The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  The beverage is sometimes sweet, sometimes salty, sometimes tasteless. Its temperature fluctuates as its taste. It replenishes itself, not informing us of the day it will finish. The last one we bought only lasted a year. Without it, we became bitter. With it, we drink it with the idea of intoxication. Our actions to each other either demolish or preserve its longevity. The payments go towards maintaining the garden and the church’s property. I jumped in the fire to stop our dream-skin selves from fading and found myself burning in love.

  “Do you think it would be better to not drink this and be without feeling toward anything?” My Girlfriend asks. “We’d stop feeling sad about the to-be destruction of the railway tracks, of our homes, of the coming changes.”

  “We won’t be sad, but we also won’t be happy,” I say. “I want to be happy.”

  “Ja, I guess you’re right. You know, that’s how they are. The Translucent ones.” She stretches out her paper-white arm. “At first, we’re like this, then we’re…nothing. How come some die and some become Translucent?”

  “Maybe it’s a toss-up for the god of death. Angazi.”

  “I have a theory.”

  I smirk. “My sexy conspiracy theorist.”

  “The people from the wards are paper-white. It buries the ethnicities in our bloods. That’s the first hierarchy of punishment. Second hierarchy of punishment is dedicated for people like us. We do not receive the privilege of death, we only become Translucent. I’ve studied the statistics. Remember my brother and brother-in-law?—they disappeared. Their bodies never turned up. Our city is surrounded by an abyss that no one can physically cross into. Both cities were searched, and not one molecule of their existence was seen. People like us are the only ones who disappear—they literally disappear into air. They’re not dead, they’re around us, we just can’t see them.”

  Besides witnesses who’ve observed this disappearing phenomenon, how do we know about Translucents’ existence even though we can’t see them? The old lady who stays three houses from my house can see them. She lives with them. Has written scholarly material about them.

  “…then those two lady couples were sighted at the park, and vanished into thin air. There were three witnesses…” she continues listing all the missing cases in our city.

  I press my hand to her shoulder. “Then what triggers their disappearance?”

  She stops, sits by the concrete seat in the garden where my father’s skin marks the bark. “I don’t know. That’s what scares me. There’s no telling! We could vanish now.” She looks down at her bottle. “What if this drink is the cause of it? I mean all we know is it’s the love manufactured from dead lovers, but what if the manufacturers add something else—it’s not organic after all.” She looks up, blue eyes shining with tears, the image fizzles until I see her brown eyes with my dreamskin sight. “But if I don’t drink this, I will stop loving you. It won’t be painful because I will be without feeling. I won’t feel anything but I feel everything now, so I’m afraid to not feel anything then. I suffer the pain now.”

  This is a knotted complication. Can my dreamskin skills remedy this situation?

  She cries into her hands. “I just don’t know what to trust anymore.”

  I wrap my arm around her shoulder. “Let’s not drink it.”

  “But I love you. I want to stay in love with you forever! It’s not fair. The other couples aren’t constrained to such rules. What higher power is giving others privilege?” Her body trembles and I rub circles into it.

  “Listen to me. We are powerful. You are powerful.” I raise her chin, wipe the tears from her face. “I will not allow someone’s words to curate our demise. I believe in my existence. I believe in you, loving you. Your breath, your thought, your faith has unbelievable power, it curates miracles that will immortalize anything you desire. Do you hear me?”

  She sniffs, nodding. “Where do you get all this faith?”

  “Very simple. If you don’t believe in yourself, someone’s belief will kill you.”

  A quiet beat stifles the air. Her eyes widen, mouth opens into a silent O. “You’re really special. I’m so glad we met. We believe so much in this drink that it became our truth, our reality.”

  “We will not disappear.”

  “But don’t you think the others too believed in themselves? Why would we be the exception?”

  The wind teases the branch above us, dropping leaves. One falls into my hand, and I fold it and fold it. “What if they wanted it? What if being Translucent isn’t such a bad thing? People say dreamskin are evil, but they only open the door to a universe that gives sight. What if we’re being fed lies about things that are good for us?”

  “Why would you say that? Dreamskin are scary, monstrous things. I wouldn’t want to bump into one at night.”

  I can’t tell her. She’ll freak out. Besides, I don’t want her to get tangled into my mess.

  “And why would being invisible be a good thing?” she continues, pressing her fingers into the concrete seat.

  “What if you are being birthed into a universe, a dimension better than ours—that we can’t see? And because we don’t understand it, we believe it’s insidious,” I say.

  She laughs. “And you call me a conspiracy theorist.” Her eyelashes are lit with crystals of tears. I pick one and kiss her cheeks.

  “I really do love you, you know. With or without the drink.”

  “But can we just drink it to be on the safer side?”

  Her lack of faith pains me, but I smile for her. Anything to make her happy.

  “We haven’t yet lost our sight. Anything can change.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” I say.

  “It’s not something you can control.” She looks at the trees in the veld. “My sister was set to get married. Lobola was paid and ceremonies were organized. By tradition they were married. When it was time for kgoroso, she lost her sight. I remember that morning, I woke up from my period pains, and I was going to use the bathroom. I saw her sitting in the metal tub in a pool of water. I was blind from sleep, and approached her with no cautious feeling in my bones.” She closes her eyes and slips underwater. Anguish turns her body rapid. She comes up for breath and says, “The water was brown; she was Translucent. She lost her sight.”

  She pinches my skin with the intention to pull it apart. “This does not belong to us. If it belonged to us, it would stay. We are people with no skin.”

  “Stop, you’re hurting me.”

  Shame pushes her back. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re being silly,” I say. “Not everyone loses their sight. There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I say. “My brother lost his sight—he lost his skin color, but he’s still living with us.”

  “His eyes scare me,” she says. “It’s a cloudy blue, like a cloudy sky—it hides things. You’re never quite sure what to expect.”

  “My brother loves us.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she asks.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I haven’t been myself lately. I get these thoughts a lot and they won’t let me go.”

  “I’m here for you,” I say.

  “I know,” she whispers, leaning her head into my shoulder. We lull in the safe waters of our universe until time calls us to reality.

  “S’thandwa sam’, ke a go rata,” she says. “Soon those words will get torn down from our tongues and we will no longer be able to say them.”

  “I love you, too.” I brush my tongue against her lips. “I miss your poetry.”

  “You’re disappearing,” she says. “I can feel you disappearing from my grasp.”

  “But I’m right here.”

  “Don’t you know that you lose sight in other places before you lose it in your eyes?” she asks. “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Ke a go rata.”

  “I love you,” I say.

&n
bsp; “You can’t speak it in our language.”

  “But I’m saying it: Ke a go love you.” My teeth snatch my lips and the words become a rough stone. “I’m still here, please believe me.”

  “I will believe you only for you.” She’s always been stubborn in her beliefs.

  “Let’s go rest. I’m feeling sleepy,” I say, anxious.

  What if I’m disappearing before I’ve known it? No. I still feel the same way. I am me. She starts kissing every part of me, my neck, my breasts, my tummy. But there’s an unusual religious fervor to her actions. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I want your skin to stay, I want it to stay with me,” she says. “I want to remember its taste.”

  That day, I remember what can’t be erased, the traces her kisses left in my uterus, in my womb.

  The shebeen was where people like us drank it in large quantities until it consumed them.

  We sip on it on the way, a love that someone lived before us. I remember watching you bite your lip knowing that our waning love couldn’t last despite how we tried bottling it for days we were angry.

  My Girlfriend and I bunk work that day, staying in the fields, and drink until the dark buries the sun. We can’t see much, so we take our bodies as light and sleep in its haven. What she breathes out, I breathe it in, and keep it inside me for the moments we are apart, something to feed on in her absence. I imagine our lives this way, growing old and happy. Being us. Forming happy with our hearts. The truth is dressed as a lie. They lied. It’s been so good so far being touched by a dreamskin—how could it really get worse? I don’t want this to change, being able to see her in full color and glory is not a curse; I’m glad the dreamskin touched me. All I need to do is keep quiet about this gift, and all this and eternity will be my life. My Girlfriend and I, we’ll make our own estate, grow our artistry business. We are in command of our lives, and perfection is within reach—I really do feel it and believe the possibility of our dreams as vast as the universe, happiness shining within my chest. Nothing and no one can destroy the pureness of this feeling. It breeds eternity for us. It is not evil I pour into her lungs, it is the real us. “Ke a go rata s’thandwa same,” I croon the silent song, against her lips, against her breath.

  In the bleak of the dawn hour, a puff of cloud-dust explodes into the clear sky, the sound of thunder rupturing the earth. The ground quivers. Far out into the distant horizon, a giant knife prickles through the skyline of adobe settlements. A big bang in our soul-universe. We stare at each other, silence a blade scraping our faces apart.

  It’s not the train.

  Demolitions have begun. The New Architecture dawns.

  Cold, Uncaring Beast

  “Is that a huge knife to the sky?” My Girlfriend asks, standing on a rock near the market place, craning her neck. “What is that?”

  We’re myriads of streets away from my home, but apart from the low-lying residences and estates, and adobe structures packed neat into the sky kingdom, from the huddled communion of our architecture, the triangular form pierces through the air, the clouds; bloodshed gleams across its steely skin, the sunset wails. The Triad, so says the sign blanketed across its façade, a chilling smile.

  “Underground workers are fast,” says Passer-by 1.

  “Is that the resort?” Passer-by 5 motions.

  “Ja, it will house residential units, recreational facilities, offices,” says Stranger 1, shiny and raw like teeth. “Nothing like you’ve seen before.”

  “What about the neighborhoods that were in its place before?” I ask.

  “Every tenant in that land sold their property. Relocated. We offered them more than the market value,” says Stranger 2. He points at the new structure.

  Ward 12 has just been taken down, quickly replaced by a foreign surgical tool. How did we not know this?

  “The civilians of Ward 12 signed a confidential agreement before relocating from the premises,” Stranger 3 says as if reading my thoughts. “Our firm uses a newly advanced technology that allows for quick deletions of structures and building constructions. It cuts down a lot of labor costs.” The agreement was to create employment for our wards, so if they fell back on their word, what more will they refuse? A whistle parts Stranger 3’s lips. “Now that is a quality standard of living. Which ward do you live in?”

  I step back. His breath, his words are invading my personal space. “Why?”

  “You might like it up there. There are units on offer. Here.” Stranger 3 offers me a pamphlet advertising a residential unit.

  “We can’t afford this,” I shout. “And they’re so small—no garden space. We are comfortable where we’re staying.”

  “They have a high market value. You’ll love the view,” adds Stranger 2.

  “It’d be so much easier if we understood their language, quite irritating actually,” says Stranger 3. “Well, it’s something that can be easily remedied. Modified.”

  The ground beneath him is starved of shadow. I look up and back away. My Girlfriend notices it too, and beneath our feet our shadows war and flicker with something. I gasp. The District on the Other Side of the City! They are the Strangers, the Others; to not see their hand, we must not see their shadows’ tracks. The Strangers with the Invisible Shadows.

  “Hold on, how did you get in here?” asks My Girlfriend. “You’re from the District on the Other Side of the City.” Their skin looks like us, pale, ours mutated to theirs; there’s a difference that discerns our side from theirs, a need be it seems.

  “We’re the architects, the proud brain power behind this design.” The three Strangers stretch smiles across their faces.

  “But each side is not allowed to cross over to the other side,” My Girlfriend says.

  “Permission was granted given the new changes. Change is good.” Stranger 3 smiles again. “I’m sorry—what’s your name again, sweetheart?”

  My Girlfriend zones out like her brain has ceased to function, a huge black hole in it.

  “This place will be perfect for basking. It’s beautiful!” says Stranger 1, admiring our region with bright eyes, staring in awe at the sunset. “And please stop referring to me as Stranger 1. My name is—”

  My Girlfriend yanks my arm and drags me away, sullen at the lips. “They have everything, even names. What do we have? What are we left with?”

  We’re making our way home with bags rustling in our hands containing ingredients to help Sister-In-Law with supper. My Girlfriend asks me if what my brother reports in the headlines are true. I tell her I’m not sure, he’s just trying to make money so we can survive. Our tongues have the syrupy taste of love that we don’t notice a new urban furniture that stands in front of every residence in our neighborhood until we bump into it, falling onto our backs. Tall obsidian sentries with sharp angles, like a sculpture, cold hard forms, a dark hooded cloth covers them entirely.

  “The Triad’s sentries,” says Neighbor 4302. “To watch for cases of crime breakout.” The forms have no slit for eyes or mouth. We can’t see if it has a body inside that cloth. Where the heavy fabric meets the ground, there is no sign of feet. Several of our neighbors are outside scratching their heads and waving their hands in anger at each figure that stands outside their residence’s entrance. It stands in our path, a maddening smoke evaporating from its cloth. My Girlfriend and I try to circumvent it, but the boundary wall is protected by a myriad of them.

  “They’re Keepers of the Gate. They’re security from The District on the Other Side of the City,” says Neighbor 4302. “The authority assented to their existence and said we couldn’t enter without its approval.”

  “Security for what?” I ask.

  “Surveying for the construction slated this season. Our ward is the next chosen site,” says Neighbor 4301.

  “But this is our home,” I say.

  “The Strangers visited me today. They’re offering good money,” says Neighbor 4305.

  “Did they g
ive you a tour of The Triad’s units?” another neighbor asks, excitement tickling his jaw.

  Neighbor 4305 scratches his head. “I’m on a waiting list, so my family is renting out in another ward. The money was too good to pass by.”