You take me home.
Insomnia wraps around my feeble body. I wake up in the middle of the night paralyzed. The creature, Manyaapelo, growls into my ear, You are nothing.
Outside my window, the night sky is covered in my scars instead of stars.
* * *
In the morning, there is a piece of sky and foliage out my window. The birds sing, sometimes I’m deaf from stress to hear them. Today I hear them and prey for hope. I sit in the bathtub and wash the nightmare clung to my skin. It’s Saturday. A break from work. You’re back again, nerves unwired, wishing for a quick high. I wish I could say many things, like, stop pumping false love into my womb if you mean to destroy it. If you mean to use it to let it cuddle
your desire
your swag
your masculinity
I wasn’t taught what love is.
They say anger is made of your body. You’re lean, broad-shouldered. You have a lisp, a buzz-cut. You ask me if lunch is ready. I stare at my pet, Keletsô, sitting hunched back against the wall, whinnying.
“I need to feed my pet,” I say.
“Who’s your pet?” you ask.
“My Dreams is my pet,” I whisper.
As you get up you slap my butt and I think, no, this is not love. “You look hot, baby girl,” you say. “You just need to put on some fat. You’re so skinny.”
Kakanyô catches me in the kitchen, shaking her head. “There’s a reason why they all cheated on you. Now you’re dating married men.” Then: “You’re a slum.”
“I need to feed my pet,” I wearily add.
“Feed the man in your bed,” Matshwênyêgô says. “There’s no point to that pet of yours. You’re wasting your time with it. Just kill it. Kill the damn animal.”
When I return to bed, you are gone. You’ve done your job. I’m alone.
I need to burn muse on the fire, feed it to Keletsô. But I’m too hungry. My starving pet enters the bedroom. “Matshwênyêgô and Kakanyô are wrong you know. You deserve better. You don’t need someone to feel less lonely. You mean something.”
“But why won’t anyone love me?” I ask.
“Because you won’t love yourself.” My pet and its brutal honesty. “They treat you how you treat yourself because they know you’ll still be there for them. No matter how cruel they get, they know you’ll still stick around because you’ve lowered your self-esteem for them. You fear being lonely, yet the thing you fear is the thing you feel with them: lonely. So what difference does it make if you leave? Because one, they ignore your messages, your calls, your needs. So it’ll still be the same if you walk away from them except this time you’ll be choosing yourself. Being single is not the end of the world. You can’t continue to be this person, kill this person you’re becoming to save yourself. Be a snake and shed that skin, sis.”
I sigh and pick it up, wondering where do I start.
“What do you want to do?” it asks.
I stroke its fur, so fluffy, so full of yarn, so soft. “I want to start a business.”
“What kind of business?” my pet asks.
I mutter incomprehensible words.
“Remember,” it says with teary eyes, “if you kill me, you kill yourself. You won’t let me die, right?”
I swallow. “I’m just a bit tired today. How about I feed you tomorrow? I promise.”
My pet slips from my grip, grunting. “I wasn’t going to resort to this: but if you don’t take care of me I will go to someone who will.”
“You’re threatening me? You’re my idea! I gave birth to you!”
“Everyone births ideas, it doesn’t mean they belong to them.”
“Fuck you!”
“Some people turn those ideas into something great, some let those ideas linger like strangers, others turn them into cheap products. Execution makes them their property. You have done nothing. Your promises are just graves waiting for bodies that will never come.”
* * *
There’s a new girl at the office. She’s pretty. Her make-up makes her melanin glow. Her Peruvian hair weaves down her back. Her eyelashes and eyebrows are poetic ballerinas. She has a beautiful accent. Her body is the right shape. It makes me stare at myself in the public toilets. I am jealous. The guy I like drools, cocooning her with his fantasies.
“Don’t you think you should fix your hair?” Kakanyô whispers as I walk by to make some coffee. “It makes you look…unkempt.”
I pat my Afro as if it did anything.
“She’s right, eh.” Kakanyô says. “And you wonder why the girls at the office have rich husbands, cars and homes. They look better than you. I mean, for instance, how can you go to work without make-up, not even high-heels, brah. No one will ever be interested in you.”
“But it costs money I don’t have, money I’d rather save,” I whisper.
“What was that?” they ask.
I look down at my hands. “Nothing.”
That’s the day I stop rising from seat, the day I stop protruding from the field of cogs like a weed. I hold my piss, I hold my hunger, I hold my thirst until everyone knocks off.
* * *
Today is the day for the big chop.
It is dark. The night has broken through the doors; it has dragged the light away, its nails screeching through the abyss. It is time for the killing. I stare at my Afro, my child that I have watched grow for years. The memories of its youth, of its glory, of its misbehaving, of its birth, flood me. Before, I remember my relaxed-hair days. If I had on a weave or braids, I had to account for the time to undo them. Then, I’d have to pay someone at the salon to relax my hair. After two weeks, my hair would break and turn frizzy and I’d have to braid it. Expenses. Expenses. My hair controlled me and now it continues to control. I will control it now. “Chop it all off,” I want to scream to a barber, except I’m too broke to go to one. My Afro was born as a buzzcut that grew into a halo of growth. Today, its voice is too strong for me.
“What the hell are you waiting for?” Kakanyô asks. “Do it now.” She hands me a pair of gleaming scissors. “Go on, butcher it.”
“Please, don’t make me do this,” I say. “I promise I’ll keep her quiet.”
Kakanyô jams the scissor and the clipper into my hands. “It is time for the killing.” She hands me a weave. “Bury it.”
I tell my Afro to “sit still, be quiet. Damn it, stop moving!” I tie it down in tracks and tracks of lines on my skull. “Shut up, damn it!” I maim its voice with glue and stitching. I veil it with the Peruvian weave and it waters to my shoulders; an ocean on my backbone, a tickling shoreline of waves to my elbows. Beneath this ocean, my Afro is hogtied. Closure seals its voice. I pick the shovel, exorcise the old me, drag its body into the old garden and start digging. I bury the old me. I bury the old me. I bury the old me.
I am a new me. I twirl and ask the mirror, “Am I pretty now?” My reflection repeats itself in many more mirrors. The mirror is translucent waters. I am a fish gliding through its waters, clones of me are reposted in many mirrors, many homes reflecting their comments back to me: You are fire babygirl, the mirror says. But you can do better.
My clones are lost in the mirror world.
I stare at my bank account. My credit card bill for the weave is high. I ogle the other purchases I made—designer clothes, perfumes, shoes. The costs can pay my rent and spare some change for groceries for the month. What am I going to eat this month? How am I going to pay the rent?
Kakanyô lifts my chin, my sight to the mirror. “It’s worth it to starve for beauty.”
I slip back into bed, lie in it as if it’s my coffin. I will not crinkle my hair, I will not crinkle myself nor my skin. I have to be perfect for tomorrow.
* * *
#AmIPrettyNow?
I startle to the glaring hour that’s broken by dawn.
“I am perfect!” I shout. It is morning already. I am perfect. Yet I am unhappy in this new body of mine. The streets are soaked in a static of ignorance.
My movements cut through passers-by. I’m a stranger even to myself. I am sunbaked dirt. My bones are jail bars. My breasts are barren cells, my thighs are wounded soldiers. No one sees this jail cell walking through the streets, a tower of heels, expensive labels, through the malls.
But I am a beautiful scent; bees follow my trail, flowers bloom and die in my breaths perfumed of a desperate want. My skin is tautly wrapped around my skeleton, the skeleton of my dreams. I see them, strangers, men, women, children, staring at my smile, how even it is, how beautiful I am. My teeth are crossbars to the words I want to say, the words I could say, don’t say. Words that lie in the tombs of my gut.
* * *
No one noticed my new hairstyle today, nor my new clothes, my new look. Sure, some said I looked hot. I paid all this money and no one really notices me. Fashion your body with your personality, my pet said, that’s what makes you real. That’s what attracts joy and good things. I stare at my desktop screen wondering how I can wear my personality.
“Yo, ain’t you going home?” my colleague asks. “You always stay late, it’s not like you’re getting overtime.”
“I’m afraid to go home,” I say.
She laughs. “Is the landlord on your back too? This place gotta stop with this shit of delaying our salary, man. My landlord wanted to kick me out this morning.”
I sink into my chair. “No…it’s not that. Don’t you…”
“Hey, if you’re going through something, you can talk to me, ja.”
“I can’t sleep. No, it’s not insomnia, because I’m in bed, my eyes are closed, but my body is not resting. How do you handle the terror when you get home?”
“Terror?” Her eyes widen into panic.
“That animal that waits for you at home, waiting to terrorize you. It threatened me last time, said it’ll follow me everywhere now.”
She slinks back, a shadow preferring the embrace of the norm. “That’s silly. Africans never had these things in their home. It was brought by the oceans.”
Brought by the oceans from other worlds. “But I feel it and it is real,” I say. Can I really trust her and tell her about this thing that terrorizes me nightly?
“That thing leaps onto my back, and sinks its teeth into my neck. It spends the whole night feeding on me.”
“Why don’t you just fight it?” she asks matter-of-factly.
“It ties me down.”
“Before it ties you down, why don’t you just fight it?”
“You can’t fight it,” I say, sighing with exhaustion.
“We all get sad, but it’ll pass. I’d invite you over…but…I hear it’s bad luck to mix with this thing, not that I believe in it, you know. I can give you a ride home though.”
Give me a ride to hell. She thinks what I have is infectious. I see it in her eyes. She was only being kind by asking, she didn’t really mean that I spill my thoughts to her. Is that what friendship is?
* * *
Home. The darkness is dust-sullen. I wade myself through it, swim through it, but it is heavy. There’s no power. I’ve no candles. I use my phone as a candle. My presence—the trigger— awakens the sleeping creature, a shark smelling the blood long escaped. It lifts from its haunches, grunting its smoky breath. It circles me. Ruffles its muzzle against my leg, sniffing me. My soul is a cacophony of fright. The creature’s paw drags across my back. “You should’ve been home an hour ago. You wouldn’t want me following you out there…” Its paw jabs my shoulder and it clambers onto me, alchemizing with the trauma on my back. I heave to my knees.
My pet purrs and strolls by. “You’ve been ignoring me. If you feed me—”
“How can you ask that of me when this is happening?” I say. The creature’s hoof stabs into my back. “Help me!” I reach out to my pet but it stares down at me.
“Procrastination is the murderer of your dreams,” it says. “I warned you. You’ve chosen them over me.”
“Them?”
“You know, Kakanyô and Matshwênyêgô are just thoughts. They’re not real people; they’re your fears and thoughts manifested into real life. And they’re coming to kill you.”
I clamp my hands to my ears, screaming, and the hooved monster claws my back.
The twins appear from the dark of the bathroom, clothed only in skin. “Unfortunately feeding the pet destroys us. We can’t have that,” they say.
My pet steps back onto its haunches. “I told you it’ll be too late one day. They were once unreal, but you fed them the flesh on your bones.” It disintegrates, fur falling to ground like cloth, bones clanking in their hands like jewels.
Kakanyô and Matshwênyêgô and their creature move forward in unison, their gait not so human. I’m famished, sight weak, astonished. Kakanyô and Matshwênyêgô have the shape of breasts, no nipples or vaginas; they’re brown sleek mannequins.
I can’t breathe and I don’t want to probe and ask how they pee and if they have an anus. I hardly see them eat, yet they pack normal weight in their bodies, appearing soft. Their heads are Afro-tinged, eyes like impalas a liquid black. Their ears like antennas scanning frequencies, catching gossip out in the world, reading into mannerisms and people’s secrets. They have the same features as me, except today they’re skewed with slanted long necks, high foreheads, sharp jawlines like shoulder blades of a black crow.
“We’re born like this,” they mime. “An accident in the womb.”
They close in around me. Their sharp-metal tongue bends my spine, spills my blood.
“Let me go,” I cry.
They laugh so loudly it hurts my ears, almost as if it’s coming from inside my head.
Matshwênyêgô kicks at my chest, at my head, at my body, until I’m breathless, panting. My mind is her church, every day it’s at her sermons. My unstable appetite hobbles to my hunger with a machete and hawks it into a bloody mush.
“What did you expect anxiety and depression to look like?” the say in unison, smiling. “All your worrying, your negativity, so self-deprecating. You allowed us into the world. Gave us the power to breathe. But we can’t just feed off oxygen. We need more to live.”
They’re need me to be alive for their torment.
Tensions lull in the air, a midwife to my terror. The din inside my mind grows, and no one can hear my screaming. My eyes are windows I bang against. Outside the glassy opaque eye of my body I am a prisoner. The river of night settles in and around me, filling this pit of depression and anxiety, burying me. Kakanyô and Matshwênyêgô—they know my patterns, my timings, know the hour is always seeking to drown me. My skin is a straitjacket clung to my bones; I can’t escape them, my skin has us all locked in. I stare up into the night, a heavy breath against my neck. The lone light of the moon stares me down as my soul is nulled by its head.
21
“Egoli” © T.L. Huchu
Originally Published in Africanfuturism: An Anthology edited by Wole Talabi (Brittle Paper: October 19, 2020)
Stare up at the infinite stars through the port window of your hut and see the passage of eras. The light has travelled millions of years and you are directly looking at the past. You are unable to sleep despite the undlela zimhlophe the herbalist prescribed. It’s the dreams, the very lucid dreams, the herb induces that scare you the most — you’ve already seen so much in this world. Your eyes aren’t quite what they once were, but you see well enough to make out shadow and light, the pinpricks in the vast canvas that engulfs the world before sunrise. You are old now and don’t sleep much anymore. There will be plenty of time for that when they plant you in the soil where they buried your rukuvhute; right there under the roots of the msasa and mopani trees where those whose voices whisper in the wind lie patiently waiting. Your grandson Makamba messaged you yesterday and told you to look south to the heavens before dawn. This window faces east.
Your bladder calls out urgently so you grab your cane and waddle out, stepping round your sleeping mat and opening the door outside. Once you had to stoop to get under
the thatch. Now, you’ve lost a bit of height and your bent back means you walk right under it with inches to spare. Your pelvis burns and you’re annoyed at the indignity of being rushed. It seems that time has even made your body, which has birthed eight children, impatient with you as you go round the back of the sleeping hut, lean against the wall, hitch up your skirts, spread your legs and lighten yourself there. The latrine is much too far away. The trickle runs between your calloused bare feet and steam rises.
“Maihwe zvangu,” you groan midway between relief and exertion.
When you are done, you tidy yourself, carefully step away from the wall, and patrol the compound. Each step is a monumental effort. It takes a while before your muscles fully wake and your joints stop complaining, but you know the drill now, how you must keep going before your body catches up. Young people talk slow when they address you, but they don’t know your mind’s still sharp — it’s just the rest of you that’s a bit worn out. That’s okay too; you remember what it was to be young once. Indeed you were only coming into your prime when the whole family was huddled around Grandfather’s wireless right there by the veranda of that two roomed house, the one with European windows and a corrugated zinc metal roof that was brand new then and the envy of the village. Grandfather Panganayi was a rural agricultural extension worker who rode a mudhudhudu round Charter district working for the Rhodesians until he’d made enough money to build his own home. You remember he was proud of that house, the only one in the compound with a real bed and fancy furniture, whose red floor smelled of Cobra and whose whitewashed walls looked stunning in the sunlight compared to the muddy colours of the surrounding huts, just as he was proud of the wireless he’d purchased in Fort Victoria when he was sent there for his training. Through his wireless radio with shiny knobs that no one but he was allowed to touch, the marvels of the world beyond your village reached you via shortwave from the BBC World Service, and because you didn’t speak English, few of you did, the boys that went to school, not you girls, Grandfather Panganayi had to translate the words into Shona for you to hear. In one of those news reports, it was only one of many but this one you still remember because it struck you, they said an American — you do not remember his name — had been fired into the sky in his chitundumusere-musere and landed on the moon.
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 28