by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service People Writer
Alice "Grinner" Matabele runs her tongue over the last tooth in her mouth. "Sa gonna rain soon," she mutters to herself. If you ask her how she knows, she shrugs and replies, "The toof knows." The fact that storm clouds can be seen pouring water down in the distance might also contribute to her prognostication, but when you try to point this out, she just keeps repeating, "Toof! Toof! Toof!" until you're sorry you brought the whole subject up.
The elderly matriarch of Faba, a small village in Chad, tries to be inscrutable that way, although it mostly looks like she has gas. Calling Faba a village flatters the collection of huts, animal pens and outhouses that in its wildest dreams couldn't possibly hope to rise to such exalted status. Faba is so small that if a couple moved there, they would have to exist on the heads of a couple who already live there. This would confuse the goats who live in the, for want of a better term, "village" even more than they already are (being mountain goats, they can't quite grasp how they came to live on a desert plain).
The main profession of the villagers is dirt farming, which makes it quite poor as nobody over the age of two eats dirt. Fortunately, the nearby collection of huts, animal pens and outhouses that could someday aspire to being a village known as Baba just went through a baby boom (three boys, one girl and seven chickens), so there is a small market for Faba's dirt relatively close by. However, to make a real killing in dirt, somebody from the wannabe village has to go to Faya, which is a good four hour's walk as the crow flies.
Once a week, Matabele makes the journey, a 20 pound sack of dirt on her head. (Except that nobody in Faba can afford a sack, so the dirt is made as hard and compact as possible and Matabele imagines that it is contained in a sack.) You wouldn't think the old crone (not to be confused with an old scone, which, if you tried to eat it, could contribute to you ending up with only one tooth in your head) had it in her: her frail body looks like it could be blown away at the merest thought of a breeze. When asked why she keeps going, Matabele sneers, "Spite!"
Nobody in Faba can afford a Home Universe GeneratorTM. In fact, if all of the residents of the ersatz village pooled their resources, they couldn't afford to purchase a Thatcher Coaxial Framagaw, the cheapest (and, admittedly, least important) component of the Home Universe GeneratorTM. Only one person in 27,316 in Africa owns a Home Universe GeneratorTM (compared to one in 2.7316 in North America - sorry, I probably should have warned you to put down your beverage before you read that statistic - no, neither I nor the Alternate Reality News Service will reimburse you for the cost of dry cleaning those curtains, although I would suggest that you wash it out now before the stain gets any deeper. Go ahead. I'll wait.).
[WARNING: Unbelievable statistic ahead. You are responsible for the dry cleaning of any stain on your drapes, carpets, clothing or pets as a result of reading it.] Only nine per cent of the African population has ever used a Home Universe GeneratorTM (as compared to 99.9998 per cent of the North American population, and that would be higher if Reggie Blatherwater wasn't so damn stubborn!). [Don't say we didn't WARNING you.]
So, after she has exchanged the dirt for fruits, vegetables and, if it has been a good week for dirt production, a copy of Elle magazine, Matabele makes her way to the almost village's Multiverse Café and spends an hour on the public Home Universe GeneratorTM (the cafe makes its money on concessions).
In the week between trips, Fabians provide Matabele with questions to ask the Home Universe GeneratorTM. "What would happen if Billy N'Gombo stop picking his nose long enough to notice that I exist?" "Is there a reality where the dirt crop was good enough one year for us to be able to purchase a copy of Wired along with our copy of Elle?" "How would my life have been different if I had sought fame and fortune as a freelance pig tickler in Faya, instead of staying in Faba and inheriting my parents' dirt farm?"
The answers Matabele gives aren't always that helpful. "You don't wanna know. Be happy he doesn't!" "No." "You would have died broke and alone at the age of 37...unless you became so famous thanks to a video on Yahootube of you tickling musical pigs that you were flown to Johannesburg to do the talk show circuit. The multiverse can be...complicated that way."
There are a couple of contributing factors to why Fabians are often less than impressed with the answers Matabele gives to their questions (setting aside their content). One is that the Multiverse Cafe has a rotary Home Universe GeneratorTM, which is at least five generations behind the latest multiverse viewing technologies. The cabinet is cracked, and the characters on the keyboard have worn away with use. Worse: the machine uses the Lycanthropos search engine which, while groundbreaking for its time, is hopelessly inadequate for modern multiverse searches.
Or, it could just be that, at 87, Matabele's memory is not what it used to be and, because she can neither read nor write, her memory is all people can rely on.
Aware of her advancing decrepitude, the Faba village elders (Gary Alatumbo and Fitzpatrick N'Gombo) have been looking for a replacement. Their standards are very exacting: candidates must be at least 14 years of age, have at least one of their original teeth and be able to carry 20 pounds of dirt in an imaginary sack for several hours. Oddly, the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth requirement is the biggest obstacle for most of the women in the (maybe in some other universe!) village.
When asked about her possible successor, Matabele laughs. Cackles, really. There is unmistakable cacklage in her laughter. "Do you not think I use the machine to see other worlds where I live?" she asked. "I have seen worlds where I live to be 120! Right here, right now, in this world, I'm still in my prime!"