The Leash & The Tide

ZURI

The eviction notice is pink.

Not red. Not the official government grey of serious administrative consequencies.

Pink, like a brunch invitation, like something that rainbow colored drinks and bad karaoke should supersede.

I read it four times. It does not change. It does not improve.

Khari outside my window is buzzing as it always does.

Tuktuk horns, the rotisserie chicken cart on the corner, Mrs. Kundi upstairs moving furniture at nine pm for reasons she has never explained, and I gave up asking about.

The city keeps running, barely registering that my account balance is zero and my life is on its last legs. Khari has seen worse. Khari has seen empires rise and fall, lived through Walumbe’s rise and fall itself.

My life imploding is insignificant. A spat on the glass.

I trudge inside my tiny flat and open the second bottle of red wine.

The first bottle was for the letter from the bank. The one that said we regret in the particular way of people who do not regret anything.

The second bottle is for the inappropriately colored eviction notice. The justification most definitely includes their choice of color.

I have budgeted a third bottle for whatever comes next, which experience suggests will be something monumentally shocking.

I sit on the floor because the couch feels too formal for this kind of evening. My business — Zuri Osei Events: Spaces That Breathe — has been dead for four months.

The paperwork is still alive — of course it is. Paperwork will outlast us all and throw a well-decorated victory party afterwards.

Kofi Mensah, my former business partner, my former friend, the man I built three years of work with, took over the accounts in February and has not been seen since. Disappearing like smoke in the wind.

I will admit, it is impressive in a specific way I am not ready to acknowledge yet.

I take a sip of my wine.

Outside, the rotisserie chicken cart man is singing — something melodic and upbeat but with a sad message.

I open my laptop, deciding another search with the wonders of technology could point me towards Kofi’s current location.

It doesn’t. It points me to something else.

I find the ritual at twenty-three minutes past ten.

I am not looking for it, of course. I am looking for Private Investigators, which is what one does when someone important goes missing, and the internet takes me sideways as it always does.

Through pop-ups too shiny to ignore, with manipulative taglines like "have you considered manifesting your way out of debt" to a Jeddit thread titled "old workings that actually deliver results, no gatekeeping."

The ritual is the seventh post.

"Summoning for those with nothing left to lose," it says. "Old words. Old power. If you’ve got the blood for it, something will answer."

I read this with tremendous critical rigor and a complete absence of good judgment, fueled by wine bottle number two and four months of nothing.

The instructions are not complicated. Candles. I have candles. I am an event stylist. I have forty-seven candles and a storage problem.

A circle drawn in something organic. Words spoken aloud, three times, in a voice that means it.

In a voice that means it. I read this twice. I have spent my whole life ‘meaning’ things. Meetings I believed in. A partnership I built from nothing. Three years of mornings where I woke up and thought "today will be the day."

I know how to mean things.

I have considerable experience.

I draw the circle with turmeric because it is the most organic thing in my kitchen and because the universe, if it is watching, deserves to see me working with what I have.

I place the candles. I have a lot of opinions on candle placement professionally, and none of them seem relevant right now.

I pour myself another glass of wine. Not for the ritual. For me.

I stand in my small second-floor flat with the city loud below and Mrs. Kundi moving what sounds like a wardrobe above, and I hold the laptop with the words on it.

I think about Kofi in his hideout, and the pink eviction notice, and the empty account, and I think: fine.

Fine.

If something is listening, if there is anything on the other side of this particular piece of theatre, I would very much like to make a deal.

I read the words.

Three times.

The candles go out first.

All of them. Simultaneously. Without wind. Great start! I think.

The temperature drops in the specific way that has nothing to do with weather — not cold exactly, more like the air becoming suddenly too serious.

Every small sound in the flat stops. Mrs. Kundi’s wardrobe. The chicken man’s song. The tuktuk horns.

Khari stops.

That is when I surmise something has gone terribly wrong with my evening.

The darkness lasts three seconds. Four. Then the candles reignite — all of them, together, burning higher than they should.

He is standing in my living room.

I will say this: he is not what I expected.

I did not, honestly, expect anything. This was the wine and the bad Tuesday and the particular madness of a person who has run out of ordinary options.

But if I had expected something, I would have expected something theatrical. Fire, perhaps. Red. The typical horn fest of the other side.

He is none of that.

He is tall in the way that makes you rethink the room. Not just height — presence, the kind that makes the ceiling feel lower, and the air feel denser, and every piece of furniture I own feel suddenly apologetic about itself.

He is broad across the shoulders in the way of something built for consequence, not performance — no excess, no vanity in it, just the simple architecture of a body that was made to mean something.

His lines are clean and certain. Chest, arms, the column of his throat — all of it carrying the same unhurried authority as his stillness. He wears dark clothing that fits as though it made the decision, like it’s a job.

He does not fidget. He does not shift his weight. He stands the way mountains stand, strong, immovable. Larger than life permits.

His face is severe.

Not cruel. I want to be clear about this, because cruel would have been easier. Cruel, I could have worked with. This is something older. Surer.

It is the face of a being that has watched thousands of years of human drama and arrived somewhere on the other side of reaction. Past judgment, past surprise, past the ordinary reactions the rest of us wear like a uniform.

His jaw is sharp, his mouth is tight in the particular way of someone who has simply not found recent reason, his brow carries the faint arch of a permanent consideration.

I look at him and I look at my small room and anxious furniture and I think: Intense.

He is not handsome the way a man in a magazine is handsome. He is handsome, the way a very old and very dangerous thing is handsome. In a ruinous sort of way.

The kind of striking that your body understands before your brain catches up. The kind that instantly sends warnings to your chest, but you immediately and foolishly ignore it.

His skin is deep, dark and rich, catching the candlelight the way good things catch light — holding it, absorbing it, owning it.

And his eyes.

His eyes are very dark. So dark they should be flat, it reminds me of a starless night sky, the visual equivalent of a closed door.

In the candlelight, they shift, briefly, to something that is almost amber, almost gold, almost the color of something that does not have a name in any language I speak. Then back to black.

He looks at me.

At my turmeric circle.

At my forty-seven candles in their excellent arrangement.

At the wine glass in my hand.

Something moves across his face. I know for a fact that I will spend a good measure of time afterwards trying to decipher it.

It is not contempt — not quite.

It is the specific expression of a being who has just understood something about his evening that he finds cosmically, personally, and professionally offensive.

It is the face of someone doing very rapid calculations and not enjoying any of the conclusions.

I should be afraid.

I am afraid. That part is handled. My body has filed the fear correctly and is processing it in the background.

I decide to move this lovely encounter forward.

“Hello,” I say.

He says nothing.

The nothing he says fills the entire room. Great start! I think.

“Can I get you anything?” The words leave my mouth with the inevitability of a bad habit. “Glass of wine?” Wow.

He looks at me the way you look at something that should not be capable of speech and yet somehow is.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life.