May 5, 2012

The floor is lava.

Some games are universal. One is the card game Spoons, which I played a few years ago in the Hong Kong airport at the suggestion of the girl from Scotland. Another is the hand-clapping game Slide, which I've now played in the U.S., The Gambia, and Morocco. Another is The Floor is Lava.

Pateh didn't call it that, of course. What he said, standing on the cement stoop outside my house, was, "Binta, look! I won’t touch the ground." Then he proceeded to stretch himself over to the bantaba where I was sitting, with some assistance from a nearby pole, but without the assistance of the ground.

Volcanoes, by the way, are fires created by jinns. I am not sure how Neene knows this, as there are no volcanoes in The Gambia, but that's what she said as we looked through a copy of National Geographic.

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