I bleed, eyeing his scalp.

—It was a misstep on my part. I will admit to that much. But the blame is not entirely my own. If I had been listened to, left unmolested in my methodology, I might have avoided the conflict utterly. As it was I had no choice but to confront the rabble.

He wheels himself to the fridge and takes out one of the bags of trotters. —I had operated in admirable discretion.

A gnarled finger pokes into the bag and comes out with a trotter. He holds it before milky eyes and studies it. —Until they manifested.

He digs a bit of meat from between the pig toes and sucks it from his yellow nails. —Mungiki savages.

He rotates the trotter, finds more sinew, tears it loose with his teeth. —It would be almost comical. Their pretensions. That is to say, not only are they not from Kenya, but most of them are not even negroid.

He licks the trotter, sucks a last twist of gristle from it, and tosses it aside, plucking another from the bag. —Skag Baron Menace.

He spits on the floor. —Filthy child. He read about the Mungiki in a magazine article.

He waves the fresh trotter at the moldy magazines and newspapers heaped along the walls, barricading the windows. —An article from my library, no less. Yes, this is ironic.

He pops the whole trotter in his mouth, rolls it about, the sound of cracking cartilage loud, then opens his mouth, dribbling the stripped foot onto his hand then dropping it to the floor. —Kenyan gangs that thrive on kidnappings and protection rackets. Political

party enforcers that cultivate legends of their own brutality. They keep oil drums of blood. And drink it. So the stories go in backwater Kenya. If it is not redundant to use the words backwater and Kenya together in a sentence.

He holds the bag up, shakes it, doesn't find what he wants and puts it back inside the fridge.

—Menace thought it was clever, naming his little litter of hyenas after the blood-drinking gangsters. Clever? As if cleverness is a thing that ever happened inside Menace's feeble head.

He rolls to a small shelf of books, pulls down a moisture-swollen Webster's and flaps it open in his lap.

—Not even his own name is his. Menace. Something that threatens to cause evil, harm, injury, etc. I gave him that name. I had hoped it might instill some sense of pride in him, some modicum of self-respect. Something for him to aspire to. Better if I had done as I originally planned and named him Insipid.

He slaps the dictionary closed.

—Perhaps it did inspire him. Sent him off to new territories. Queens. Indeed. As if that was my fault. They act as if it was my fault. His adventurism of my making. But it was meddling in my methods that caused the problems. They have bred their own complications, not I. Little hairy monkey with dreams of his own empire. Skag Baron. The pretension of it. That little scrap of half-nigger and his delusions of nobility.

He places the book back on the shelf.

—Skag is a word I know not the meaning of. Nor do I deign to seek it out. So sure am I that it is some foul slang for vagina or penis.

His chair creaks close and he butts me with the wheels. —And you, were you in my charge at an early age, what should I have named you?

His lips purse, dry flakes of blood, and grease from the trotters, mingle in the whiskers on his chin.

—Shiftless. Yes, Shiftless. Lazy and contemptible. Placing yourself outside the structure of things. Imagining yourself better than your place. Adding nothing to the common good and weal.

He reaches behind the chair and comes up with a short cat-o-nine-tails and prods me with the wood handle.

—You are a burden on us all. We strivers, we reachers and dreamers, without us, without our mighty efforts at forward progress, you and your slovenly kind would perish in your own filth.

He dangles the knotted leather cords of the whip in front of my face; I can see the dry blood clotted thick.

—Parasites. Sucker fish. Tapeworms. Reveling in the bowels of the citizenry. Living off our wastes. Upsetting the smooth functions of the body politic that we nourish with hard labors.

He raises the whip and lashes it across my face. —Shiftless. Useless. Leech.