’s attached a grindstone to a bicycle wheel and will pedal me a vengeful new point.

In the day, I sit behind the desk in my office—my perfect white cube of a room with a perfectly square window that looks down over the pool and its thorned fence of bougainvillaea. I watch the city vultures circling high and impossibly slow, and wonder if they have their eyes trained down here on this blue kidney of chlorine and the sun-ripening expats. I am writing a thesis I will never finish. And I know it.

In the night, I dream. I dream. I dream. And my sleeping hands are busy. I fill the bath and salt the water. I set the table for afternoon tea. I pull the cushions from the couch, and the books from the shelves, and the leaves from the indoor plants. I play both sides of the chessboard. I unmake the guest beds and draw on the bathroom walls with hard soap. And it’s all amusing and harmless enough until Ben wakes to the sound of me unlatching the balcony doors and climbing the balustrades to welcome down some moth-dusted god.

It’s a reaction to the anti-malarial meds, the doctor at the hospital explains: the part of my brain that should keep me immobilised while I sleep has been switched off.

‘How can we stop you from living your dreams?’ he jokes. I stop the meds.

Ben and I start telling the echidna story together at embassy functions. We toss it back and forth between us, like a party balloon: him waking to a sea of clothing, me and my somnambulant logic—how I had the presence of mind to don safety gear before handling the echidna’s nightmare spines.

And then we break out all of the cheap down-under hits: did you know that wombats shit cubes? And that kangaroos have two wombs and three vaginas? And that koalas have chlamydia? Furry little sluts. Oh, how people love my country’s mangled, venomous strange.

Ben drives us home in our brand new car with its diplomatic plates screwed on tight. Nobody will stop us. My wheatbelt accent feels thick on my tongue, and when I sleep tonight, I’ll dream of nothing at all. But how everybody laughed! And what a charming little wife I am.

This story is the winner of the KYD Flash Fiction Prize 2025.