This is my entry for the Africander ficathon. It is the prequel to "They Tell Me it Rained." It takes place in Africa. It is slash, but it is not Spander; Xander is paired with an orignal male character. It is set in Togo, West Africa (a place I happened to live for two years).

A debt of gratitude that is eternal at this point to reremouse for her reading and support.

Remember, this is the Togo entry of the Scatterlings and Orphanages Africander Fiction Challenge, so finish here and then go check out all the other great stories if you haven't already.

Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake

by
Savoy Truffle

Part One

Xander shifts his weight, attempting to get a little blood flow to the right side of his ass, but knows it’s futile. The left side of his ass is grounded on the taxi’s bench seat, but the right side is hanging in the gap between the bench and the fold down seat on which the driver’s apprentice is precariously perched, holding the sliding door closed as he leans his thin torso out the window and yells, “Sokodé! Sokodé! C’est où? C’est Sokodé?”

He’s looking for passengers—coaxing, cajoling—as if by the power of his voice alone he’ll somehow convince one of the women drying grain on the asphalt by the side of the road that she really needs to be going to Sokodé today.

The twelve-place van is already more than full with fourteen paying adults, the driver, the apprentice, four small children, two nursing babies and roughly a dozen chickens on the inside, not to mention the two bleating goats strapped to the roof—and there’s got to be some sort of bastardized version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ to be sung here—but if there’s one thing Xander’s learned in Africa, it’s that there’s always room for one more.

One more guest in the hut, one more friend at the dinner table, one more passenger in the bush taxi.

He’s also learned that bush taxis ought to be declared a form of institutionalized terror and supposes that somewhere out there there’s a hell dimension that looks exactly like an African taxi station.

The van careens down the two-lane highway, darting around women with baskets on their heads, boys on bicycles, helmetless men on motorcycles and other, slower vehicles with little concern for minor annoyances like oncoming traffic.

Twenty minutes later, the apprentice gets his wish and the van door is sliding open even before the taxi comes rolling to a stop. A thin woman climbs in, dressed in at least five bright and clashing patterns that would have put teenage Xander to shame and carrying another dozen chickens, tied together by their feet and hanging upside down from her hand. Xander is in sympathy with the chickens, quirks his lips at them in a half smile.

There are no more seats—or even partial seats—so the apprentice digs out a thin cushion and slaps it over the hot metal covering the van engine. The woman and her chickens are installed between Xander’s knees, the woman facing Xander with her back resting against the front passenger seat. She spares a glance for her chickens on the floor and, finding them suitably settled, looks up to meet Xander’s eye—gives him a half toothless grin.

“Anasara,” she says—matter of fact, like she’s identifying a piece of the landscape—and Xander doesn’t need a translator to know that that’s the local word for white guy.

He looks over her shoulder to the relative peace and comfort of the front seat. It’s the best seat, the prized seat in any bush taxi and usually its his for the taking in virtue of being white and male, but today he was outranked by a man in uniform carrying a machine gun.

Ah, well.

He sneaks a glance at the man riding next to him—the man whose warm body is pressed up against his side—trying not to be too obvious. He takes in the tight muscles of bicep and forearm, the rich, dark skin—smooth and deep—the wide nose and prominent cheekbones with three perfect little scars carved into each side, the dark eyes and the black eyeliner.

The man catches him looking as they pull to a stop at a military checkpoint. While the gendarme in the front seat talks to his buddies, women approach the windows bearing trays and bowls of snacks for sale. African drive-thru.

Xander spots the bean fritters he loves and digs out a bit of his very limited French to ask the woman, “Combien?”

She holds a pair of fritters in a scrap of brown paper recycled from empty cement sacks. “Vingt-cinq, vingt-cinq,” she says.

Too bad Xander can’t remember what that means.

“Twenty-five,” says the man next to him, speaking close to Xander’s ear in an accent that sends shivers down Xander’s spine.

Xander holds up two fingers and hands the woman a fifty-franc piece. The woman spoons a bit of hot sauce onto two pairs of fritters and hands them through the window. Xander hands one pair to the man next to him, who smiles.

Traveling by bush taxi isn’t all bad.

Part Two

The Sokodé taxi station is hot and dusty and everyone seems to be waiting.

Ticket sellers sit on little wooden benches behind little wooden tables and wait for passengers. Passengers sit on their own benches, staring at their taxis, sucking water and fruit juice out of little plastic bags bitten open at the corner, and wait for the drivers. The drivers hide out in nearby bars and wait for the apprentices. The apprentices mill around in ragged tee shirts and holey pants, load baggage and livestock onto the roof, and wait for the ticket sellers to tell them the taxis are full.

Africa is all about waiting, as far as Xander’s been able to tell.

Too-thin girls weave among the waiting passengers with trays balanced on their heads, trying to sell their wares to buy food for families in which they’re probably be last to be served. As the bags are being tossed down off the taxi roof, Xander buys a packet of tissues and a bag of peanuts and wishes he could buy more. He gets his backpack and follows his beautiful traveling companion to a cluster of men on motor scooters. Each man wears a blue shirt with “TAXI” and a number printed on the back. They climb on behind numbers 397 and 183, respectively.

“Relais de la Cigalle,” the man says. The drivers gun their scooter engines and take off.

The hotel has seen better days, obviously—or maybe that’s hopefully. It’s about thirty years out of style and poorly lit and they may be the only guests, but that’s probably why they’re here and Xander doesn’t really care. He wants a shower and a fuck and a beer and dinner and he’s not sure about the order.

But the order gets decided for him. He finds himself pressed up against the back of the closed door being kissed within an inch of his life.

In Xander’s somewhat limited experience, kissing isn’t too big in Africa, but this man has taken to it like a fish to water. Xander loses himself for a moment in the waves before pushing off the door and rolling them so that he’s the one doing the pressing, the one taking strong but pliant wrists and pinning them overhead. He pulls back and laughs.

“You?” he whispers against soft, dark lips. “Are such a fucking tease.”

“Tease?” The lips frown and the black-lined eyes blink—all innocence. “I am afraid I do not know that word, Xander.”

Xander laughs again, shakes his head. “Don’t give me that. You know damn well what you and your fingertips and your thigh were doing in that taxi and all I’ve got to say is—payback’s a bitch, Luce. Remember Mopti? And Ougadougou?”

He’s sliding his hips against Lucien’s as he speaks and Lucien stops pretending he can’t break Xander’s hold on his wrists and brings them down, starts pushing Xander back towards the bed.

“Fondly,” Lucien says as they tumble onto it, laughing, and Xander pretends the mattress and sheets at his back are soft, not stiff.

The shower can wait. It’ll be cold anyway.

Part Three

They sit in the hotel restaurant, clean and relaxed, and Lucien chats with the waitress in a language called Tem. The beers she brings back are tall, dark and cold. The restaurant is empty except for the pair of waitresses and a few turtles that crawl around in sunken flower beds that border the dining room. Xander frowns at the turtles and blinks, but they don’t go away.

Africa is fucking random.

The menu is at least ten pages long and filled with choices not only European, but distinctly American. It’s written in French, German and English. Visions of hamburgers dance in Xander’s head and he thinks about the meal they had back in Ouga and then about Pierette and then Essi and the words on the menu start to blur though he continues to flip the pages.

Breakfast… soups… salads… entrees.

“You are thinking about girls,” Lucien says, looking stern, and Xander flashes back to research sessions in the high school library.

“Am not,” he says—reflex response. He grins. “I don’t think about girls that way anymore.”

“Don’t give me that,” Lucien says in a pitch perfect parody of his lover. “You said, ‘I need a break, Luce. Let’s go see your family. It’ll be my vacation and if I try to think about slayers, I want you to kick me.”

The toe of a boot raps—not lightly—against Xander’s shin and he winces.

“Ouch. And you need to quit listening to every word I say. I’m not used to it.”

The waitress drifts back and Xander points to the hamburger on the menu. The waitress frowns at him and shakes her head, rattles off a few words to Lucien in Tem.

“They don’t have that,” he translates.

“Kinda got that,” Xander says. He turns the page on the menu. “A pizza, then.”

More back and forth between Lucien and the waitress and she’s shaking her head again and Xander is flipping a couple pages further.

“The fish?” he asks hopefully. It’s been awhile since they’ve been anywhere near a real body of water.

The waitress looks confused now—frowns and turns to hurry into the kitchen. Xander wonders if the thought of fish scares her. When she returns, she’s shaking her head.

“Okay, I think I’m going about this the wrong way,” Xander says. “Ask her what they do have.”

The question sends the waitress scurrying into the kitchen again, but this time she brings back a man who turns out to be the chef and points out the four actually available entrees. He tells them he can also make two of the salads.

Had anyone tried to tell Xander that one day the word salad would be right up their with chocolate or Twinkie, he’d have called that person the looniest loon in loonyville, but these days his body craves fresh vegetables like nobody’s business. He orders a side of fries just to balance things out and smiles as the chef walks away.

“But you’re right—vacation. This is me taking the week off.”

Lucien smiles back. “There’s no one you need to rescue here, Xander. No one you need to save.”

They flag down the waitress for another pair of beers and talk about nothing until their meals arrive an hour later. For all the hassle, the food is good.

Part Four

Xander wakes at dawn to the sound of a rhythmic—almost hypnotic—chanting that crackles over loudspeakers. The call to prayer. One set of loudspeakers becomes two, becomes four, becomes too many to count as the calls blend into a low, lyrical hum.

Xander had forgotten. Sokodé is a Muslim city.

He opens his eye and watches as Lucien kneels on a bright plastic prayer mat that must have come with the room and uses water from what looks like a yellow and purple striped plastic teapot to clean his face, hands and feet.

Lucien is a Muslim man. Xander sometimes forgets that, too.


They forgo breakfast at the hotel for a walk along the dusty roads of town while the sun is still low and the air still dry and cool. Xander’s asked Lucien to show him around, but there isn’t much to show. They wander past the central market, not yet in full swing. Mostly it’s French-shaped loaves of bread, some bananas, a few mangos.

Across the street is a building that says “Supermarket.” They stroll by the front windows but there’s a serious lack of shelf-age and what few shelves there are are mostly bare. They walk past the Texaco station and smaller, better stocked stores until they reach a blue plywood shack with “Cafeteria” painted in white letters on the side. They have their breakfast there—fried eggs in bread slathered with mayonnaise and Nescafé crystals dissolved in hot water and liberally dosed with sweetened, condensed milk.


They wander back up the road to the hotel and pass through the restaurant on their way to the room. A white man stands at the bar in front of a short glass half filled with brown liquid. He’s wrinkled and withered; he could be forty or sixty.

Dull, cloudy eyes drift over Xander and Lucien and narrow. I know what you are, they say.

Xander recalls the quiet but beautiful thirty-something African woman who checked them in last night. He thinks of the small, pale-dark boy he’s spotted peeking out from corners and doorways with a lonely, longing gaze. He watches the man take another drink and meets the murky eyes with his single, clear one.

I know what you are, too, it says.


After the noon prayer, they sneak in one last fuck—they’re not sure when the next opportunity will present itself—and then walk with their bags up to the Route de Tchamba, where a few even-more-ramshackle-than-usual vans and trucks wait to take passengers to the town of Tchamba and all points east.

Lucien grew up in one of the villages between here and there. It’s called Alibi II and its right on the road—Alibi the First being about thirty miles south of the road, off in the bush—and the name never fails to make Xander chuckle.

The road is unpaved and bumpy and dust flies in the open windows, coating everything in a fine red sheen. Xander coughs and his stomach clenches a bit.

He’s off to meet the family.

Feed the Author