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New Short Fiction Award

Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.

Aishatu Ado, an Afro-German Peace Technologist living in Cologne, Germany, is the winner of the 68th Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on April 3, 2025.

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photo via The Met

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Saharan Blues on the Seine

By Aishatu Ado

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…..Aminata wakes with sand in her mouth and Paris under her cheek. The grit coating her tongue tastes of home—of spice and lingering sorrow. The copper tang floods her mouth; even in sleep, her body fights phantoms. Beyond the thin walls of her cramped Montmartre apartment, the city stirs to life. Moussa’s laugh, a ghost with teeth, tears through the veil of dawn, summoning shards of a desert sun, the acrid smell of burning instruments. Car horns blare below, an impatient hymn to morning.

…..The ngoni in the corner watches, its quiet presence a reminder of Mali, of headlines screaming of bloodshed, and of her grandmother’s tales of borders drawn by distant hands.

…..With a groan, Aminata pushes herself up, nightgown sticking to her skin like a lie. Her feet ache, memory-bruised.  How many times has she sleepwalked through Paris, chasing ghosts that no one else sees?

…..As she stares out the small window at a market setting up—where a vendor roasts lamb—the scent carries her briefly back to Timbuktu, to evenings around a fire with Moussa. Then the kettle’s whistle snaps her back.

…..The open door gapes like a wound. She never locks it anymore. The memories she’s running from live inside her skin.

…..Then she hears it again.  Laughter—Moussa’s laughter—skipping across dunes and defying borders. Aminata blinks, tears blurring the faded paisley wallpaper and worn oak floorboards. The memory hits like a sandstorm, erasing years and miles. In that moment, his warm hand seems to brush against her skin, and the pull of his absence grows impossible to ignore.

…..The urge to run builds in her legs, but there’s nowhere to go. Paris, with its cobblestones and wrought iron, traps her. Aminata takes a shuddering breath, willing the memories to recede. But they cling like burrs, stubborn and sharp.

…..She dresses quickly, fingers fumbling with buttons. She needs to get out, to outrun the memories.  She steps into the metro, letting the crowd swallow her. Even here, amidst the clatter and babble, the past intrudes. Rokia Traoré’s “Nuit de Printemps,” swells in her ears, the ethereal vocals intertwining with the fluid, jazz-inflected guitar lines. Moussa’s phantom hand is warm in hers. She gasps, startling her neighbor. The woman shoots her a curious look before turning away. Three years in this place, and still, she can’t call it home. It is merely a pit stop—a place where discarded identities hang in her closet, waiting to be abandoned. Even her half-hearted decor—a tribal mask here, a faded tapestry there—reminds her of transience.

…..Back in her apartment, Moussa’s laughter grows louder, seeping into the cracks and reverberating in the rattle of pipes. It paints the walls with memories, turns shadows into familiar silhouettes.  The ngoni shivers, its strings humming a lament for a lost homeland. Aminata presses her palms to her ears as the sound invades her mind. Her raw-boned frame sways, a reed in the harmattan wind. Once, Moussa’s laughter had been a promise; now it is a persistent echo, an unsolvable equation: present + absent = Moussa.

…..Drifting into the kitchenette, she fills the kettle once more, her trembling fingers lighting the stove. She tries to shake him loose—like grains of sand slipping through her fingers—but he clings. Can one be homesick for a person? Can the act of forgetting etch a name deeper?

…..Scared of facing her memories head-on, she skirts the ngoni, its drum-like membrane echoing reminders of what she fled. Did she run from Mali, or was she forced to? In Paris, she built a fortress of forgetting, but its walls are crumbling.

…..Each morning unfolds like a tableau vivant: Aminata forces herself through the motions of readying herself for work. Her hands move on autopilot – braiding her hair and buttoning her blouse.  At Café de l’Alma, the barista’s smile feels obligatory, his eyes treating her like a fleeting shadow. Conversations drift by in French, seductive yet indifferent, leaving her soul parched.

…..Boarding the metro, she is wedged between strangers. Her afternoons vanish in a cluttered office where her own words lie unsaid. Every curt nod, every rustle of a newspaper, is a reminder of a life she cannot quite stitch together.

…..The ngoni calls, a siren song she cannot resist. Only one touch, she resolves, is enough to quell the longing. Only then does a news headline on her phone shatter her fleeting calm: “Historic Sites in Timbuktu Destroyed by Islamist Rebels.” Mausoleums reduced to rubble. A strangled sound—half sob, half scream—escapes her. Around her, life continues, oblivious. All she sees is destruction, erasure; the past turning to dust.

…..In the following days, memories crash in like a relentless tide. At work, her mind drifts and her translations falter. At night, she paces, heart racing, mind in knots. Sleep, when it comes, is a battleground of nightmares: Moussa’s blood, burning manuscripts, the silence after music dies.

…..Then, a single note splits her Parisian life in two: Before. After. Suddenly, she is elsewhere. Essakane—a village two hours from Timbuktu—arrives uninvited. Her cramped apartment dissolves; desert sands mix with spice and woodsmoke. The air thickens, pregnant with history.

…..In an instant, she is back at the Festival in the Desert, where drums and voices wove defiance into the night. For one breathtaking moment, Aminata is whole again.

…..Her body remembers even as her mind tries to forget. She dances, sweat streaming down her spine like a revived river, as the ghosts of the lost rise in the music. There—amid the artists with dust in their hair—stands Moussa, his spectral smile flashes bright as a newly minted coin.

…..Terror and longing intertwine as she wonders, “Am I losing my mind, or have I finally come undone?”

…..She squeezes her eyes shut, yet when she opens them, Essakane persists, singing in voices she once tried to silence. The music swells until it drowns out all else. Aminata tries to run, but her feet are rooted in sand that used to be her apartment floor. At the heart of it all appears Néné —her grandmother’s ghost, radiant in an indigo boubou rippling in an unfelt wind. Néné’s eyes, deep as desert wells, hold the weight of centuries. Aminata sees empires rise and fall in them, Mali in bloom and decay.

…..“Ahul,” Néné says, her voice a cool oasis. “You’ve come back to us.”

,,,,,Néné’s form multiplies, a mirror of every woman who has borne unbearable burdens. “We are unsilenced, unbowed, unbroken. You carry us within you. Now, sing the song you fear. Let your voice shake the world.”

…..Around her, Mali unfolds in a time-lapse: acacias in bloom, the distant cry of a nightjar, the whisper of millet fields in the wind. What if remembering is not destruction, but creation? What if Moussa’s memory is a seed waiting to bloom?

…..Desert blues notes burst from Aminata’s mouth, sharp and jagged. Her song turns to screams as the past returns:

…..In a violent flash, armed men from the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin storming Essakane—faces hidden, voices shouting “No music!”—smashing koras and balafons, burning electric guitars, and Aminata ran, lungs burning,  from her world exploding in gunfire and crack-boom-wails, from the silence-bringers, the joy-killers, from Moussa’s blood warm and sticky on her hands, his final words a death rattle in her ears, “run Aminata run”, and she ran, feet pounding sand then concrete then ocean, the weight of survival crushing her chest, guilt riding her back like restless djinns, and always, always the memory of rough hands that grabbed, groped, tore at clothes-flesh-dignity, fetid breath on her neck, Moussa’s fists flying, saving her only to die, and she couldn’t save him couldn’t save anyone, so she ran from a culture ground to dust under boots and twisted ideology, from home-that-was-no-longer-home, from self-that-was-no-longer-self, from joy-turned-ash and laughter-turned-silence, she ran and ran and ran until the running became who she was.

…..She always hears her own footsteps, running running running. Each step a betrayal, each mile carving a fresh wound in her soul.

…..Then, the familiar chaos of Paris intrudes—car horns slicing the air, each blare asking: “Who the hell are you? Why you here?”

,,,,,Aminata nods through tears. “I thought I was protecting myself. But forgetting’s just another way to die.”

…..“Oh, child. You can’t forget what lives in your bones, what sings in your blood. You can only choose to listen.”

…..The ghostly festival fades; dancers dissolve into mist, music dying like a weak radio signal. Aminata clutches her grandmother, desperate. “What do I do now?”

…..“Sing, ma petite. Sing until the world remembers how to listen.”  In that moment, she hears Ali Farka Touré’s guitar weep about pirogues crossing rivers.

…..Aminata blinks —and she is back in her Paris apartment. The ngoni, warm with tears and life, rests in her hands. Drained yet determined, she walks to the open window. For a heartbeat, she stands at the crossroads of Rue de la Liberté and Rue de l’Exil.

…..Taking a breath that tastes of courage and sand, she flings the window wide. Paris floods in: the aroma of fresh bread, the rumble of the metro, a neighbor’s radio serenading “La Vie en Rose”.

…..Aminata lifts the ngoni and begins to play. The first notes are shy, tentative, but soon each bold, resolute stroke declares: I will not be erased, I will not be silenced.

…..Every string sings of Essakane, Moussa, Néné—of the girl she was and the woman she has become, suspended between remembering and forgetting, between running away and coming home.

…..As the sun climbs higher, Paris sheds its grey like old skin. Her music transforms into a manifesto: loud, unyielding, and resolute.

…..Aminata lowers the ngoni, arms aching, heart pounding. She marvels at these little half-moons of moisture on the floorboards, already fading. How the body weeps in unexpected ways, how grief, once transformed, can nourish like rain on parched earth.

…..The ngoni sings and Paris listens. Suddenly Aminata is everywhere: a grain of sand in the Sahara, a raindrop in the Seine —a story that refuses to end, a song that will not die.

 

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Aishatu Ado is an Afro-German Peace Technologist, writer and poet who advocates for social justice. She is an alumna of Tin House, VONA, Hurston/Wright, and Roots Words Wounds fellowships among others. As a visual & literary artist, she weaves transformative Afro-feminist cosmovisions, channeling ancestral oral traditions & mythologies. Aishatu is featured in anthologies such as “Parables of AI in/from the Majority World” and “Mythic Winter: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology.” 

Click here to visit her website

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Click here to read “Bluesette,” Salvatore Difalco’s winning story in the 67th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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