Not a Fairytale

by Shaida Kazie Ali

  The Mirror Cracks

  ONE MORNING, SOME MONTHS AFTER RETURNING from a prolonged visit to Zuhra, who was recovering from a breast cancer scare, Salena wakes up realising that what she feels towards Zain is more than spousal animosity: she truly despises him. She is sick of hearing how she doesn’t contribute to the household financially, how every possession belongs to him, and worn out by all the years of cleaning up after him.

  For the first time in their married lives, they are the only people in the house. The years she has spent guiding her sons through school have paid off, although Zain does not consider her mothering worthy of the title “labour”. Muhammad has completed his medical studies but has decided to take a year off to travel before deciding which field to specialise in, and Raqim is fulfilling his dream of becoming a vet, studying at an American university full-time and working part-time to supplement his financial support.

  She and Zain are alone in a five-bedroom, six-bathroom house, unless you count the TVs that Zain collects as living entities. They embody most rooms with their non-stop chattering channels.

  She notices the three towels he scatters on the bathroom floor like empty sweet wrappers. She sees his socks forsaken in piteous piles. One pair at the bottom of the stairs, another pair in front of the lounge TV; once, incongruously, a single, smelly sock next to the stove.

  In the morning, evidence of his bedtime snacks are lying on the floor next to his side of the bed. The curl of a naartjie peel. A packet of Marie biscuits with just one biscuit left. A half-empty bottle of juice. In his study, his jeans lie discarded on the floor, the shape of his bum still stamped on them.

  She observes.

  At night, in bed, while she reads, he cleans his nose, rubbing the snot between thumb and index finger before bouncing it onto the wooden floors.

  She watches.

  In the mornings, she sees the devastation in the kitchen. He has left five dirty glasses from the night before, with remnants of Coke or juice still in them. Then various breakfast plates, a coffee mug, un-eaten toast. He leaves a trail of crumbs and used cutlery from kitchen to dining room to lounge to bathroom, to bed.

  That night, when he arrives home, he pours a glass of water, sips at it, discards the glass. Then he reaches for another glass, fills it with juice, and leaves the juice carton next to the sink. At the table, he pours a third glass, Coke, to accompany his meal.

  He burrows into the plate with his right hand, food marinating his fingers to the uppermost knuckles, sauce saturating his chin, reminding her of Faruk’s table manners. In the middle of eating, he rises from the table, carrying puris and a chicken leg to the television, dripping food along the way, unperturbed.

  She goes to bed.

  The next morning, she hears from the en-suite bathroom the sound of him emptying his bowels, trumpeting out farts. Followed by the sounds of throat-clearing, gurgles and gargles in the shower. When Zain has left for work, Salena draws the curtains against the sunlight and spends the day in bed.

  In the evening, he walks around his unspoilt domestic carnage, oblivious. She stands, casually clearing a space on the kitchen counter, shattering the soiled crockery on the floor. He grunts something at her from his space in front of a TV screen, but does not get up to see what has happened.

  Salena crunches her way with bare skin over the shards, and walks upstairs to their bedroom. There are bits of crockery embedded in her feet, and she leaves a trail of blood. At the doorway, she catches her eye in the full-length mirror which is positioned against the far wall of the bedroom. Automatically, she straightens her shoulders, lifts up her neck, smoothes her hair. In front of the mirror, she lifts up her eyebrows to make her eyes widen and pulls back the skin at the outer corners of her eyes, narrows her nose and sucks in her cheeks slightly. She’s in her forties; there’s no stopping the ageing process now, unless she wants to indulge in cosmetic surgery.

  In the mirror’s Mr Minned surface, she sees at least two possible futures for herself. In one, she has become her Aunt Polla, bitter and jealous and perpetually blaming others for her own wretchedness. In another, she sees red lights, brown boulders and metallic debris, molten glass – a terrifying scene, yet tempting.

  Then, for the briefest second, she catches a glimpse of her beloved daadi in the mirror, and it gives her power. The mirror cracks, then shatters completely. Shards are flying around the room, but she closes her eyes, feels herself in her grandmother’s protective embrace. Peace envelops her.

  After an interminable time, a whimper pierces her calm. She turns to face the sound, leaving a bloody shadow behind her, and sees Zain poised in the doorway, a shard of mirror trapped in his neck.

  Reflections

  I know what they whisper behind my bac, I’ve seen their smirks: She used to tidy up after seven men before Prince Charming married her. Don’t they appreciate that cleanliness is next to godliness? Not one of them would know how to purify a pig-sty of a cottage let alone disinfect a dilapidated castle. Am I a domestic slave? Perhaps. But I’m not going to publicise the fact like Cinderella, self-condemned to cleaning up after others for eternity. I’ve got bigger issues.

  Today, in the shadowy hours of the morning, as the enchanting mirror and I were adoring each other, I saw it. An ominous phantom, priming my snowy skin for its coal-lump future. It was nesting, near the outer corner of my right eyelid, like a viper. A hostile wrinkle casting a sickening shadow on the mirror’s satiny surface.

  A howl escaped my red-as-blood lips, and the mirror sobbed its cold-comfort response, knowing I was forever changed; a crone in creation.

  I have no one to turn to. At the wedding reception, the prince made my mother dance to her death in red-hot iron shoes. Mommy knew me best of all; Mommy loved me. She tried to murder me several times because she understood I could never endure the horror of maturing like a mould-ripened piece of brie, the way she had.

  The prince admires my smooth flawlessness. He doesn’t want me resembling creased foil; he requires a stunning statue. At night when he slobbers over my body, he says, “Darling, don’t move, don’t breathe!” I have to pretend to sleep. It’s not that I mind indulging his necrophilic fantasies; I was at my happiest preserved in that magnificent glass casket, relentlessly beautiful, perpetually young. But then he came along and fell in love with my motionless shape. If only the dwarves had refused him, if only they hadn’t tripped while carrying my coffin, if only I hadn’t coughed up Mommy’s kind-heartedly poisoned lump of apple. If only I could stop the ghastly progression of time.

  The path forward is a slick tilt into old age, a second-by-second descent into unsightliness. At least I have no one to protect: I don’t have a daughter who needs me to rescue her. I have only myself to think of.

  High Care

  “I’M IN HIGH CARE,” THE STRANGE MAN SAYS, unprovoked. He smiles, showing fleshy red gums, his head tilted right, his eyes shining.

  “That’s … nice,” Salena replies.

  “Yes, it is. Here, we have special days for high-care patients. Which section are you in?”

  “I’m, er, not sure.”

  “Ah, so you’ll be waiting for your interview then.”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  Salena walks away from him briskly, opening the patio doors that lead into the back garden with its broad view of the mountain.

  As she strolls around the sanatorium’s grounds, Salena remembers Zuhra’s humid garden and the grave she’d dug to bury the mink coat. She remembers hearing the call of the lonely alligator from the nearby Everglades; it had seemed to echo the cry that lived in her own body. When Zuhra had gone inside to eat, she’d stayed behind to listen for the alligator. But it had never called out again.

  When she got better, Zuhra said she and Salena should go on a road trip, but Salena declined. She’d spent enough time in the US. Besides, driving made her think of cops: on their first day out, with Zuhra at the wheel, they were stopped by a burly Floridian police officer. A routine drivin
g licence check, he said, but Salena was reminded of the Afrikaner policemen of her youth.

  In her dreams, Salena could still feel their thick red fingers on her arms, like iron bracelets, as the inquisitive eyes of a squirrel watched her from a low branch. The police had asked if she and Yaseen had had sex. One had said he would put his fingers up Salena to see if she was wet, to see if she was a virgin.

  Salena had pleaded, “I’m not white, I’m not white!” But they wouldn’t believe her. Then Ma had arrived, with her Indian card, and she’d known it would be worse for her at home.

  In the garden, she lights the menthols she’s stolen off the front desk. She’s never smoked before, and she splutters like an old car as she inhales. She can imagine Zuhra telling her to extinguish the cigarette on Zain’s eyeball, or some other ball, but instead she stubs it out on the base of her lifeline and watches impassively as the skin darkens and shrivels. Soon there will be a new scar to join the others.

  She thinks, this is not her life, this is a role to which she’s forgotten the lines, and if she looks around suddenly, she will catch the audience, watching her, laughing at her. Zain says she needs help, that she is sick, she tried to kill him. She doesn’t argue. She can’t remember. Maybe she did try to kill him. Maybe she is sick.

  She remembers her conversation with Dr Galsband earlier that day. He’s convinced she meant to murder Zain. He said that if Salena had succeeded in killing Zain, she would have died, too. Perhaps not physically, but she would have been imprisoned by that act forever, a kind of death.

  “Like my marriage,” said Salena.

  “Would it have been worth it?”

  “Yes,” said Salena. “If only for the order and cleanliness left behind by his death. But, you know, I don’t believe I tried to kill him. Maybe I was trying to kill myself.”

  Dr Galsband was not impressed with her answer.

  It is he who has made Salena come outside with a pencil and paper, to sit on the bench under the oak tree in the back garden and write a list of things she would miss if she were dead.

  Salena takes a bite out of the apple crumble she has saved from lunch. It is the only thing that looked edible. Then, ever-obedient, she follows the doctor’s orders.

  Ten things I would miss if I were dead

  1. I would miss the smell of percolated coffee in the morning.

  2. I would miss sleeping.

  3. I would miss my sister and my sons.

  She chews at the end of her pencil. There is a burst of wind through the garden, and a few crunchy leaves land on the bench next to her, clearing a space from the tree and her mind. She thinks of how good she has always been. How obedient, like a cow chewing her way to the slaughterhouse. Succumbing to her parents’ rules and regulations, her mother’s worry about what people would think. Submitting meekly to Zain – after all, he earned the money, and all she did was give birth to babies and cook and clean his house and have sex with him on demand. Never questioning his rights over her, crawling back into her body and living through her sons.

  The nurse opens the patio door, beckons to her. But Salena shakes her head. Not yet. She is not quite ready. She can’t think of any more points to add to the list, but there is something else she needs to write before she can face Dr Galsband and his interrogations again. A letter.

  I see you in the faces of other children as you flit by in pursuit of your childish goals. I am despondent; I can never hold you, never make eye-contact with you as we share a joke, and never see you smile at me sleepily as I tuck you into bed at night.

  You will not have to face the anguish of adolescence. You will never taste a first kiss.

  We will never go shopping for your first suit. We will not discuss women. Or men. I will not be able to complain about your brothers’ taste in music; you will not roll your eyes at my maudlin musical choices when I drive you to school. You will never go to school.

  Your tongue will never again taste my pancakes made sweet with sugar, fragrant with cinnamon and tangy with the juice of a fresh lemon.

  Your eyes will not catch mine during a poetry reading, when the words jump from the voice of the poet into your heart.

  We will not walk together on the beach, sand stuck in our underwear and toes. We will not jump up together to dance to the melodic beat of “our” song.

  Of course, you will never have to compromise. You will never have to worry about being too fat or too thin or not rich enough. You will never be hurt. You will never know fear. You will never be sad. You will never stub your toe. You will never break your heart.

  You will not be lonely. You will never have to swallow your pride. You will not fail. You will never lie. You will never be late for a plane. You will never commit a crime. You will not doubt yourself. You will never face sorrow which leaves you too frozen to breathe. You will not hold my hand when I die.

  I miss you every day.

  All my love

  Your mother

  Gingerbread Boys

  125 g butter

  2 tbsp golden syrup

  ¾ cup sugar

  1 egg, beaten

  2 cups self-raising flour, sifted

  ¼ tsp salt

  2 tsp ground ginger

  ½ tsp cinnamon

  ½ tsp ground cloves

  Lightly cover a baking tray with non-stick spray. Melt the butter and golden syrup in a pot, then add the sugar and the egg. Lastly, add the flour, salt, ginger, cinnamon and cloves, and mix well.

  Roll out the dough to ½ cm thick and use a gingerbread boy biscuit cutter to shape the biscuits. Make faces with icing sugar, sultanas and chocolate drops, or leave undecorated.

  Bake at 160° C until a delicate golden brown, for approximately 10 to 12 minutes.

  The spices in these biscuits make them wonderfully flavourful, and they satisfy childish cannibalistic tastes.

  After the Wedding

  I watched her eyes, horizontal blades of spring grass, half-closed and heavy lidded, as though she’d recently left his bed. I liked her eyes, even as they grew wide and hollow like empty teacups as she took us in, lying in bits and pieces, like broken dolls on a rubbish heap.

  She closed the door but not before dropping that tattletale key into a brown blood-puddle. Poor thing. Her story was written the day of their wedding. I knew the anguished hours she would spend trying to clean the key and her mind of the blood. Trying to make excuses for herself and him. I’d done much the same. Only I’d walked deeper into the room, hypnotised by a waxen face that mirrored mine, a sister-me who had already committed the crime of disobeying him. The icy breeze that often played through the rooms of the house followed me into the blood-soaked room and waved the dark curls of my torso-less twin about, like a finicky hair-dresser.

  I fled in my mind but my body, already awkward with child, and my white satin slippers, betrayed me. I fell, belly first, into brown smears of rusted powder. It stained the key and the white silk dress he’d made me wear every day since I told him of the pregnancy. Soon I joined my co-wives; our stories all the same, all different.

  When the door opened, my spirit sighed with sadness. He always made us mute witnesses to his murders. Some he killed swiftly, some he mutilated while their broken bodies still breathed.

  She walked into the room first, her torch-eyes lighting the gloom for the others who dragged his beaten body behind them like a carcass. While he accounted for his crimes the men stared at our naked limbs with a revulsion that brought a blistering blush to my chilly cheeks.

  She and another, whom she called sister, touched our rigid flesh with capable white hands, washed our skin with sun-warmed water, cleansed us of caked blood stains, encrusted imperfections, and unwanted maggots. Then they matched our limbs, fingers, toes, heads and torsos like human pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and wrapped each piece in soft, red velvet shrouds. And as we were made whole, bone to bone, he was minced by the men who locked his sentient remains in our former burial chamber with his glowing red key.


  She visits our graves; we are not forgotten. We live on through her.

  Ringing in the New

  THE PHONE RINGS, BUT SHE CANNOT BRING herself to answer it. It looks and sounds sinister, foreign. Everything seems different now, yet she’s been away a mere two weeks. When she blinks she expects to see the clinic bedroom, all cheery, non-intrusive colours, but instead she’s in her perfect kitchen, with its marbled counter-tops and steel appliances. There are the framed photographs of her sons next to the coffee machine, and there is the phone which won’t stop ringing.

  Who could be calling her? It is 8 am. Zuhra will be asleep in her faraway time zone. She cannot get up to answer the phone. She feels like an unsewn dress, held together with straight pins; one false move and the whole fragile structure will fall apart.

  The phone stops, abruptly, one ring left hanging in the air, like a question mark.

  Maybe it’s Zain, checking up on her. He’s become uncharacteristically attentive since he convinced himself that she tried to kill him; he sees this as a sign of her devotion. She’s heard there are people who view abuse – broken bones, bloody gaping holes where teeth should be – as a sign of love and passion. She sees no romance in violence, nothing tender in watching your skin change colour and waiting for welts to heal.

  The phone rings again.

  She should answer it, it will bring her closer to the coffee machine. She stands up cautiously, moves over to the phone. It stops ringing.

  If it rings again she’ll answer it, she promises herself.

  She makes her coffee, heaps the grounds into the machine, puts a stick of cinnamon and three cloves for protection into the pot, as Zuhra as taught her, and adds enough water for two cups.

  The phone rings again.

  As she reaches for it, her right eye twitches, a sign that something good is going to happen.