The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  Something thick forms in my throat. Tears collect in my eyes. I will not let them fall. My Girlfriend fits her hand into mine, kisses it.

  “But. This. Is. Our. Home,” I whisper with a trembling voice.

  Neighbor 4302 shakes his head. “Not today, kid. Try again tomorrow.” He walks alone, he himself as his own luggage. The street looks so dusty around him that I want to hug him so the pain will leave our neighborhood.

  My Girlfriend and I explain ourselves to the Keeper of the Gate, but as soon as we open our mouths to let our language flow from our throats, our throats become arid, and the air crackles with the dying beat of our dialect. A force stands in our vocal chords, a thick lump that denies both our speech, inhales and exhales. We don’t know what language it speaks so we can negotiate with it. Even as we hold keys to our homes, the figure won’t let us through.

  My Girlfriend starts weeping and begins to drag me away from the Keeper of the Gate. “Please, love, let’s go before we get hurt.”

  Our distance ensures our ability to breathe. She’s dragging me. I’m screaming. “The only thing we had left was our language. The only thing!” I shout. I want every creature to hear me, creatures that live beyond the sky.

  The Keeper of the Gate has the power to null the language on my tongue. I try to scream for Sister-In-Law to open for us, but my voice can’t climb over the walls, over the towers. It can’t even reach the birds in the skies.

  I scream and nothing scatters. Nothing can hear me. This is annihilation. This is murder. In their hands, Death is ceaseless; it is a cold, uncaring beast.

  The Woke Rote My Bones Home

  This place we call home took my skin-color, took my voice, took our hair.

  Hours pass.

  Days pass.

  Weeks pass.

  We wait.

  We don’t know if the Keeper of the Gate stands outside to protect us or to protect itself. But from what? But each time we exist in its presence, our chests become heavy with a paralytic pain and we slip into a vacuum, an abyss of silent pressure overwhelms our voices and the altars that hold our breath.

  My Girlfriend doesn’t want to go home. Home is an empty house. Her family is in the train. All of them—passage to the ancestral land. All of us should end up in the train; the train will be our home. But should we allow ourselves to be kicked out from our homes! My Girlfriend is a loner. Has always been a loner. The Keepers of the Gate scare her. We rent a hostel that night, and I hold her until her sobs turn into sleep.

  I. Don’t. Sleep.

  I cannot sleep.

  I am awake.

  My anger is awake.

  It is fed up.

  It is saturated with woke that runs the valleys of our souls.

  I am woke to everything.

  It’s the seventh night in a row I can’t sleep and My Girlfriend wonders why sleep won’t enter my body—because it is not welcome in here, I tell her—asks me what is wrong with my body and if the sangoma can prescribe something, or is it the syrupy love we’ve been wining on.

  “When have you seen our love pick up a weapon and shoot down a man?” I say, throwing the beverage away. “What if the dreamskin people that prescribed this to us are manufactured by the citizens of the districts?”

  “You need to sleep,” My Girlfriend repeats.

  I shake my head. “I will stay woke.”

  “You need to sleep,” she says.

  “It’s too dangerous to sleep,” I say. “I refuse to sleep. Sleep is a medicine they feed us to numb us. They’re doing something when we’re sleeping. Can’t you feel it? Underground, beneath our feet, away from our sight, they’re breeding their pleasures to destroy us. It shot out from the ground today.”

  She begs me to sleep, to think about my health.

  I hold her and tell her, “The more I sleep the more I lose my skin—it’s been peeling off for weeks.”

  She is stunned by this revelation. The absence of sleep allows the tales of truth to slip from my lips.

  Tonight I am freedom. Nothing holds me back.

  “You have to dream,” My Girlfriend says. “In order to dream, you have to sleep. If you don’t sleep, your dreams—your nightmare will roam with you unlimited by the hours of sleeping.”

  “Let them.”

  “They will hurt you. Please. Stop this insanity.”

  Within the sleeping hours, dreamskin people can wreck torture on our bodies.

  I grip her shoulders. “Stay awake with me.”

  The hostel has only one bed shoved into a storage-sized room with a window to the sun.

  My Girlfriend slips into the shadow of the sun. “I’ve heard of this ‘woke’. It rots your bones. It leaves you out of comfort. There is no point to it.”

  “Lies. Lies. Like the dreamskin people they tell us about. They aren’t monsters. Dreamskin make us alive.”

  She presses her palms to her ears. “Stop! No more. No more.”

  I step closer, eclipsing the shadow from her face. “What if this ‘woke’ will give you Sight? You will see yourself. You will see me. You will walk through walls. You will walk through anything.” I touch my Afro. “This is a symbol I’ve been afraid to cut. But it is not me. This is me.”

  My Girlfriend catches me shaving part of my head bald. “What are you doing?”

  “There is too much in me. I am going mad,” I shout. There is catharsis in shaking your head loose of hair. Just because I have half an Afro doesn’t make me any less deserving of its symbol. “I’m the girl with the half-shaved Afro.” I stand tall, brandishing my shoulders. “I can see myself.”

  The ghost of a scream escapes her mouth as she faces the same mirror I’m looking into.

  The mirror finally speaks truths. It speaks “me.”

  Boneless Shadow

  The Shadow exists like air in our wards. There are days when streets or people disappear, or people we used to know aren’t people we used to know. It’s why we don’t see ourselves in the mirrors. It’s why earthquakes only occur in the wards. It is why the Keepers of the Gate have access to our homes. It’s why our skins aren’t still-Black font to stamp out words and preserve names. The Shadow’s power wields through the streets in our wards to the veins in our bodies and does as it pleases. Its power is still at its low peak to conjure the worst damage. For now. At least The Shadow is not strong enough to destroy the train. We normally refer to The Shadow as They. It always feels like a group of people sucking the air from our lungs with their mouths and their straws for luxuries. But today, I am untouchable by The Shadow.

  The melanin on my bones is a fabric quickly swallowing the sunlight. My Girlfriend is skeptical. She stares at me with lunacy rimmed around her eyes. She trails behind me, takes my kisses only to play nauseous later and vomit them out. She’s afraid I’m leaving bombs in her mouth. I hold her hand to press the warmth of promises into it. “I am still the same,” I say.

  “You look the same, but you aren’t the same,” she whispers.

  “When you sleep, you look dead, my love.”

  She looks down, hurt.

  “I love you,” I say. “Trust me.”

  She wraps her arms around me; her scent is sunset-tinged. It leaves me breathless. Her tears rub solace into my back. “I love you, too,” she says.

  We stand in front of the Keeper of our Gate. It seems to have grown taller. I grip My Girlfriend’s hand, and she squeezes her eyes shut as I walk past the figure. It doesn’t stir. I unlock the gates and we make our way to the front door.

  I kiss her cheek. “Open your eyes,” I say. “We just walked through a wall.”

  “We’re home,” she says, only it sounds like a question.

  “We’re home,” I say. “Stay with me this time.”

  “What will the neighbors think?”

  “They can go fuck themselves,” I say, picking her onto my back and giving her a piggy-back ride into the house. Her mouth is no longer a des
ert of laughter. She is laughing and she is happy. That is my universe.

  She hops off my back, her lips stretched down at the ends.

  “What’s wrong,” I ask.

  “Your house is different,” she says. “It’s been altered.”

  I don’t see the differences but I walk her around and ask her to point out what’s changed: it no longer bears the adobe brick for it apparently irritates the figure outside, it doesn’t look expensive to it. She points at the new building material: the material shines, the material is cold, the material reflects. Only it doesn’t reflect who we are. Sister-In-Law and Brother are not yet home to confirm what My Girlfriend says.

  They call our house the house with the marigold windows. Its walls are mauve in some areas, and bright and muted in other areas. Our neighbors gossiped that our house wasn’t built by science, it was painted. It turned shadows and light into beings that walk the passages and spaces. No one wanted it until they experienced it. Everyone now wanted the house with the marigold windows.

  We built the house ourselves under Brother’s apprenticeship within 400 sun days. The southern side was made in adobe, and the boundary wall of stone had a rusted plaque titled Ntlo 42301. The textured walls reflected the light so strongly, the pool of water did all to absorb and dissolve the light into itself, that in the common moonless night if you swam in it, orbs appeared in its body as if you were swimming in the buoyant nature of light.

  I cross the courtyard, past the tree rooted in the ground with its brown skeleton deformed by lightning hands, leaving it naked of leaves. I knock on all the widows’ doors. The widows welcome me back as I collect their rent. During the day, they chew seeds of a fruit, then plant it into each other’s ears to prevent deafness.

  The widows stay in their rooms and do not leave. Their heads are bulbous, smooth and shiny in the light. They know where their hair was buried, unlike ours that was burned. It has never grown back for them, ours is new and fresh on our heads. We don’t know how long they have been mourning, but it seems like for years, as if they are sisters.

  Our neighbors called them “dirty with death” for they are not cleansed of senyama—a toxic element to us and their new partners who will consume them. But we disregard it. They stayed alone because they still had senyama, it was not cleaned from them and the neighbors complained about it. They still slept on their abdomens without changing positions, they still ate goat liver mixed with herbs as if every day was the day their husbands died. People gossiped about them because their husbands weren’t on the train or opaque spirits in the streets. Who were they mourning that we couldn’t see? Did they hide their husbands’ body or did they not send them off? Where do they come from? The day the widows arrived, knocking on our gate looking for a place to rent, the soles of their feet were soot-marked with abyss-dust. What mattered to us was that they paid on time. They do not disturb us, they do not eat much—all is well in our residence. Sometimes, when they stand in the courtyard, their headscarves are tied beneath their chins.

  The night before, My Girlfriend and I listened to the tree tremble as the women ululated for the train’s departure. They have already bought their tickets and are registered to board the train in two months once their lease has ended. Slowly, the rooms have become perfumed by the scent accumulating in their skin, a scent that calls scorpions to our courtyard into the outdoor fire which burns them into a feverish dance that crackles parts of them to the sun-marked sky. Smoke tangles in the mausoleum of the widows’ lungs, their breaths a solace to those who visited.

  In our house, geometric walls cut up the light into diagonal lines. The windows are tinted marigold to focus the majestic quality of sunlight so that it glows within the space, a solitary house that celebrates solitude.

  “I feel something here,” My Girlfriend whispers. “I sense something. There was an intention with the design of this house. The architecture does something to the light, it elevates it to its spiritual meaning. It moves me so much, it makes me want to strip and bathe in it.”

  I, too, couldn’t understand why the light in the house was different, for it flooded the wards just as it did before, but it has been manipulated by the form of the building, by the glass in it, to appear mystic. It stirs something against my ribs.

  At one end of the house, we have a room we called šawara, which is used by the whole family for cleansing. The pool water meets the wall and imitates a horizon, for the colors are placid and portray a distance that the horizon contains, the part when the sky is dilute. “It’s a devotion to light, self, and the universe,” I say. “It is pure from everything in the city.”

  “Can you swim in this as well?” My Girlfriend asks.

  “Ja, it serves as a pool, too.”

  My Girlfriend’s lips turn up at this. “Can I try it?” she asks. “Skinny dipping interests you much?”

  We’re buoyant in the sunlight-saturated pool. “Your house feels like a church,” she whispers and her voice echoes. The square opening above us reveals a transitioning sky. The walls have texture. “I’m afraid,” she whispers and turns away in embarrassment.

  “What are you afraid of?” I ask, kissing her shoulder.

  “That we will become different,” she says. “That loving you won’t feel like loving you anymore.”

  “That’s jinxing us,” I say.

  Later, My Girlfriend is sitting in the living room by the fireplace, working through her mail, the baby crawling about her legs, trying to catch her bobbing feet. She has braids the thickness of my fingers that fall to her knees. Both are laughing. Sister-In-Law and I are preparing rabbit meat that Brother brought. She is mashing it into seswaa. We couple it with paleche, soup, and cabbage. During our meal, Brother tries to evade our questions about the city’s new developments. Silence is the only thing that sits in comfort when Brother tells us that as long as we’re related to him, we’re safe. After our meal, I guide My Girlfriend to my bedroom. The hallway is cold. Our feet are bare. A shadow of someone passes our path into the hallway leading to Brother’s bedroom. I crane my neck. The shadow has dissolved into air, and there is no body to claim ownership to it.

  “What’s wrong?” My Girlfriend asks, unable to pass through the barricade my arms have formed.

  “I saw a shadow without a body,” I say.

  She cracks up laughing. “I had more to drink but you’re way tipsier than I.”

  “It had no bones to hold it like us.”

  “You’re shaking,” she says. She tries to hold me together, but I am falling apart. I am a jumbled mess in the passage.

  “I’m losing my mind,” I cry. “I don’t want to lose my mind.”

  “You’re just drunk,” she says, terror marking her eyes. “Please, get up.”

  I must get up. I must get up for her. “We need to evict them,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “Them. Those widows. Those baloi people,” I say. “They’re witches.”

  “You’re lucky you even have tenants,” she says. “No one wanted to rent here.”

  “Isn’t it better to be alive than have tenants?” I ask.

  “Say something like that, and I won’t return,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, sadness pressing my face down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You’ve made me sober now.”

  “We haven’t run out of alcohol yet,” I suggest.

  A smile lights up her face. “Good idea.”

  I follow her, ignoring the shadow that appears again, walking back and forth in the hallway between Brother’s bedroom and mine.

  “Do you think I don’t love you because I don’t know how you look?” she asks when we settle in my bedroom, candles surrounding us in the dark that knows no moon.

  “Where do you get that silly idea?” I ask.

  She takes a sip of the liquid; it is as thick as blood. “I see the way you look at me. You look at me with loss, as if you’re pleading
with an imaginary god. I wake up with doubt, I go to sleep with doubt. You will leave me for someone who will see you as you are. Who will give you what you need.”

  “I don’t know where you’re collecting your fears from lately. Is there something you’re trying to tell me?” I stand closer to her. “Wouldn’t it be superficial if I just loved the skin on your bones? Have a little faith in your soul. I don’t need its body to love you.”

  “You’ve given me a gift I can’t give you: painting me, showing me who I am. This universe can’t distort your art. It is truth. I feel like I shove lies into your body when I kiss you. Every day I wake up with this huge debt sitting on my chest—I have no talent to gift you with. Each day I’m trying to pay and pay but I keep failing. ”