Continental Drift
stories by
Tim Bascom
300 pages, $17.95 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: May 2025
An Advance Sale Discount price of $11 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $16/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Synopsis: Continental Drift
In Continental Drift a diverse array of travelers cross borders between African nations and the U.S. Debilitated Mabior returns to his Sudanese village after 30 years of exile, hoping to make amends to a wife he abandoned. Zauditu emigrates from Ethiopia and starts working as a guard at the Chicago Art Institute, where she gets caught touching up a disconcerting painting. Thirteen-year-old Neal, from Milwaukee, reluctantly goes on safari with his nature-loving parents and, because of an obsession with video games, accidentally leads them into a violent ambush. These and other characters are challenged, sometimes deeply disturbed, but always brought to see the world anew. Their stories reflect the tangle of cross-cultural interactions that take place every day as real travelers from real places try to connect despite all the differences that so easily divide.
Bascom has a special gift for the pivotal encounter—the quietly unsettling, the bittersweet, even the explosive. Throughout, the flora and fauna of Africa enrich and authenticate—weaver birds, thorny acacia or jacaranda trees, dust storms, flying ants, even the evocative scent of the Nile. Moving, yet never sentimental, the stories in Continental Drift are a pleasure to read. ~Catherine Browder, The Manning Girl, a novel.
In these varied and poignant stories, Tim Bascom’s writing is as sharp as it is tender. His cast of flawed and engaging characters go on unexpected journeys, both internally and externally. Richly observed and beautifully written, the stories in Continental Drift will stay with you long after the final page. ~Rebecca McKanna, author of Don’t Forget the Girl
Whether American or African, teacher, preacher, traveler, tourist, student, artist or missionary, the people in Tim Bascom’s remarkable Continental Drift are seekers: of adventure, cultural experience, better lives, or of approval and reconciliation. With impeccable, sensual prose, Bascom takes us to cities, forests, waterfalls, shorelines, war-torn villages and scenic savannahs. Through chance encounters, unforeseen dangers, lack of control, displacement, and the hunger for more, these stories are life-changing journeys for characters and readers alike. ~Thomas Fox Averill is the award-winning author of 10 books, most recently the novel Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr, published by the University of New Mexico Press.
The Assigned Seat
When Mama Nqobile boarded the plane at Heathrow, she paid no heed to the perky stewardess who greeted her in a pressed jacket and silk scarf. Nor did she acknowledge the British businessman who had taken the window seat, even though he glanced up and collapsed his newspaper.
As she settled into the aisle seat, she smiled as if alone. This was her way of savoring what had happened twenty minutes earlier to the young Afrikaner at the X-ray machine. One of the security guards, a short black woman like herself, had made him take everything out of his suitcase, and though the Afrikaner had protested, this guard had taken her time. She had tossed his boxers on top of the pile—red ones with tiny bullfrogs. She had even taken out his medicines and asked him to explain. “What’s this for?” she demanded, so that he had to talk about his irritable bowel in front of everyone, completely at her mercy despite the bulging biceps under his green-and-yellow rugby shirt.
Nqobile guessed the Afrikaner must be more than twenty-five years old, but his barrel chest and broad face reminded her of someone slightly younger whom she had known long ago—back before she buried him in the cellar of her mind. The cock-eyed mouth and sandy hair and ruddy skin, these were all so familiar that she wanted to reach right out and slap him. How could it be? After thirty-five years, to still feel this way?
She glanced to the entrance of the plane, wondering if the young Afrikaner had boarded. She hoped to see him outraged. Then she could describe him to her fellow workers back at the township clinic, savoring how absurd he looked—like a wet rooster strutting.
Instead, the fellow came onto the plane with a tentative smile, the sort people use when they worry how they might be received. Never mind, she said to herself, wondering why she had given him her attention. Long ago she had put away any interest in his people. Why change now?
Needing something else to hold her attention, she pulled a thick conference manual from her travel satchel: Dying with Dignity: A London Symposium on Hospice. For two weeks she had been learning new methods to use back home, surrounded by an array of foreign trainees—not just African and Asian but European too, and most of them decades younger than her. Was all that cross-cultural interaction why these memories were bubbling to the surface now? Disco tunes on the turntable? Linoleum shimmering? His hand lifting from her hip to her headwrap?
A black businessman with peppery hair stopped in the aisle to take off his double-breasted jacket. He looked like a possible kinsman, and Mama nodded. He lifted his bearded chin before sliding in behind her to sit at the next window seat.
Right after him, the Afrikaner came to a stop, grimacing. “Sorry, baas,” he said to the other man. “But that’s my seat.”
Mama clucked, feeling all her suspicions confirmed. This Boer was no different than the rest. Maybe Nelson Mandela had turned the rules upside down, but this lout still thought like his ancestors: That’s my seat. That’s my bus. That’s my country, too.
“Nay,” said her kinsman. “I asked for the window specially.”
“What’s your ticket say?”
“I told them window seat.”
“Maybe so, but they gave it to me.” And the Afrikaner lifted the stub of his boarding pass as proof.
Mama clucked again. She was disappointed that her kinsman stood without a fight. Even if his assigned seat was by the aisle, why should he yield?
However, she took consolation when he did not sit back down next to the Afrikaner. Cool as could be, he folded his suit jacket over his arm and walked up to the stewardess, who glanced back as he spoke.
“Yissus,” hissed the Afrikaner from behind her.
Normally Mama didn’t enjoy hearing the Lord’s name used in vain, but today she took pleasure even in that. Go on, she thought, there is a stone in the road that won’t let you pass.
The stewardess rubbed her forehead. Then she started to lean over seats, querying passengers who were seated by windows, each of whom swiveled to stare at the now-vacant aisle seat and the Afrikaner in the adjoining seat.
“Bloody kak,” muttered the Boer, and Mama smiled deeply. She could have been blind and recognized this fellow for what he was. His swearing brought back memories of that other young man she had known, back when she was only eighteen and worked in the white suburbs as a maid. Like the Afrikaner in the row behind her, that other buck had an impatient, tough voice, and he liked to use it even when he was doing his studies in the next room, calling out, “Ag, sif! Nqobile, do you know the fokking definition for ‘phylum’?” She had been attracted, she had to admit. His confident, do-as-I-will attitude was a relief of sorts—like a thunderhead on a hot day. However, it also suggested storms to come.
Finally, the stewardess found a volunteer to switch seats—a skinny white girl who nodded and stood to let the ousted businessman take her place. Mama Nqobile lowered her brows. This would be no punishment. She dropped her gaze as the girl came down the aisle carrying a book bag. Mama peeked only long enough to form a quick impression. An American she guessed, since the girl wore simple running slicks with a name across her small breasts—Hope College—and since she didn’t use glossy lipstick like the runway women in London. Her sleek black hair was pulled back in a headband, which made her pretty in an uncomplicated way. Very thin but pretty. Closer up, Mama saw that she wore hearing aids—tiny silver devices with tubes thin as fishing line. That didn’t keep the girl from smiling, though. She had the optimistic, open look so common among Americans, at least the ones Mama had seen on her TV at home.
“Hi,” said the girl to the Afrikaner, “I heard I could get an aisle seat.”
“Ja,” came the reply. “For you, no charge.”
“What’d you say?”
The Afrikaner now realized the girl was partially deaf, so he repeated himself more loudly, but Mama Nqobile could still hear the upswing in his tone. She pursed her lips. This was not the way it should work. Like a bee to the flower, the girl would have him buzzing.
Soon a chime rang, and the airplane crew went into their take-off demonstrations. As the big jet lurched out of its parking place, Mama lost track of everything but the voice on the P.A. system and the revving engines. She was still gripping her armrests as London dropped away, replaced by gusts of cloud. How amazing that some medical fund in England had made this trip possible, bringing her out of her home country for the first time.
She didn’t hear the two talking behind her again until the plane quit straining and leveled off in blue sky. Then a meal cart rolled by, and she recognized the Afrikaner speaking loudly, his voice raised to make sure the girl heard: “Hey, you want some cake? I’m not much for chocolate.”
“Thanks, but I’m avoiding desserts,” came the quick reply, which caused the young man to shoot back: “You? Why would a girl like you have to worry about sweets?”
Mama scowled, bothered by the girl’s flattered laughter. Beware, she thought. Just because he’s older doesn’t mean he’s safer.
She turned from the crack next to her seat, determined not to listen. She had no desire to talk to the British businessman beside her either. After all, he hadn’t said a word since using his cell phone on the landing strip to ask for a mining report to be emailed to his attention. Instead, she lifted her training manual on hospice care and leafed to the last chapter: “The Sacred Goodbye.” As she chewed on the roast beef sandwich she had been served, she tried to concentrate on ways to help family members find resolution with dying loved ones.
Unfortunately, her focus kept slipping. In lieu of conversation, there was no way to shut out the voices behind her. The beguiling way that the young man pried, which prompted the girl to explain she was from a suburb near Cleveland, raised unbidden memories in Mama. Images flickered of that other young Afrikaner. Whenever his parents were out of the house, he had come slipping into the kitchen, talking smooth as butter. He had bantered even if she bit her lip and looked down: “Nqobile, if you rub any harder, you’ll make a hole in that counter. Nqobile, do you know that when you mop you look like you’re dancing?”
One afternoon he had even blocked her as she tried to escape down the hall to the laundry room. Bold as ever, he had pleaded: “Nqobile, c’mon now. What’s your name mean? ‘Flower’? ‘Princess’?”
She knew what he was up to. She was no child. She also knew why he was not to be encouraged. My God, in those days you couldn’t even sit on the same car seat with a white, not without potential arrest. Yet what girl wouldn’t be affected? He had asked about her name with such honeyed charm that she almost forgot its meaning: “She who conquers.”
If you want to read the rest of this story and others included in Continental Drift, order now (at discount) and have it delivered to your door once the book has been published.
Tim Bascom is the author of a novel, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire. His essays have been selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing, and his short stories have been published widely, winning the 2021 Fiction Prize from Briar Cliff Review. Bascom received his MFA from the University of Iowa, and he directs the annual Kansas Book Festival.