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Brother Jack by Gloria Mwaniga Odary

Color image of a small African Christian church under an atmospheric blue sky with cumulus clouds; title card for the flash fiction story, "Brother Jack" by Gloria Mwaniga Odary.

Gloria Mwaniga Odary refers to “Brother Jack” as an exorcism that calls out spirits—spirits that prey, that take advantage, that “demonize and shame.” Odary writes in a language of visual juxtaposition, beginning her story with a lowercase word, running immediately on from the title. Each sentence that follows thrums with the long-winded energy of a dreamy, naive, and curious child. What is religion in the hands of the ungodly? How do nature and lust settle into the frustrated mind of a young woman—a girl really—as she seeks her god? In her essay, Odary explains that she wrote “Brother Jack” from a place of “rage, then helplessness, then sisterly concern for young, impressionable girls who continue to be preyed upon by powerful, predatory males posing as mentors and men of the cloth.” Men. Girls. God. “Brother Jack” uses sensuous words, italicized commands, and natural imagery to give us a sense of the weight of this girl’s world, of her reality. How can she safely learn and grow in the midst of evil men who think themselves brothers? How does she escape the pressing guilt of growing within a body built of flesh in the midst of such untrustworthy spirits? —CRAFT

 

performed miracles in the dining hall, handed you his phone to read out a text from Jesus; something about not letting a hair of your head perish. Brother Jack’s bullet voice tore into your flesh as he placed pulpy blessed hands on the small of your back, made electricity, healed you, filled hysterical lasses with the spirit of laughter. Fed you Old Testament tales of valor, settled the host on the hungry tongues of teenage girls who sang the responsorial psalm, un-gospeled pendo langu, redirected its lyrics from Jesus to him. Brother Jack made you burn, love letters from the boys in Chesamisi, turned young love prospects to black ash, said, Give your hearts to God not to boys whose hands grazed your skin & made the miracle of electricity. The organ timbred Alabaré, alabaré a mi Señor, as Brother Jack’s magic hands sprinkled vials of holy water, as the holy water twirled, cartwheeled on your face like magic golden threads spun from the sky by Anansi, then splintered into a thousand shards on the cold cement floor like Mary’s alabaster jar or just broken china. At bedtime Brother Jack was a secret ballad rubbing itself on your lips as you twisted kinky hair into bantu knots. In your dreams he was a wild river that burst its levee, held you & leaves & lilies in its sweeping flow, widened your banks with boulders, deepened soft silt beds with pebbles and debris. His eyes a lighthouse; his voice a gurgling stream that drowned passionate cries; his long, thin fingers, electrons beneath your school blouse, cupping flesh, folding protons inside a stiff-starched white blouse like Taylor & Ridge in The Bold & the Beautiful playing on TV before mother switched it off and took the remote to her bedroom. Sunday mornings found you at confession staring at mkhulundu through grills, forgive me father for I have sinned then ten Hail Marys for penance, for absolution. In April during lent, the nuns called you lilies of the valley, said fast and pray for your souls and you fasted & prayed and fasted & prayed for your souls, believed the devil of desire had left the room until challenge weekend when Brother Jack returned and you lilies of the valley jumped in line eager to feel the ecstasy that lived on the edges of his blessed hands.

 

GLORIA MWANIGA ODARY, a writer and educator from Kenya, is an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis and Managing Editor of The Pinch Literary Journal. Odary is fascinated by historical revisionism and the intersection between research and imagination. She is a recipient of the 2024 Georgia Review Prose Prize, the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize, the 2021 African Land Policy Centre Story Prize and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Isele, Lolwe, Weganda Review, The White Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.

 

Featured image by Rohan Reddy, courtesy of Unsplash.

 

By | Flash Fiction, Fiction | January 16, 2026

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Author’s Note

A rather unusual incident with a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Movement brother during my first year of high school at a girls’ boarding school in Western Kenya is what seeded “Brother Jack,” which I initially wrote as a poem for Dr. Emily Skaja’s workshop in the Spring of 2025. As I was drafting the poem, I was reading Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music, and her examination of sexual identity and the policing of feminine desires by religious institutions lit the fires of remembrance in me. Until then, all my attempts to scrub off the stain of such memories had failed, but this time, when the memory made its way to me from across time and space, I was pen-ready.

Writing this piece was, therefore, another attempt to exorcise the spirits of the ‘Brother Jacks’ I’d encountered throughout my schooldays, right from my early years at a Catholic sponsored all-girls primary school founded by Ursuline Sisters from Holland in 1928. Ironically, just after I wrote “Brother Jack” a story broke out in Kenya’s top national girls’ school about a male educator who used his position as teacher and religious mentor to abuse impressionable girls. Reading through the exposé shook me; the man had too many similarities with Brother Jack. The girls could have been me. My disbelief turned to rage, then helplessness, then sisterly concern for young, impressionable girls who continue to be preyed upon by powerful, predatory males posing as mentors and men of the cloth.

My original idea was thus: Try to make sense of an incident that had stayed with me for years. But I’d done so in earlier poems. In revising, I therefore decided to complicate the issue somewhat; perhaps as a last act of defiance toward insufferable school administrators who demonize and shame girls for having desires. The result is this flash piece that gives girls agency and brazenly celebrates the music of feminine desires. 

I tried to tie the setting to the characters’ shifting emotions because of my fascination with geographical phenomena. Having taught geography in high school for eight years, of course I had to find ways to sneak in my obsession with levees and riverbeds and boulders and electricity. Those who study poetics may wish to read deeper meaning into such things, and to refer to them as tactile imagery or figurative language aimed at engaging a reader’s senses and creating an immersive experience. Yet it is possible that this geography teacher simply wanted to talk about river flooding and the miracles of electricity. Or did she?

 

GLORIA MWANIGA ODARY, a writer and educator from Kenya, is an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis and Managing Editor of The Pinch Literary Journal. Odary is fascinated by historical revisionism and the intersection between research and imagination. She is a recipient of the 2024 Georgia Review Prose Prize, the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize, the 2021 African Land Policy Centre Story Prize and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Isele, Lolwe, Weganda Review, The White Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere.