From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part XVII / Bribery, Barrels, and Bureaucratic Breakdowns: A Muzungu’s Guide to Importing Chaos

Nairobi, 20th of February, 2012. Customs Roulette and a Container Full of Delusion: The scene? A sun-scorched loading dock roughly the size of Luxembourg’s guilt complex, vibrating with the existential hum of diesel, diplomatic failure, and mental decay.
The star? Me.
The IQ? Negotiable. I stood there, face tilted toward the Nairobi midday furnace like a lizard auditioning for a skin cancer documentary, squinting at a dented blue shipping container that looked less like salvation and more like a Soviet-era coffin someone had forgotten to cremate.

And yet—I was excited. Not “mildly hopeful” or “cautiously optimistic.” No. This was full-throttle, radioactive joy. The kind of joy only accessible to men who believe that government forms are mere suggestions and that shipping a homemade aircraft across international borders is just like ordering sushi, but with more jet fuel and customs bribes. I was the Duracell Bunny wired into Chernobyl. My heart buzzed like a faulty drone. My pupils dilated like I was watching Top Gun on mushrooms.

This was it. This was the moment. I felt like a child discovering Santa was not only real but also the CEO of DHL Kenya, and he’d personally overseen the delivery of my Cub—my aircraft, my ark, my weapon of messianic purpose. Because obviously, when Africa is drowning in poachers, what it truly needs—what history demands—is a bored, overfunded white guy with a bush plane, a saviour complex swollen like a tick on a missionary’s thigh, and a motivational playlist curated by Bono, Oprah, and a malfunctioning Alexa. Armed with drone footage, a solar-powered guilt complex, and a Development Studies degree printed on recycled colonial maps, I was ready to descend upon the savannah like a tax-dodging archangel of justice—filming it all in 4K for a charity gala nobody asked for.

Forget rational thought. Forget trauma. Forget the bureaucratic colonoscopy I had endured to get here. None of that mattered, because the shipping manifest—likely scribbled in Swahili, dried goat dung, and the tears of an overworked customs officer—declared that within this rusted steel sarcophagus lay destiny: a half-disassembled flying mistake, soaked in debt, and reeking of colonial déjà vu. It wasn’t paperwork—it was a suicide note disguised as logistics, blessed by a witch doctor with a British passport, sanctified with a blowtorch and a barcode scanner, then faxed straight from the festering armpit of my midlife crisis—triple-stamped by delusion, and probably cursed in three languages.

At no point—not once—did I pause to consider: “Maybe this container isn’t the redemption vessel I hallucinated during an espresso-fuelled ego seizure.”
Maybe—just maybe—I should’ve packed it all in, shuffled back to the manicured golf courses and performance anxiety Audis of my old life, spent my afternoons in Armani stores arguing with other leather-scented sociopaths about seasonal tie widths, and left Africa’s elephants the hell alone—instead of turning them into an unwilling support group held hostage by a white guy's spiritual meltdown in an aircraft held together by duct tape, guilt, and colonial hangover.

Nope.
Instead, I stood there like a missionary with a GoPro strapped to his conscience, ready to save souls that never asked for saving—armed with nothing but a shipping receipt, a saviour complex, and the kind of unhinged optimism that gets entire species extinct. I was already halfway into my acceptance speech for the International Elephant Saviour Awards. My Cub would descend upon the Mara like a furious paper airplane of righteousness, its propeller scattering poachers like Vatican priests at a condom convention. I had so thoroughly deluded myself that my self-confidence was now a Category 5 weather system. Children born within a 30-meter radius of my ego would need to be named after saints to compensate.

The absurdity of it all—the paperwork, the shipping costs, the fact that no one in this godforsaken dockyard even knew what a Super Cub was—none of it mattered.

Because I, Marcel Romdane—first of my name, breaker of logic, forgetter of receipts—stood before that dented steel monolith as if it were the Ark of the Covenant.

And just like in the movies, I was fully prepared to open it and melt my own face off.

Cue the goat. Cue Kalli’s distant sigh echoing across time and avgas fumes. Cue the collapse. Because the only thing more absurd than the container’s contents…was the idiot who shipped it.

Flanking me were my two trusted customs clearance companions—David #1, the self-anointed high priest of this administrative fever dream, slicing through Kenya’s bureaucratic holocaust with the grace of a butterknife trying to perform heart surgery on a brick. And David #2, whose contribution to the mission was primarily botanical—offering moral support with all the psychological depth of a potted fern watching its owners divorce in slow motion. He stared into the void like it owed him money, his pupils fixed somewhere between the fifth and sixth dimension. Possibly meditating. Possibly dead. Most likely silently auditioning for a job at the KCAA, where emotional absence and long-term memory loss are considered core competencies. Together, the two formed the unholy trinity of incompetence, optimism, and plant-based empathy—ready to liberate my aircraft from the steel womb of financial ruin and spiritual confusion, or at the very least, get sunburned doing absolutely nothing useful.

Today was the day. The Day of Reckoning. The Great Un-crating. After six weeks of floating across the globe, one minor Suez Crisis, and enough paperwork to wallpaper the Great Rift Valley, my shipping container had finally arrived. What was inside? Possibly my pride and joy—the yellow Super Cub I’d sunk my sanity and savings into. Or perhaps just a colony of feral rats wearing what was left of my safari wardrobe and reenacting Lord of the Flies with my aviation tools.

Somewhere inside that steel tomb were also a few personal treasures: a ludicrous number of books (because I had grand plans of reading while my dreams collapsed), a small arsenal of survival gadgets (because obviously I’d crash the plane eventually), and Kalli’s lovingly compiled “Crash Kit”—a shopping list for emotionally bankrupt apocalypse survivors, scribbled on the back of a boarding pass in what I can only assume was transmission fluid or repressed German disappointment.

And now, standing there under the equatorial sun—grinning like a moron who’d just won front row tickets to what he thought was a Beyoncé concert but turned out to be his own public execution, complete with a marching band and popcorn—I realised the only things between me and my aviation messiah moment were:

–one rusted bolt welded shut by colonial karma,

–a customs officer making origami out of my shipping documents with the facial expression of someone constipated by power,

–and the creeping suspicion that Nairobi’s freight yard was less of a logistics hub and more of a demon’s waiting room with good parking.

The two Davids were no match for the locking bolt. A stubby, malevolent little bastard of oxidised steel, forged in the bowels of Mount Doom and spiritually lubricated with the tears of unpaid interns at the Kenyan Revenue Authority. It wasn’t a fastener—it was a ritual humiliation device, specifically engineered not to protect cargo but to emotionally disassemble men in public, one stripped screw at a time. It had fused itself into place like a government employee after their second cup of chai—immovable, smug, and blessed by an ancient union of apathy and rust.

Meanwhile, I continued beaming like an idiot trying to high-five a firing squad. Not out of pride, but the kind of terminal optimism usually observed in lab rats seconds before they discover the floor is electrified. I stood there in full cheerleader mode, completely detached from reality—like someone offering to buy shots at a wake without realising the wake is for him. The brief flicker of anxiety I’d experienced this morning—some fleeting adult impulse to brace for disappointment—had already passed through my brain like a bullet through a wedding cake shaped like an aircraft manual. What remained was the usual: my signature blend of manic delusion and cinematic optimism, shaken, stirred, and served without warning.

"Come on now!” I chirped, my grin so wide it required dental clearance from three time zones. “Put your back into it!”

The Davids paused.

They looked at me not like colleagues, but like witnesses—traumatised bystanders at the slow-motion car crash of my existence, silently praying the paperwork would kill them first. Not with anger. Not with pity. But with that quiet, vacant stare people get when they’ve accepted that the apocalypse is wearing cargo pants and a cowboy hat.

Maybe—just maybe—they were calculating the logistics of faking their own deaths right there on the tarmac. A quick dive under the forklift, a splash of red paint, a forged obituary in the Daily Nation. Escape. Disappear. Reincarnate as papaya farmers in rural Indonesia. Anything but another second standing next to the Muzungu whose optimism had detached so violently from reality, it was now orbiting somewhere over Mars—dragging them with it like a karmic black hole in aviator shades. If eye contact could file a restraining order, theirs would have come notarised and on fire.

Armed with nothing but delusion, shaky drone footage, and a Swahili vocabulary limited to “hello,” “thank you,” and “where’s the nearest restroom”, I abandoned the two Davids—now slow-cooking in the Nairobi sun like bureaucratic barbecue goats—and set off to find help.

Five dollars later—one aggressive nose blow and two self-inflicted face slaps just to keep the hallucinations in check—the container doors groaned open like Dracula’s vault finally giving up on retirement, and revealed:

Drum roll.
Spotlights.
Angelic choir of underpaid cherubs.
(One sneezed. Probably allergic to hope.)

There it was:
The most beautiful, stupidly glorious, reality-detached airplane the African continent had ever laid unworthy eyes on.
My Super Cub.
My airborne midlife crisis.
My tax-deductible hallucination.
My yellow, winged revenge on poaching, logic, and financial responsibility.
It stood there like Thor’s hammer—if Thor had taken out a loan, dropped out of engineering school, and really liked duct tape.

I felt an uncontrollable urge to drop to my knees and weep—not noble, masculine tears, but the kind of hysterical weeping reserved for cult leaders, failed actors, and people who see their lost luggage actually arrive for once in their lives. The kind of tears  that make nearby goats nervous and cause birds to migrate early. It was a full spiritual seizure. My entire nervous system screaming:

“Look, Mum! I did that!”
And then, of course, my brain did what it always does at moments of potential joy: it betrayed me.

Flashback. Kalli.

Kalli, my grizzled, avgas-soaked aviation oracle, who smelled like diesel, bad decisions, and quiet German despair.
Kalli, who had reluctantly accepted the dual role of mechanic and mental health crisis hotline ever since he realised I was legally allowed to own a wrench and to operate machinery. He had laid out a meticulous aircraft-container security plan—a literal IKEA manual of aviation survival, complete with diagrams, torque values, and a section labeled “What to Do If Marcel Gets Creative (Don’t).”

“Ok,” Kalli had said, inhaling like a physics professor ready to explain—for the 17th time—that Newton’s laws of gravity are not optional guidelines.

“We need to build a stand for the wings so they don’t roll around like drunks on ice.”

I nodded with the violent enthusiasm of a malfunctioning bobblehead, trying to signal comprehension while my brain quietly packed a suitcase and left the room.
“That sounds good,” I chirped, channeling the emotional depth of an empty glovebox.

Kalli stared at me with the cold suspicion of a tax auditor examining your “laundry expenses” and knowing, deep in his soul, that you’ve never owned a washing machine.

Hollow.
Full of questions he didn’t want the answers to.

“Ok,” he said, deadpan like a medieval executioner clocking in for work, “I’ve prepared a few wooden planks, an old carpet, and some screws in that corner over there. Here’s a sketch. Go start. I’ll help if you need me.”

He pointed to a pathetic heap of sadness and termite-infested wood, then handed me a drawing that looked like a crime scene reconstruction made during  WWII.

I shifted from foot to foot, studying the blueprint while holding it completely upside down, oblivious to the laws of gravity, logic, or shame.

“Errr… help?”

Kalli blinked.
Long.
Slow.
The kind of blink that signals neurological surrender. I could hear his soul submitting its resignation paperwork.

He sighed, rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette, and addressed me in the tone used for escaped mental patients and emotionally unstable llamas.

“Ok, Marcel,” he said, dead-eyed.
“Why don’t you just… get us some coffee. And we’ll build the stand together.
Gimme that sketch before you fold it into a hat.”

“On my way!” I beamed, glowing with the delusional enthusiasm of an unstable nuclear reactor managed by motivational quotes and unresolved childhood trauma, and galloped up the stairs toward Kalli’s office—home of the sacred coffee machine, which, by that point, had not only learned my name but had started offering unsolicited life advice.

“Back again, Marcel?” it whispered in a steamy sigh,
“Maybe try decaf. And therapy.”

Naturally, I completely misread the situation.
I thought I was being trusted. Valued. Empowered.
In reality, I was being strategically ejected from the blast radius—exiled to the beverage corner like a toddler with a plastic wrench while the grown-ups welded destiny together downstairs.

I wasn’t the assistant. I was the liability relocation protocol.
An airborne risk assessment with legs.

But I skipped off like a caffeinated Border collie, thrilled to be included—blissfully unaware I’d just been emotionally outsourced by a coffee machine with better judgment than me.

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice snapped me back to the scorched tarmac beneath my feet—which, by that point, was radiating both heat and my inflated sense of global relevance. “Is this your container?”

I turned around, blinking through a thick soup of sweat, dehydration, and the kind of heatstroke-induced optimism usually reserved for Jehovah’s witnesses, unstable prophets, or people moments before getting eaten by the animal they’re trying to rescue.
And there he was.

Maybe customs.
Maybe security.
Maybe just the janitor cosplaying as law enforcement, stitched together in a homemade uniform held by velcro, spite, and a laminated ID card that looked like it came from a cereal box.

“Is this your container?” he repeated, this time in the soft, condescending tone normally reserved for head trauma victims and toddlers holding sushi knives.

“Oh yeah!” I nodded, vibrating with such unearned enthusiasm it probably registered on aviation radar. My hands flailed with evangelical precision, like a TED Talk speaker on expired mushrooms addressing a silent crowd of heavily sedated tax accountants.

“I am Marcel Romdane, and this is my plane!” I declared, grinning with the unshakable confidence of a man who’s never been burdened by results.
“I’m going to fly over the Sahara—or was it the Savannah?—like an archangel with a propeller, rain down righteousness, and chase elephant poachers all the way back to Mogadishu armed with nothing but aviation fuel, a stern look, a firm handshake, and the blinding glow of white vengeance weaponized into lift.”

There was no doubt in my mind.
This wasn’t a humanitarian stunt.
This was a sequel to history, and I had cast myself as the aviation Jesus of the Mara, descending not with fire and brimstone but with GoPro footage and a Facebook page full of tragic elephant emojis.

The officer blinked.
Not once.
Several times. Slowly.
Like he was trying to manually reboot his cerebral cortex using eye movements alone.

Behind me, the two Davids—
To be fair, only David #1 was still remotely connected to this plane of existence.
David #2 had long since vacated his soul, which now hovered in bureaucratic purgatory, waiting for someone to fill out Form 34-B to authorise his re-entry.

They were my clearance companions, my logistical war buddies, my heatstroke Sherpas—and unwilling witnesses to what was now shaping up to be a high-definition, slow-motion spiritual collapse.
They knew what was coming.

The sermon.
The saga.
The full-blown, messiah-fuelled aviation gospel of The White Saviour Flight Club™, about to detonate in the face of an underpaid customs officer who—up until that moment—had simply wanted a cigarette and a quiet life.

He didn’t respond.
He just looked past me.
Through me.
Into the abyss.
And somewhere deep in the bureaucratic break room of his soul, next to the speech he’d rehearsed about why today’s bribe was higher because “the system is down,” a small, desperate voice whispered:

“You could’ve been a barber. You could’ve opened that chapati stall with your cousin. But no—you had to work at the cargo terminal. And now this… this Muzungu wearing cargo pants and a cowboy hat… is standing in front of you, talking about flying into Somalia with a Piper Cub, a half-melted GoPro, and a mental health hazard rating of DEFCON Jesus.”

The officer sighed—the kind of long, slow, thousand-mile exhale only emitted by men who’d started the day hoping for a sandwich and ended up receiving a front-row seat to a live re-enactment of Apocalypse Now: Muzungu Edition.
He gazed toward the container like it might explode from narrative tension alone, then pointed—theatrically, reluctantly, spiritually defeated.
“So… what else is in that container?”

I cleared my throat, like a man about to deliver a speech  on the proper storage of regret.
“Well,” I began, with the galloping confidence of a condemned magician,
“The wings, of course… some literature, a safari wardrobe, spare hat, aviation tools, and—”
My voice dropped to a guilty whisper, like a child confessing to arson for the third Christmas in a row.
“...a barrel of Avgas.”

He blinked.
“A what?”
The man’s soul visibly left his body.
If I had said “a severed unicorn head wrapped in uranium and marinated in elephant dung” he wouldn’t have looked more horrified.
Time slowed. Birds paused. A cargo handler in the distance muttered “Oh no” in Swahili.

“A 200-litre drum of Avgas, obviously,” I chirped, with the bubbly innocence of a death row inmate asking if the electric chair comes with cushions.
“Why? What’s so exciting about that?”

The officer staggered back like I’d just detonated a small theology.
“You… brought fuel?”
His voice cracked like a suspension bridge under moral pressure.
“How did you even get that drum past inspection?!”

I coughed nervously, suddenly sweating like an Eskimo auditioning for Cirque du Soleil in the Sahara.

“Well… I drained it from the wings, and I wasn’t going to throw it away, obviously. So I just… rolled it in.”
My smile was the facial expression equivalent of a hand grenade wearing a party hat.

“Nobody really noticed.”

The man stared at me like he’d just discovered a Diplodocus nesting in his lunchbox, then blinked once—long, slow, and haunted.
He muttered something that included the word “Muzungu”, followed by what appeared to be a silent prayer for divine evacuation.

Then—without breaking eye contact—he slowly extended his hand: palm up, fingers twitching with the ancient muscle memory of a thousand discreet bribes and the resignation of a man who’d just seen the end of modern aviation ethics.

Twenty minutes later, I found myself sweating into a plastic chair manufactured in North Korea during a power outage, positioned directly in front of David #1’s “desk”—a tragic structure that looked less like office furniture and more like a repurposed banana crate held together by masking tape, diplomatic lies, and a single, suicidal termite with nothing left to lose.

We were now “officially” discussing modalities of transportation—a phrase which, in Kenya, loosely translates to:

“Welcome to the jungle, Muzungu. Your dignity will not survive this journey.”

There were two options.
Just two.
Which meant that Option #3—my shimmering, unicorn-grade hallucination that some barefoot aviation Gandalf might emerge from the shadows of the customs depot, wrench in hand, ready to miracle the wings back onto my plane using divine torque and jungle whispers—
…evaporated faster than a mosquito on a blowtorch at a Pentecostal barbecue.

So.

Option One:
Put the container on a train.
The upside?
It would, eventually, move.
The downside?
Everything else.

According to David #1—who delivered the intel with the emotional engagement of a man describing his third failed marriage while microwaving ramen noodles—there were two notable risks:

1. The container could be stolen entirely while the train waited for clearance at Nairobi’s central rail terminal.
   A process that, David explained, could take up to two months, or longer if Mercury was in retrograde, the stationmaster was drunk, or someone had sacrificed the wrong goat to the Transport God of Inconvenience.
2. The container might just… fall off.

“It happens,” David shrugged, like he was talking about soggy bread, not industrial cargo ejection at 40 km/h.

Option Two:
Load the container onto a trailer, slap it on a truck, and send it careening across Nairobi to Wilson Airport.
ETA: two days.
Likelihood of survival: statistically better than childbirth in 1830s rural Ireland. David assured me that “only a handful” of containers had been lost, flipped, or launched into city traffic like bureaucratic projectiles in the past year.

So really, by Kenyan standards, almost safe.

Naturally, there was a small hitch.
There always is.
This plan—unlike my sanity—wasn’t included in our original customs-clearing deal, which only covered the highly theoretical “train to nowhere” option.

But not to worry. This problem could be gracefully resolved—as all Nairobi logistics are—with a modest application of physical currency to the nearest corruption node. A mere $200, handed over with the same quiet discretion you’d use to purchase black market ivory, expired malaria drugs, or an AK-47 from someone named Yusuf.

I nodded with the disillusioned sigh of a man who’s seen a wing fall off mid-flight, spiral majestically into a nearby goat pen, and still heard the pilot blame the rain. But, determined to be morally upright—at least on paper, or in the vague memory of anyone watching from a great distance through thick fog—I handed over $150. A pathetic token of resistance that fooled absolutely no one, not even myself.

David accepted it with a nod so perfectly choreographed it should’ve come with its own soundtrack. A gesture polished over centuries, handed down not just father to son, but from one exhausted post-colonial hustle to the next, since the first Victorian sociopath stepped off the boat and declared everything he saw taxable—including the weather.

I had a strong, almost religious suspicion that part of that money would immediately teleport into the pocket of David’s cousin—a man who, in addition to possibly being a “transportation expert,” also ran a goat funeral service, a printing company that specialised in fake vehicle import permits, and a highly unofficial driving school loosely based on Mario Kart and vengeance.

Behind me, David #2—long presumed medically comatose, emotionally bankrupt, and mentally outsourced—let out a faint, death-rattled wheeze. It was hard to tell whether it was a sigh…a seizure…or the muffled sound of his soul attempting to claw its way out through his esophagus, desperate to evacuate after enduring two straight hours of Romdane-grade Muzungu Disaster Theatre™, live and unfiltered, at ground zero of Kenya’s customs apocalypse. If there had been a Richter scale for secondhand embarrassment, David #2’s nervous system just hit an 8.6, and the tremors were felt as far as Mombasa.
He didn’t blink.
He didn’t speak.
He simply began the slow, internal migration into another dimension—one with no Muzungus, no propellers, and no barrels of highly flammable optimism.

Grinning like a lunatic who’d just invented a cure for cancer using band aid and positive thinking, I took David #2’s groaning—a noise somewhere between heatstroke, divine exorcism, and the slow reboot of a brain that had just seen its own obituary—as my cue to evacuate the scene before the universe billed me for emotional damages.

This was my curtain call—my graceless, heat‑stroked exit from the Nairobi Theatre of Paperwork and Pain, where the actors don’t act, the props are just broken typewriters, and the plot twists are legally classed as human rights violations.

Spoiler alert:
This wasn’t an ending.
It wasn’t even a beginning.
This was the pre‑show twitch. The part where the orchestra warms up and the audience checks for emergency exits. Because the upcoming Kenyan Bureaucracy Travel Circus™ wasn’t just going to test me—it was going to emotionally waterboard me. To spiritually drag‑dismantle the overconfident, pathologically optimistic Muzungu who believed—with all the self‑awareness of a sock puppet—that a laminated pilot license, a canvas-covered airplane, and a motivational soundtrack stolen from Top Gun were enough to change the world. I was the white saviour nobody ordered, armed with delusion, caffeine, and a Cub that looked like IKEA furniture with wings.

And this—THIS—was quite possibly the last time the David Double would ever allow their names, their souls, or their pension prospects to be linked with containers, Muzungus, or German-built aircraft arriving in Africa in more pieces than originally advertised.

The look they gave me as I walked away?
Not hatred.
Not pity.
Just the quiet, resigned expression of men who knew they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to forget the day a delusional bush pilot—in cargo pants, a cowboy hat, a sunburn, and a full-blown saviour complex—nearly brought down the entire Customs Department by sheer force of confidence and aviation-themed hallucinations.

I had to get back “home.” Or, more accurately: to the guesthouse where Shlomi’s mother was preparing for impact like a slow-moving air raid—ready to occupy my bed, dominate my kitchen, and emotionally dismantle me with three syllables and a stare that could deflate charging rhinos.

But that was a future nightmare.
For now, I was riding high.
High on delusion.
High on the fumes of bureaucracy.
High on the unearned flair of a man who thought he’d just pulled off a miracle, when really, he’d just paid a bribe, sweated through three shirts, and traumatised a customs facility so thoroughly they’d probably add my name to the incident log under “Act of God.”

Dripping in third-world aviation sweat, solar radiation, and the kind of mental high that should require a license, a helmet, and a warning label, I marched toward my asthmatic Land Rover—a wheezy British relic that had survived Empire, entropy, and at least two spiritual breakdowns.

I climbed in. It shuddered beneath me like a trauma survivor sensing another flashback was imminent. I turned the key with the swagger of a man who believed he had personally invented aviation after watching one particularly moving YouTube video about the Wright Brothers while deep in a caffeine induced denial. The engine choked, screamed, and then—through some combination of mechanical despair and divine mockery—roared to life. It belched smoke, doubt, and pure, weaponized colonial guilt into the dry Nairobi air, as if it too wanted to warn the locals:

“Brace yourselves. He’s moving again.”

And so, with aviator shades askew, exhaust pipe dragging like a metal regret, and ego inflating with every pothole like it was breathing in its own hype, I rolled forward into the sunset.

Further behind, a certain customs officer—recently exposed to a 200-litre fuel barrel smuggled in like a cheerful death wish—
lit a cigarette with the shaky hands of a man who had just watched fire flirt with paperwork. He stared into the distance like a man trying to erase himself frame by frame, and whispered a silent prayer to the gods of flammable regret.
And somewhere deep inside me, right next to the burned-out remains of logic and the place I keep my laminated pilot license, a voice whispered:

“You have absolutely no idea what you're doing. Godspeed.”

Shlomi’s Guesthouse,  Nairobi. February 2012.

“She snores,” Shlomi said, flat as a death certificate. He looked at me with the emotional warmth of a medieval prison warden calmly informing you that your new cellmate eats people.

I blinked.
Not out of confusion.
Out of fear.
The kind of fear usually reserved for jungle expeditions, tax audits, and finding your ex at your wedding wearing white.

“She also farts,” he added—cheerfully, in the same tone a psychopath might use to describe a casserole. There was something almost musical in his delivery, like he’d been rehearsing this speech for maximum psychological impact.

Like he knew.

I swallowed.
Hard. Like I was trying to down a whole lemon wrapped in panic.

“…and she outweighs you by at least a hundred pounds,” he continued, his eyes twinkling with the malevolent delight of a Bond villain feeding you to your own decisions. He delivered it like a Michelin-starred chef layering existential dread into a soufflé of doom.

“Wait,” I cut in, visibly unraveling, my voice cracking like a missionary’s in a brothel holding a purity ring.
“But… we are still talking about your mother, correct?”

I stood in the doorway of his guesthouse like a man who had just staggered out of a bureaucratic minefield, dazed, sunburnt, and lightly concussed from the shrapnel of carbon copies and visa application shakedowns.
Shlomi wasn’t done.
No.
He was smiling. That smug, soft smile people reserve for watching war crimes unfold in real-time from a safe distance. The kind of smile that says, “I didn’t push you, but I did move the railing.”

“She arrives next week,” he said, gently twisting the emotional knife.

“But… it’s Friday already,” I croaked, like a cult member halfway through the Kool-Aid, realising the flavour is cyanide.

Shlomi blinked.
Not fast.
The slow, deliberate blink of a man watching your parachute deploy without you. It wasn’t a blink.
It was a eulogy.

“Well…” I began, already gesturing like a deaf-mute contestant on a game show hosted by Satan,
my voice now two octaves higher and vibrating like a Nokia 3310 lost in a blender,
“I think… it’s better to move out then, is it?”

“Unless you want to share the place with my mother, yes,” Shlomi whispered—
like he was leaking state secrets in a parking garage at midnight.

“But worry not, my friend,” he continued, now channeling the soothing menace of a Mafia villain offering wine.

“I think I found something new for you already. You’ll love it… it comes with a pool. And a gym.”

He smiled.
The kind of smile reserved for last meals, forged signatures, and passive-aggressive wedding toasts.

“Splendid!” I chirped—with the enthusiasm of a lottery winner moments before reading the fine print. I was radiating the type of joy only found in children, the heavily medicated, and people who don’t know what 'communal bathroom' means yet.

It wasn’t optimism. It was financial amnesia, weaponized.

Marcel Romdane

Mistaking landmines for real estate opportunities since 2012.