*New* short fiction: Election Day by Christopher Mlalazi

He suddenly stood up and punched a fist into his left palm.
‘Damn!’ he cursed to the empty room. Then he called out. ‘Twenty!’
Twenty entered the room. He went down on his knees in front him. ‘Your Excellency,’ he said, his head bowed over a potbelly straining under a buttoned suit jacket.
His Excellency pointed at a sofa. ‘Sit.’

Election Day by Christopher Mlalazi.

Christopher Mlalazi has two books to his name, Dancing With Life: Tales from the Townships, a short story collection, and Many Rivers, a novel. He has written plays in Zimbabwe for Amakhosi Theater, the Harare International Festival of the Arts, and Umkhathi Theater, and has had short stories published in the Edinburgh Review, the Caine Prize Anthology and the Literary Review (USA). Currently, he is the 2010 Feuchtwanger Fellow at Villa Aurora in California, and in 2011 he will be guest writer at the Nordic-Afrika Institute in Sweden.