THE SILENCE OF THE WILTING SKIN
TLOTLO TSAMAASE
PINK
NARCISSUS
PRESS
This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
THE SILENCE OF THE WILTING SKIN
© 2020 Tlotlo Tsamaase
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Cover illustration & design by Duncan Eagleson
Published by Pink Narcissus Press
Massachusetts, USA
pinknarc.com
ISBN: 978-1-939056-17-7
First trade paperback edition: May 2020
To Mama, Papa and Mmêmogolo (for lost days).
My Girlfriend was born on the train a week after her mother died.
“Trust no man without a shadow,” my grandmother used to say. “If shadows are felled from their owners it means the body is vacant of a spirit. Something felled them.”
We have a train station that no one boards in our wards. It’s decrepit and takes its specific passengers to and fro—somewhere. Somewhere no one wants to go. My dead grandfather always has his palm against the window, a silent wave, trying to catch us in our adolescent growth. My still-born brother wavers next to him, slumbering on a hammock-like cushioned chair hanging from the rail. He is grey-skinned with dark-brown eyes so beady with aliveness it pains my heart. There are about five dead in our family and we’re still counting. My boyfriend is huddled next to them, holding them. He still carries that quiet expression with him, an expression that has slain itself as a martyr for someone.
I prefer to only see my family dead, for we see them in their true identities. The only time we ever become us is when we’re dead; when we’re dead we become the still-Black font of sky. My dead family calls the color on them still-Black hoping it will still itself onto our bones. But we don’t refer to them as dead to their face, they are still here, they are still a part of us, more than we could ever be
From our window, the fields are a wisp of green, a railway line stitched across them. We can see it in the distance from our balcony using our telescope. You can’t be near the dead without catching their fever.
“The graveyard opens early today,” my brother says, walking into the living room with a limp in his left leg. He holds a tray of tea for Grandma. “We should get there early to avoid long queues.”
“It’s 3:00 a.m.,” I say, pushing the telescope down. But we can’t ignore the train’s horn. It is a wail; its nails drag into the still night.
“That’s the perfect time. The night guard will be on his shift and might give us tea, phaphatha and a warm place to hold up in,” Brother says.
“I haven’t finished knitting this for my brother,” I say, lifting an untold fabric. “I will be done in a few hours.”
“He is dead,” Brother says. “He doesn’t actually get the chills. Better give that to Grandma. You know how she can’t bear the cold. She wants to get an early night so she’s not tired for our visitation in a couple of hours.”
“Mxm, whatever, just stop making me feel guilty,” I say, clicking my needles against each other as I thread yarn through them.
“The fare has doubled—”
“Again? What the hell. It went up last month. I don’t think washing dishes is going to cut it anymore,” I say, banging my fist against the table. “And we still have last month’s rates to pay.”
“If we don’t pay, they’re just going to relocate our dead relatives to some Satan-worshipping asshole who will make them work menial jobs with dithokolosi.”
“Eish, please. Like, you don’t need to remind me. We’re seeing our grandfather tomorrow! He’s going to have questions, and I don’t want to lie to his face again this time. I swear they will drag him out the train this time and he’ll be slaving around for those evil things. And you? Where’s your money?”
“Having a kid is expensive,” Brother says, staring at the tea getting cold.
“Having dead relatives is, too,” I say. “So, where’s the rest of your money?”
“I had to reinvest it into the company—”
“I’m not going to chew on that shit anymore like it was some goddamned bougie meal. I swear I’m going to make your girlfriend throw up whatever money you fed her. Or shit it out. One way or another, I’m getting that money out of her.”
“You’re so crass.”
“And you’re a brother. Act like one.”
“Fine, geez, I’ll figure something out.”
Visiting the Dead: A Memory
In the early hours of morning before we go visit the dead, the cock crows. The air is dusty with night and moonlight. Footsteps tread through our home’s long passageway to my bedroom. The door creaks open, and my body senses the intruder with anxiety. I’m sleeping, but my body is coiled with fear. Through the sight of my skin, the intruder is bone-thin, moonlight-soaked and wan. It is Grandma in dreamskin, lacking flesh and fat. There is no shadow to her form. Her legs are brittle, her white gown embosses her skeleton in feather-form and light. The moon’s lazy eye follows her footpath.
Dreamskin Grandma stares at me until I wake up from the intensity of her observance. My eyelids pull back, my heart bangs against my chest, and I’m quick with sweat. Dreamskin Grandma neatly and quietly wraps her bone-fingers around my throat, telling the air to back out from my lungs. She presses me hard that I can’t move but to stare with nauseating fear.
“You’re in the wrong room,” I stutter. “Grandma’s in the other room. You have the wrong person. You’re warning the wrong person.” I don’t say I don’t want to die but saying that means I want my grandmother to die. “What do you want?” I cry.
The dark sockets of her skull gleam with a thick torpid smoke. She speaks without voice: Your genes are concentrated with a nightmare.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
Little girl do you understand how difficult it is to mine dreamskin and extract from them a bountiful resource? Here you are mimicking me to a threat instead of seeking me as power. There are enemies who alter your vision so they have power over you. To have vision is empowerment—freedom.
“But I don’t want to die.”
Even if I were here to kill you, it would be the fake you that dies…not the real you.
“The fake me?” I look about me, unable to find an ally for escape. “What’s so fake about me?”
The fake you is not this color, is not this hair. You questioned it before. If you are like the citizens from The City on the Other Side, then why is there a dividing line between you and them? Why do they receive more benefits? You are unconscious to the spiritual submissiveness that tethers you to the religious web of this city, thinking it holy. The fake you is a manufactured avatar by this city’s ideals. You are a pawn in the grand scheme of things. Your sight, your hearing, the gem dissolved in your skin, the language on your tongue is a product that neither profits you nor promotes you in this ‘beloved’ city. You think you are invisible, that is nothing! Wait until you are not white-washed but turned translucent. Do you want to see?
“See what?”
The truth. Feel the truth. Bleed the truth. The world you so blithely desire is already here in your mind, penned in by their laws—she points in the direction of the other half of the city—Break the walls and you are free.
I’m thick with sleep and terror, a dizzying concoction. “You’re speaking philosophies and metaphors—you’ve
lost me,” I say.
Your great-great grandfather gave you sight, the dreamskin mimes, grime on its bones. I will give you auditory gifts more valuable than the market value of your family estate.
In the dark, my tongue traces my lips with hunger. “What must I sacrifice?”
Let me touch you. I will be your alchemist, not death.
Dreamskin. They curse, they destroy, they do harm. I will not be seduced by a dreamskin. “I’m fine, thank you, but Grandma’s bedroom is down the hall, third door on your left.”
Its form heaves forward, a menace steaming in its sockets like empty graves waiting for corpses.
My heart is a tolling bell. “But I said no,” I shout.
Its cackle sparks the night air, and I feel stupid. Child, I am not your subordinate for you to assume that you have the power to say no. No? To a dreamskin? Unheard of. A calling is an irreversible chemical reaction. I am here to dispatch what I must dispatch…into your body. Whatever dispute you have is not under my jurisdiction. See, I am quick to catch my death, it’s a punctual train; I must not be late.
The fucking dreamskin has humor.
“Nice pun,” I say, bitterly.
Its claw snicks my forehead. Politeness is my policy; I motioned ‘choice’ to you, not that you actually had a choice. You held the assumption of power.
“But why?”
Trust no man without a shadow, it repeats a mantra. If shadows are felled from their owners it means the body is vacant of a spirit. Something felled them.
I never understood that statement even when Grandma repeated it. “Everyone has shadows,” I say.
What the eye doesn’t see, it assumes, it explains. Conforming, you will lose everything that is dear to you. Time! Now lay still, I despise fussy prey.
What am I not seeing that I’m assuming? Too late.
Grandma in dreamskin lays around my skin, an itch of a nightmare. Her bone-fingers remain imprinted to my neck. I try to scream for Brother, but her hand nullifies my voice, squishes it between her fingers like crumbled balls of sugar. “You’re committing perjury,” I try to scream. “You can’t do this. Why are you doing this to me? What are you doing?”
Without voice, she maintains: We make the rules, the rules do not make us.
Fear explodes in my body; I pray to God. I stay paralyzed hour-upon-hour watching her knitting dread into my being: she raises her arms, a pantomime, drags them across my limbs, massaging something cold and soulless into me. Time sweeps out from my bedroom like dust in the hand of a wind until the walls are lit with the morning sun. Morning. My eyes see reality bare of a dreamskin figure. My bones crack as I sit up. Grandma’s dreamskin visited me instead of her. I must break the news to Grandma of her death to come.
Brother slides open my bedroom door finding me wet with sweat. “Grandmother went to sleep and won’t wake up.” He is curt, unsure what to do with his body. He shuffles to and fro, shaking sweat, worry and uncertainty from his wrinkled forehead. “I can’t hear her heartbeat.”
Sister-In-Law appears and folds her arms. “She’s—”
“I don’t understand,” he says, glaring at her. “No one dies without their dreamskin signing the death register.” He holds up the leather-bound death logbook that holds countless of our lineage’s death signatures, and next to Grandma’s name is an empty space. I don’t tell him that Grandma’s dreamskin was too busy terrorizing me through the night to sign anything. I feel embarrassed and ashamed, but I don’t know why. A dreamskin is only allowed one visitation in its entire lifetime: to warn the owner of their death to come. It is bad for it touch someone who’s not its owner; am I bewitched? In the coming days, what symptoms will I display? No, I must not tell them.
“She’s not dead.” Brother is stern. “She’s not dead until her dreamskin informs us. I refuse to believe it. We are not burying her.”
A quick, cold fear blazes in my legs, halting the feeling in them. “If we don’t bury her, we are desecrating our family rituals,” I say, getting off my bed onto shaky legs. “Our actions will burden us with a curse.”
“She. Is. Not. Dead. Not until her dreamskin tells us.” He lifts the thick-padded logbook again, as if it’s more alive than Grandma. He shakes it with the desperate certainty that the empty unsigned space is more definitive of her aliveness than the explicit death in her wordless heart. “It is not signed, which means she wasn’t warned of her death. She can’t die without being warned.”
“They make the rules, the rules don’t make them,” I reiterate in a whisper, understanding what that future-ghost, the death-warner, the dreamskin said last night; they are not bound by the law to warn their owners—they can change the rules as they wish. But why, of all the four people—Brother, Sister-In-Law, Niece, Grandma—living in this house, did it choose me?
Brother narrows his eyes. “What?”
That I had a chit-chat with a dreamskin is not a casual thing to mention. They are feared and only revered for their prophecies, the ability to foretell our death for preparation’s sake. But what if it was tricking me last night?
“What?” Brother enunciates.
“We have to bury her,” I say.
“Dreamskin aren’t allowed to do this!” He spits as he shouts. “This is the second time they’ve done this to my family. Unbelievable. I have to file a complaint.”
“Your family?” My nerves twist in irreparable anger. “Listen here, I am not your property. You are not my commander. You do not make the rules just because you have two sacs hanging from your manhood. This is a family discussion, and it stands that we will always follow the rituals.” Deaths in the family always birth warring parties.
“I am the head of this family!” he yells. He knows it burns me with anger, because yelling is kin to talking down to someone.
“You are not God.” I, too, stand taller, and I pierce him with my glare. “It may suit you well that you delay with the family’s payments, but I will not let you interfere with grandma’s journey to the ancestral realm. Say that you are the ruler of this family, and I will sharpen your words and guillotine that ‘head’” I step toward him, a heavy hold in my glare. “You want to take death and the dreamskin to court? That doesn’t exist. Dreamskin are nightmares that don’t always come through the night. Brother, these things are beyond us. Don’t wrap Grandma’s body in a coffin of legal shit. It’s not as like if you win a case, then she’ll be alive. We have to send her well according to the ancestor’s dictatorship.”
Brother shakes his head and storms down our passageway, patriarchy thick and intoxicating on the tongue of his mind. Bastard has too much pride to shed a tear.
Sister-In-Law comes towards me, snaps a strand of coiled Afro from my scalp.
I smack her hand. “Ish, man!”
She observes the strand in the sharp sunlight. “Your hair is grey with death. Her passing has stained our house. We’ll have to shave every hair on our body to be pure again.”
***
Hours later in our hairless bodies, Brother is hasty with the ticking time given by my uproar earlier. He’s delayed Grandma’s spirit, imprisoning it in cold flesh for his stubbornness. Grandma’s swollen eyes stare at the ceiling; her spirit scrapes the words “Hurry up, I want to die, to leave this imprisoning body” across her vocal chords. Brother brings an inyanga to the house, who declares Grandma’s death and signs the death register on behalf of the dreamskin. The inyanga stares at me; her skin expands at the pores and sniffs the air, my essence. Perhaps it’s the stench of the witch crafted into my skin that makes her sneeze and cough. She seems to want to say something but thinks better of it. Instead, she pats my shoulder and whispers secretly, “My condolences,” as if I’m the one who’s lost my life. Her voice is wet with cough. “Live, dear child, live. For that is all you have. No flesh is more powerful than God nor more powerful than your ancestors to take that away. Live.”
I take her words as holy and anoint my hope with t
hem. Do I dare pull her back and ask her what happens to those burned by the hand of a dreamskin? Do I dare risk my freedom, to be thrown away into a life of a pariah to waste away in the forest? Or worse, if anyone finds out, I could be killed and sold piece by piece and used as muti to pepper peoples’ desires with juju. They will consider my body, incensed by the dreamskin’s touch, more valuable than an elephant’s tusk or a diamond. No one must know. No one must see. I shut my lips and move forward with the rituals of the day.
We prepare Grandma’s body, wash it, and shave off her hair to ease her journey. We bury her in the graveyard behind our residence, and scatter sorghum grains across it so our fields will be rich. We pour water over it so she can satiate herself on her journey. We wash ourselves of the death that has smoke-clung to our skins for several days without leaving our houses in fear of polluting our neighbors. Hours later, as the sun soaks the sky with its first light, Brother and I are at the train station with empty stomachs and fear saturating our bellies.
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