Africa is still roaring in her head as she steps off the plane in Detroit: The whistle of a snake-eagle as it hunts for reptiles rises high above the singing of the wind that journeys over the plains, east to west. In the waiting crowd she sees the slowly starving bodies of the Massai people of southern Kenya. She still sees the parched yellow grasses of the savanna, the crooked acacia trees, the twisted baobab rising monstrous over all else. She sees giraffes curling long purple tongues around high-up twigs and straddling their legs to get at the water hole dug over time by the elephants, which wallow nearby in the mud. She sees troops of baboons loping across the savanna with pups swinging from their bellies, a cheetah dragging a freshly killed antelope up a stunted tree, the pride of lions that gazed at her incuriously as she passed them by on her rented Jeep, and then her vision is taken up by a human, a blond-haired, blue-eyed human smelling of Drakkar Noir aftershave and very faintly of beer and tobacco and saddle-leather. She blinks. He smiles down at her.
“Still wrapped up in dreams of Africa, I see,” he says. “I know I didn’t bring a sign or anything, but I’ve called your name at least a dozen times, Christine.”
She hears him, but the monkeys and lions and elephants in her head still clamor for her attention.
“How was it?” he asks. “I missed you.”
She shakes her head, clearing it for a moment of African noises.
“It was great,” she says.
He holds out an arm, which she takes, and they hug.
“I want to hear all about it,” he says.
“That would take a very long time,” she replies, smiling.
“We have a long drive home. You can start telling me, at least.”
She opens her mouth as they head through the airport, but she doesn’t know where to begin. With the multitude of animals she saw, the ox-peckers and wild dogs and impala? With the Massai warriors whose duty it was to guard the people’s cattle? Or maybe with the man she met in the Congo who delighted in telling horror stories that made you never want to see a diamond again.
“Ask me about it,” she says as they climb into his Chevy.
“I just did. How was it?”
“No, ask me something specific. Ask me – ask me the names of the animals I learned, like their African names, or ask me what a snake-eagle sounds like, or ask me – ask me the color of the sky there.”
He grins.
“The sky’s a different color there?”
“Well – not exactly, but it’s – closer. It’s a deeper blue. I don’t know, the sky there’s closer somehow. And the stars, you can see so many more stars than you can here, even more than where we live, and they kind of throb, they’re so bright, and…”
She talks nonstop for maybe twenty minutes, but then she runs out of things to say. You can’t hear about Africa, she thinks; you have to experience it. There’s no other way.
“Christine?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry. I just…”
"Ran out of things to say?”
She smiles.
“No. I could never run out of things to say about Africa,” she says. “I just…don’t know what to say.”
She stares out the window, watching America pass by. Yellow traffic lights swing from their wires, and there are so many cars – not just one beat-up old Jeep trundling across a savanna, but a myriad of sleek, shiny vehicles of every model and color, flashing in the sunlight as they race along the roadways. Concrete and asphalt are everywhere. She sighs. Her boyfriend keeps looking over at her as he drives.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Everything’s so – synthetic, here.”
“It always has been. I mean, this is America. Synthetic is what we do.”
“But I never noticed before,” she says.
After a few minutes he says, “I thought we could go out to dinner tonight. You know, celebrate your return. Or something like that.”
“Okay.”
“Great. I was thinking, we could go somewhere a little fancy for once, maybe—”
“Red Lobster!” she says. Her favorite, but they rarely go anymore because fewer people feel the need to keep horses at boarding stables like his in this economy, or to keep horses at all for that matter. He grins.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” he says.
“Really? You mean it?”
“Yep. So we’ll go home and change into something a little dressy, make a big deal out of it, just for the hell of it, and then I’m taking you to Red Lobster.”
“God, you’re awesome,” she says.
“Oh, I know,” he replies, and she punches him. “Hey, watch it, I’m driving.”
He really is wonderful, she thinks as she changes into her honey-colored cocktail dress later that evening. She hasn’t had Red Lobster since long before she left for Africa three months ago. Delicious, delicious. And how long has it been since she last had half an excuse to dress up? She finishes changing and meets him in the foyer, where he stands in a tuxedo, smelling more of Drakkar Noir and less of saddle-leather and tobacco and beer.
“Well, you clean up nice!” she says.
“I could say the same about you,” he replies, “if not for the fact that I’ve seen you cleaned up before. Shall we depart?” he asks, holding out an arm.
“We shall,” she says.
She is surprised to find her parents and siblings and siblings-in-law waiting for them in the lobby when they arrive at Red Lobster.
“What are you all doing here?” she asks as they cry out in greeting and envelop her with hugs.
“Matthew invited us, of course,” her mother said. “He thought we’d want to see you, darling; after all, you were gone for the entire summer.”
“Missed out on the Fourth of July and everything!” her father added. “Even Grandma Ninny’s birthday.”
She gives out hugs and kisses and asks the proper questions about how the children are doing, but the whole time in the lobby and on their way to the table she studies her relatives, perplexed. Every one of them looks different, and she can’t quite put her finger on why. None of them seem to have gotten a haircut or lost or gained weight, and she would’ve known without looking that none of them have had any plastic surgery done. The only one who has changed in some tangible way is her oldest brother, whose right ear now bears a small diamond stud, but that doesn’t apply to the rest of the family.
She’s still puzzling over the odd invisible change that was made during her absence when the food is served, at which point she puzzles over that instead. Prodding her tilapia with a fork, she says, “This is a lot of food.”
“Of course it is,” her father says. “You get what you pay for. Don’t get me wrong, I know Red Lobster’s your favorite, and I like it well enough myself, but you must admit it’s expensive. They better damn well give you a lot.”
“But I mean…” she starts, and then goes back to staring at her family. They dig in enthusiastically as their meals are served, talking and laughing between mouthfuls of food. They, apparently, are untroubled by the fact that they’ve been given more food than they can possibly eat, food that will go home with them in Styrofoam boxes and sit in their refrigerators for a week before getting demoted to the trash, when there are people in the world whose existence depends on a crop of maize that might be blighted by a drought or a march of fire ants at any time. She wonders if they’ve always been this way, but she can’t be sure, and that troubles her.
As they settle back with their bills and the last of their coffee, Matthew stands up and says to her, “Do you want to step outside for a minute?”
“Um – okay,” she says. She doesn’t know why, at first, but then she looks at her family and she does know, because her mother has tears in her eyes and her father looks like he’s been hit in the head with a baseball bat but not in a bad way, and her brothers and sister and her sister- and brother-in-law wear expressions that say they knew this would happen tonight and aren’t they just so smart for knowing.
Out on the sidewalk, he turns to her and says, “I didn’t know how I wanted to do this, and I thought about it long and hard the whole time you were gone and I’m still not sure this is how I want to do this, but we’re here now anyways.”
“Okay,” she says.
He pulls a jeweler’s box out of his pocket and hands it to her. She stares at it.
“Open it,” he says.
She does so. A diamond ring nestles inside, winking up at her.
“I—” he starts, and then he has to stop and clear his throat and start again. “I just – I love you so much, Christine, and – well, we’ve talked about this before, the possibility of getting married someday, and I – well, that’s what I want. I want to marry you.”
When she doesn’t answer he pulls out a cigarette, but his hands are shaking so much that he can’t light it, so he gives up and throws it away.
“Say something,” he says. “I don’t care what, but say something, God damn it.”
But she gazes at the ring, thinking about where it came from. She knows she should just be thinking about how beautiful it is, how much it may have cost him, but she’s not thinking about that, and it bothers her.
“Thank you,” she says finally, “but—”
The color drains from his face like water from a newly unclogged bathtub.
“You—” he says, “you don’t want—”
“What? No! No, that’s not what I – it’s just – Matthew,” she says, “this isn’t a real diamond, is it?”
"Of course it’s real. Why wouldn’t it be real?”
“Oh,” she says. “I was hoping it was fake. I – Matthew, in Africa—”
“Always Africa,” he says quietly.
“No, just listen to me for a minute! In Africa I met this Congolese man, he must have been about ninety, and he used to work in the diamond mines, and Matthew – it’s terrible how the workers are treated in the diamond mines, even today! His stories – I mean, I heard them and I thought how much better off people would be if diamonds just didn’t exist! I just – could we – could we exchange it? I just – don’t want a real diamond. That’s all.”
Now he’s staring at her like he’s never seen her before, and suddenly she realizes: Maybe it isn’t her family that changed while she was gone.
“Please, Matthew?” she says. “I want to marry you too, I do, I really love you, but – I just don’t want a real diamond. Maybe just me boycotting them won’t do any good, but – at least I’d be doing my part. At least I’d feel better. Please, Matthew? I do want to marry you.”
She watches him nervously, thinking now he’s going to retract his offer, but after a moment he lets out a long breath and gives her a tight smile.
“Okay,” he says. “So – we’ll exchange it. Tomorrow.” Then the tightness disappears and the smile widens. “Let’s go tell your family.”
And with a feeling of relief, she follows him back into Red Lobster.
(I mean obviously your content is up to you, but I'd be interested to read something like that from you. Though, I just realized all your other stories may be dark or something, maybe I'll go stalk your portfolio.) Okay, finally done. 
