The Fish Bowl

This morning, I picked up the box of Corn Flakes that I bought in Mocuba and discovered a rat’s rear end hiding behind it. The rat’s face was wedged between the wall and some plastic containers. He pretended to be hidden while I shouted out the window for Renee to come and kill it. The thing continued to sit there while Renee walked into the house, got a stick and poked the thing in the abdomen until it died.
Soon after, I went to school for a meeting with the school’s new director, the equivalent of a principal. I was surprised by how the subject of gossip was addressed, and how the other teachers reacted to it. After the meeting, we went over to the primary school to suffer through another hour or two of ceremonial bull, one of the less glamorous duties of being a Mozambican teacher. Before the ceremony – which presented a few new members of the hospital staff, including a much-needed doctor – a woman introduced herself to me as my neighbor. To prove it, she mentioned that I’d had a rat in my house that morning, and that I’d run out of the house wearing a capulana. I knew I didn’t have much privacy, but now I feel even more like I live in a fishbowl. I’m probably subject of a lot of the aforementioned school gossip, as well.

Today, I went to a loja and bought a new mattress. The one that I’ve been sleeping on is a well used three-inch-thick piece of foam covered in holey fabric. The new one is maybe five inches thick, but it’s firm and free of that unsettling people indent, left by who knows how many strangers. The fabric that covers the new foam mattress is a collage of music pages and various instruments, which is cute, in a ridiculous way. It’s oddly comforting to think that I’ll be sleeping on violins and clarinets. I had my eye on a space-themed mattress, but it was a double, and the only functional option in my tiny room is a twin. I only really wanted it because of the astronauts.