After Dinner Conversation Magazine: After Dinner Conversation, #46

By Kay Mabasa, Patrick Tibbits, Donna Lormand and 4 more

Named Top 10 "Best Lit Mags of 2023" by Chill Subs

 

Delight in intriguing, thought-provoking conversations about ethics, philosophy, and social issues! After Dinner Conversation is a monthly literary magazine publishing short fiction. Each issue features both established writers and up-and-coming authors who contribute fascinating philosophical insights on controversial topics like marriage equality, assisted suicide, the meaning of death, animal rights and defining your "purpose." It's time to go deep in search of truth! If you love reading imaginative short stories on hot topics that make your brain think deeply but also have you laughing out loud... then this magazine is for you!

 

"After Dinner Conversation" Magazine - April 2024

• The Family's Medium: An English educated woman returns to her African village to potentially fulfill her community role of accepting Sekuru's spirit.
• SMRTSS: A café radical professor requests a copy of a war photo and gets more than he bargained for.
• The Ladies Book Club: A women's book club gets together each month to fight back against the historical brutality of men.
• Glad Tidings: A little girl wants to know why her new toy says, "Made in China" when Santa lives at the North Pole.
• Emancipation: A 50-something woman leaves her loveless marriage to join an archaeological dig in Montana.
• Lemon Trees: A mother learns her 17-year-old son is seeing his recently widowed English teacher.
• A Wolf on The Bus: A wolf rides the bus, and is subject to discrimination by riders and police.

 

After Dinner Conversation believes humanity is improved by ethics and morals grounded in philosophical truth. Philosophical truth is discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate. In order to facilitate that process, we have created a growing series of short stories across genres, a monthly magazine, and two podcasts. These accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas are intended to draw out deeper discussions with friends, family, and students.

 

★★★ If you enjoy this story, subscribe via our website to "After Dinner Conversation Magazine" and get this, and other, similar ethical and philosophical short stories delivered straight to your inbox every month. (Just search "After Dinner Conversation Magazine")★★★

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224004362

Book preview

After Dinner Conversation Magazine – April 2024

This magazine publishes fictional stories that explore ethical and philosophical questions in an informal manner. The purpose of these stories is to generate thoughtful discussion in an open and easily accessible manner.

Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The magazine is published monthly in print and electronic format.

All rights reserved. After Dinner Conversation Magazine is published by After Dinner Conversation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States of America. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher. Abstracts and brief quotations may be used without permission for citations, critical articles, or reviews. Contact the publisher at [e-mail].

ISSN# 2693-8359      Vol. 5, No. 4  

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Copyright © 2024 After Dinner Conversation

Editor in Chief: Kolby Granville

Story Editor: R.K.H. Ndong

Acquisitions Editor: Stephen Repsys

Cover Design: Shawn Winchester

Design, layout, and discussion questions by After Dinner Conversation.

https://www.afterdinnerconversation.com

After Dinner Conversation believes humanity is improved by ethics and morals grounded in philosophical truth and that philosophical truth is discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate. In order to facilitate that process, we have created a growing series of short stories across genres, a monthly magazine, and two podcasts. These accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas are intended to draw out deeper discussions with friends, family, and students.

Table Of Contents

From the Editor

The Family’s Medium

SMRTSS

The Ladies Book Club

Glad Tidings

Emancipation

Lemon Trees

A Wolf on the Bus

Author Information

Additional Information

Special Thanks

* * *

From the Editor

THERE SEEMS TO BE A lot of anger and horribleness in this issue. I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: that’s just the luck of the draw; we simply publish stories as we find them.

However, like every magazine, re-reading the stories and drafting the questions got me thinking: why can’t people just be happy? Wild animals feel physical pain, but they don’t suffer the way humans do. Suffering from relationship unhappiness, from family and cultural expectations, from the pain of understanding historical gender/racial trauma. Humans seem fairly unique in the extent to which we suffer in the mind.

Is that our fall from Eden’s grace, or is it, instead, the sparked finger of life touching man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Perhaps both.

My recently passed father was the quintessential spotless mind, totally unphased by the results of his actions or the suffering of others. I asked him once why he never traveled to developing countries, preferring European river cruises. His response, Why would I want to see poor people?

That short response was perhaps the most grotesque phrase I could imagine. The most perfectly selfish statement. "I’m aware of your suffering and offended by your suffering because of the way seeing you suffer makes me feel."

I have no unoffensive response except my own resolve to properly embrace what I believe it means to be human.

Kolby Granville – Editor

The Family’s Medium

Kay Mabasa

I LOVE MY FAMILY, I say with my voice clawing against the walls of the mud hut. Smoke plumes to the thatched ceiling and dissipates into the straws of blackened dry grass—a telling of past fires that have warmed the hut and cooked family meals. I love my culture, I say, my voice no longer clawing but gently brushing the walls—a tell that I do not truly mean what I’ve said.

I lower back down onto a wooden stool set close to the center of the hut, two feet away from the crackling fire. My relatives encircle me, fringing the round room with their backs pressed against the mud walls of the hut. The younger group, who have no say in tonight’s proceedings, sit behind me while I face the annoyed faces of the elders.

The elders glower at me, judging the African child who’d spent most of her life studying in the UK—the land of our colonizers—foreigners who took our lands and brainwashed our minds into thinking that we were naked and that our culture and religion were satanic.

If you love your family and culture, as you say, then you wouldn’t be refusing the honored position the ancestors have bestowed upon you, Aunt Yeukai says, raising her shoulders and spreading her arms out at me.

The elders continue to stare at me, their way of trying to intimidate me.

Our culture has its ways of training a child: the bendy twigs from branches, slippers, an open palm, yelling, silent treatment, and the narrowing of eyes. I, no longer a child, could no longer be whipped, although it would have made for a thrilling display, thus leaving yelling, the silent treatment, and the narrowing of eyes.

The yelling stopped a few hours ago after my initial refusal. To their shock, I yelled back, an act seen as disrespectful and believed to bring curses on the offender. And as for the silent treatment, which has yet to be implemented but will likely happen when they’ve failed to convince me into taking up the honored role. They will no doubt ostracize me for months, which honestly does not seem like a terrible thing. I’ve barely spoken to my cousins and have never met most of the elders until today. And so, for now, they glare at me, supposing it will make me take on the role of being the family’s spirit medium.

I meant what I said about loving my culture. I adore our colorful patterned dressing, the colorful, flavorful food, the loud drum-filled music at gatherings, and how family means everything to us, but spirit mediums is not a thing I am fond of. I cannot wait for it to die off like the other parts of our culture that are dead or dying. The parts that are now stories we tell by cooking fires to frighten each other, stories of virgin girls being buried with the chief when he died and stories of female circumcision.

My role as the next spirit medium for the family has not come as a surprise. I’ve known I would be the next medium since the age of three, when I asked Baba why my second name was that of a boy, back when names were still gendered. Baba chuckled, amused at the workings of a three-year-old mind. He then told me that I’d been named after his mother, Gogo, who’d been named after one of our great-grandfathers, whom we simply called Sekuru, which meant grandfather. Baba told me that Gogo was the family medium who channeled Sekuru’s spirit for him to communicate to the rest of the family in order to guide and protect us from our enemies. Although I was three, I wasn’t too naive to know that I would be the next family medium as soon as Gogo passed, and so Baba left that part unsaid.

It’s an honor, Aunt Yeukai repeats. I would have taken it if I’d been chosen.

Then I choose you to take my place, I say.

The room gasps, hands clap, and a tongue clicks in frustration.

One of the elders, the eldest I believe, judging by his wrinkled ebony skin, fully white head, weak cloudy eyes, and missing teeth, takes such a great effort to rise to his feet that an aunt sitting next to him has to help him stand. We understand that all this is alien to you, he begins. You’ve been away from home for so long that our ways have become foreign to you. But you cannot simply pass the position to someone else. It could anger Sekuru’s spirit, and he could forsake us, leaving us unprotected and open to illnesses, witches, misfortunes; my child, the list is endless.

But why me? I ask, my voice rising back to its clawing tone, which makes the room suck its teeth; even the young behind me suck their teeth, and I picture them doing so with rolled eyes.

Sekuru has his reasons that none of us here knows, he says patiently. Maybe after the initiation ceremony, when he’s possessed your body, he will reveal it to you. He then settles back down on a stool and narrows his weak, cloudy eyes at me.

It’s an honor, Aunt Yeukai repeats with her eyes narrowing at me. We know you’re Christian; most of us here are Christian, she says, looking around the room; those next to her affirm it with a single nod, but you’re an African Christian, like me, she says, pointing a finger to her chest with her eyes digging into mine. You cannot ignore that part of you. She shifts on the mat she’s sitting on, stretching her legs in front of her, moving them from where she sat with them folded to one side. I believe you’ve heard of Mbuya Nehanda, she said, pointing two fingers at me. She was a spirit medium during the time our country was colonized and called Rhodesia. She along with Sekuru Kaguvi used their gifts to help the liberal fighters get back this land from the British. Obviously, such power can only come from the Creator. And if you didn’t know, when we pray to our ancestors, they pass the message on to the Most High. So you see we are not much different from Christians.

I spy my mother shifting on her mat and know that she’s thinking of how lost Aunt Yeukai is in believing such powers came from God. At church, we learned that those powers actually came from Satan. But then again, Christianity was given to us through men who’d taken our lands, which in my eyes seemed satanic. So how