Peter’s mommy showed him how to stalk spoonbill birds with y-shaped catapults or spot guinea fowl’s eggs between the feathery grass.
The tot could whistle the calls of grey pigeons or name the colour of cows.
Sometimes, Peter shocked everyone by describing black acacia or yellow acacia trees after looking at the shape of a leaf. In addition, he could tell a berry from a raisin by looking at a jackal’s droplets. “Stars are holes,” shouted Peter, thudding his milk bottle to the ground.
His babyish remarks tickled the women who were kneading the dough for the velvety fat-cakes. In response, grey-haired men scooping fist-size chunks of meat stuck between their teeth broke into ear-bursting laughter.
“Stars are like the holes in our roof,” Peter yelled, clutching the wide-neck bottle with one hand and squeezing his mom’s milk-dripping breasts with the other. “The sky is a blanket that leaks raindrops,” Peter said, as the women rinsing the steel mugs poked their uncut fingernails into their wax-blocked ears. His mom pushed her shaking lips outward and dumped a finger on his lips.
“The same way our roof pees, that’s how the sky drips raindrops,” Peter said, gathering twigs for his stick castles. Peter’s mom dropped her jaw and kindled the blinking fire with flammable twigs meant for Peter’s toys. This time, his mom mocked him to stop wetting the blanket by winking three times. Soon Peter crawled towards a man skinning a black-headed goat and grabbed a sharp knife. Afterwards, he cut cross-shaped holes in the urine-smelling blanket and dipped a bowl into a drum of water. Later, he poured water over the saddle-like blanket to model the raindrops through his manmade stars.
“The sky leaks raindrops through holed stars,” Peter said, triggering the loud burping men to serve him chunks of meat on a bowl-shaped branch. Instantly, a hairless-scalped man praised the tot for crushing a marrow-dripping bone with his milk teeth. “Are you my son?” he asked the boy building a tortoise-like sandcastle. “Mommy whispers bedtime stories, saying I’ll grow a sun-mirroring baldhead,” said the boy, as breastfeeding mommies cupped their mouths at his heart-drumming lies. “Where do stars go during the day?” quizzed the hairless man, his teary eyes glued to the tortoise-size sandcastle. Peter scratched his head, knitted his eyebrows and then hugged his MAM bottle. “Stars oversleep during daylight and blink at night,” said Peter.
In a blink, the bald-headed man forklifted the tot with one hand and tossed him in the air. “You’re my son,” he said, rubbing the pink patch on Peter’s forehead, while hand-clapping onlookers popped their eyes at the baldhead man’s dark-chocolate birthmark on his forehead.
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