Dancing with their babies

Read with Parental Guidance

Repartee is an art of conversation that is quick, witty, and usually humorous, to establish it effectively is to leave such nuggets of memory that cannot be forgotten even as in your retelling of it, you might lose the effect it had at the point of your original hearing.

It is not essentially truth or fact, it could be an intelligent or mocking play on words, the knowledge of geography or any other thing is not particular when it is ideas set alight in directions that cannot predetermined. As for innuendo, there might be plenty of it, you take your rib-cracking laughs and your jaw-aching cackles to confession at a much later time.

In a conversation that might have been overheard, who can say who was involved? Selby and Niko have these exchanges all the time with one accusing the other of leading the other astray, the saint is further away from the sinner even as the former presents innocence better.

And so…

Selby: I trust he had a great experience in Kenya, I’m sure he has very interesting stories to tell you all about.

Niko: I don’t want to hear his stories. The thought is shocking enough. He won’t be able to complete confession in the allotted time.

Selby: [Much later, recalling the tail end of that conversation] I laughed when I read your response.

Niko: He was most likely at the receiving end of some Masai Mara.

Selby: They are probably still jumping in him. [If this needs explaining, you do not need to know.]

[Niko is in shock and laughter at the same time, every corruptly shocking interpretation of whatever he meant paints the situation in too vivid detail for polite conversation. Our friend has a reputation that would make pages on which it is written red with embarrassment and the ends curl almost in revulsion and indescribable glee.]

[At which time, Selby is half-weeping and Niko is proverbially rolling on the floor, and Selby is not done yet, he rues his big mouth, but you'll love his free expression, almost naïve and truly deadpan, like Rose Nylund from The Golden Girls.]

Selby: Did he have the whole dancing troupe?

[At which point, Niko had a picture of a line of men of enviable renown, starved of it and ready to find the totally ecstatic excitement of lascivious relief at the sight of a starfish with the unmistakable groans of the earth moving violently. No fault was left untouched; the rift cracked open to its fullest extent. It is East Africa, after all.]

Niko: You’ll have to ask him. [The stories Niko didn’t want to hear had already been told by Selby either like a witness of the event, or because Selby has had some experiences in the African bush that he has hinted at but never really told. Farm boys hosing down fires like the fire brigade.]

Is that, you wonder, a ticket to Seren-get-him?