The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  “Do you think she’ll make it in time?” he asks, huffing into his hands. A puff of vapor escapes, rises like a cloud of smoke and disappears. It is too cold even for Grandma’s spirit to journey into the train. If she doesn’t make it, she’ll remain trapped in our dimension as a silly ghost, growing dumb by the minute.

  “I wish we could help her,” I say, shaking on the spot, hoping to create a bubble of warmth around me. My bones are painful against my thin, tawny skin.

  At eight, the train’s horn signals its arrival, which is meant to wake her spirit up. Brother’s head perks up. I yank my woolen hat down my ears, my teeth jittering.

  “The train’s about here. She hasn’t risen from the grave yet!” he shouts.

  How did it happen? You keep asking. It’s been hours since we buried Grandma. You asked me once how Grandma passed away. I don’t like talking about it because before she died, her dead-form in dreamskin visited me instead of her. I couldn’t even break the news to her in the early morning of her death to come. Before the burial, her body looked thin and taut with death. It didn’t look like her.

  The train’s wheels wail against the track as the train rattles to a stop across the platform from us. The conductor eyes us and Brother approaches him with ease and agility to persuade him. Finally, we see Grandma’s spirit creep through the thicket of trees in the graveyard with shaky, weak knees, covered in cowskin, making her way towards the train stationed by the platforms. She is embossed in feathery light. The land is steep towards the train station, and she holds onto loose grass that crumbles down with fresh earth. My heart is in my throat, because I always helped her walk. What if she comes tumbling down and fails to board the train? It’s happened to those who died in our wards. Their spirits wander the streets, listless, like torn bags of plastic. Time kneads them into bitterness, and they’re no longer as kindhearted as they used to be. You find them in the streets, barking sometimes, chasing away the street dogs. Brother hugs me as we watch Grandma pat her weak knees and resume her walk on levelled ground. Her tiny hand is steadfast, holding a Bible.

  When she steps into the train, punctual as usual, for the departure time, our hearts become lighter. Maneuvering to her seat, she opens her Bible and begins reading. We remind her to greet our dead great grandparents and parents for us. Our hands are still cold and high in the air, waving her a safe journey as the train remains still, waiting for its departure. Through the tiny aisle, dead Grandpa hurries to her with weak knees and stumbles into her lap, hugging her in tears. He can’t hear my yelp of joy of seeing him.

  “I really wish I could see where the train goes,” Brother says, craning his neck to get a better look at Grandpa.

  The city boundaries end in abyss-dust and black fog. The train disappears and remains there during its weeks of inactivity until it must come back out for the dead we have buried. I don’t know what those like my grandmother do on that side. The train for the dead passes every once a month, and those who have died have to wait for it.

  Today, like every month, everyone we know is gathered on the platform, our heads covered in cloth, hoping we get to wave or see our other dead relatives smiling at us. The train arrives at eight a.m. and leaves within 15 minutes. It is important that every citizen of the wards visits their dead relative. The relationship with the dead must never be severed. Dishonoring visitation rites will shame the family and bring misfortune to their lineage. When we visit Grandpa, he normally asks how we’re doing and nags my brother to marry his girlfriend. He spends most of the time playing with Brother’s baby. But right now he’s too preoccupied with Grandma, his still-wife who’s no longer widowed. Sister-In-Law can’t visit because she must first be introduced into the family through marriage. At this thought, I catch Boyfriend smiling at me through one of the carriage’s windows. Guilt makes it difficult to swallow. He thinks I still love him, especially after he died saving me from the fire of one of our outhouses. His face is knotted with burnt skin, scarred with my infidelity. I feel guiltiest when I kiss my Girlfriend knowing that he hopes we’ll be united in death…someday.

  Brother nudges me. “Don’t just stand. Blow the guy a kiss or something.”

  I hesitate, raise my hand. Boyfriend’s eyes brighten. On the cold fogged window, he writes with his finger: I love you, s’thandwa same. I’ll wait for you forever.

  Even when I die old and meet you as an old woman? I used to joke. But today the words are heavy anchors in my gut.

  “Tsk, tsk.” Brother shakes his head. “Shem skepsel. If only he knew you’re cheating on him.”

  I elbow Brother in the ribs. “Shut up. The dead have hyper-sensitive hearing, you bastard.” When I look back, Boyfriend is gone. Did he hear? Cheating on a ghost is really a new low for me.

  Brother giggles, fighting me off, bumping into passers-by. We’re not the only ones here. A couple of our neighbors stand eagerly to introduce their babies, wives, and husbands. When one of the carriage’s doors open, a kid makes a lunge for them. The entire universe freezes, the span of a bird’s wings pause mid-flight, the arc of air stills. The crowd of visitors cup their mouths shaped in terror. My heart leaps like a light ball into my throat, the blood in our veins stalled with panic. The kid’s foot is literally an inch away from the riser, the father yanks the little boy by his corduroy straps and wraps himself around himself, fear pale on his face. “What did I tell you? You should never, never ever, enter the train. Never!” The young boy starts crying, and says, “I just wanted to surprise Mama.”

  If you enter the train of the dead whilst alive, you will never return.

  Warmth returns to my cheeks, but I still feel the cold threat of dreamskin Grandma’s bone-print grasped around my throat, a nightmare I may not escape.

  You can’t be near the dead without catching their fever.

  The Mirror

  We are nameless.

  I can’t remember them. I can’t remember the people I loved. Where are their names? I wake up; we are burning. We have no names. I wake up screaming again. Every single time after seeing our passed-away relatives. No one hears me. My family chooses to not hear me anymore. Before, they used to think assailants were attacking me until they found an empty bedroom and a girl fighting the screams from her throat. I probably wake up like this because of what people say: our family is diseased. Even though we’re all the same. I’m worse now.

  Sister-In-Law and Brother never wanted marriage. They’ve had a bastard child. Our neighbors hate that fact; they have tall walls hoping that philosophy won’t crawl into their homes like a thokolosi and possess their children. It happens often that the measure of protection is both preventive and useless. A few days ago, I found Neighbor 4201 in the streets on his knees, picking at a scrambling insect in the sand. He mindlessly threw it into his mouth and chewed relentlessly. Right next door is a unisex dormitory full of people fevered with the passion to not eat, which has the bodies of our neighbors constipated with pica, eating the shells of insects and crusts of plaster. Most people have their own beliefs which oftentimes noose our necks and deform us into strangers living in our bodies. So our neighbors keep sight of us and lay certain pieces of herbs around their yards to dissolve our fate from stealing into their homes.

  The District on the Other Side of the City doesn’t have horse-shaped wards like us. Their structures for living are ordered in grids as if in formation to a strict teacher with a lead ruler. When I wake up, the sun is a swollen eye in the sky, burning the morning into nothing. I wonder how The District on the Other Side of the City wakes up with no sun, no warmth. The rooster crows for the millionth time, its flapping wings like someone clapping, and I wish I could snooze it. It sits on the thick log outside my bedroom and if I stretched my hand out my window, I could strangle it. I try to beg sleep to not leave me, and it reconsiders, but the bustle of morning noise from my family members evaporates it: the baby crawling through the hallways making murmurs of nonsense, Sister-In-Law shouting “fotseke”
at the street dogs that have somehow snuck into our courtyard for our garbage, a splash of liquid into the courtyard, my brother’s shoes making a stiletto noise on the stone floors. I feel sorry for Sister-In-Law. Fotseke. At least we still have our language, this gem of a stone that I crave every second of the day, the way it bends and melds into the air, dissolving sweetness into my ears.

  “Eish.” I groan into my pillow. I can hear who I am. The real thing, she said, I would become the real thing. I want to tell everyone, share it with them, but that would reveal that I was touched by a dreamskin. But…this doesn’t feel like a curse…unless it will slowly evolve to evil. Live is evil spelled backwards. We are living evil, my Girlfriend always motions. I rattle my head of these confusing thoughts.

  I pull the blankets aside, and they smell of urine. I’ve wet the bed again, like always, since I lost Grandpa. My family, when they were still alive would ask me, “How were you dreams tonight?”

  “They were tough,” I’d always say. “That’s why I wet my bed.” My skin is a parched brown; I remember screaming, after Dreamskin great-great Grandpa visited me four years ago. My skin—what happened to my skin? I kept shouting at the whole household, reckless with fear. My skin wasn’t like the cow’s milk we drank every morning, it was desert-sand brown, terrifyingly beautiful. I’d never seen anything like it except of those on the train. I actually thought I was dead for the only time I saw still-Black skin was on our ancestors, cloaked around their skeleton majestically, and now, I wore that coat. My family couldn’t see my skin the way I saw it. To them, it looked as white as the mist that skidded the Badimo Mountains flanking the entry into the abyss where the train embarks. They did not have the sight.

  This morning, my skin is different, as if the casual terror from my dreams diluted it during my sleep. What was I dreaming of again?

  The bright morning light streaming into my window sullies my sight, wringing a sick headache into my mind. My knees are shaking. My Girlfriend is coming today, and I don’t want her to see me this way. She’ll crack me open and I don’t want to wash her with my secrets. I do not want to taint her.

  “From foul dreams comes the stench of creatures of evil,” Dreamskin Grandma whispered that night, standing over my bed, her eyes a cloudy cataract. That day she looked like an apparition, the one that slipped from her dreams to tell her that her death was close. Instead, it crept into my room with wiry legs and held a cold grip around my throat, leaving a soot-marked necklace of handprints. The memory is unbidden but it comes for a reason, a reason I do not want to know now. I lock the secret in my body. No one will ever know it. No one will ever see it.

  My bedroom door swings open.

  “Your brother’s slaughtered the cow,” Sister-In-Law says. “He wants us to make segwapa.” Something about my appearance widens her eyes. “What were you dreaming just now?”

  “I can’t remember,” I whisper.

  She pulls out table salt from her apron’s pocket and throws snatches of it over both shoulders. I roll my eyes.

  “How will you know if anything bad will happen to you if you can’t remember your dreams?” she asks.

  My palms are pale and wet with sweat. I ignore her and try to stand—every bone is brittle and I hit the floor. Sister-In-Law tries to help me but shakes back from the urine smell. “Giiiirrrrl,” she says, walking back, pinching her nose.

  “Don’t tell her,” I say. “I’ll be fine. Just don’t tell my Girlfriend.”

  Sister-In-Law has an inch-layer of natural hair, which is decaying into sinewy strands. She is thick-set. Her skin is smooth and brown, the brown is melting from her. I blink and yank her arm towards me. The melanin is innocent and where it should be.

  “What?” she asks.

  I shake my head, droplets of sweat stain my nightgown.

  She pulls back her arm, rubbing my fingerprints off her as if they are dirt marks. “I’ll send you my quotation for the lies you want me to manufacture.”

  “Ja, whatever, man. Just don’t tell her,” I say.

  “I wonder what else I can get from this amazing power you have given me,” Sister-In-Law says.

  I throw a pillow at her, she ducks it, but I can hear her cackling in the hallway. Jittery, I make my way to the metal tub. The daylight is still warm, so hopefully today I won’t bathe in cold sunlight. Our bedrooms are spacious, allowing a workstation and a metal tub that stands in one corner surrounded by a gauzy curtain. The bamboo spout protruding from the wall oscillates up and down. I press it down and an oval opening in the roof shifts aside allowing a shower of sunlight to splay down with the passing slurp of time. I stand beneath it, washing away the sweat, the nightmares, and the memories. The sky is a quiet blue, a serene being massaging my body. As I’m bathing, I feel a rough patch on my lower back. It is a scab. When I peel it off to take a closer look at it, it’s a plain piece of my skin color, not the hard covering of a healing wound. My bedroom door is not locked. A noise makes me quickly shove the patch of skin color onto the window sill where I encounter several more pieces I’ve tried to hide. Cockroaches scatter away from the pieces of my still-Black skin.

  My skin color is peeling off. I am transitioning. Is that why Dreamskin Grandma visited me instead? What if the curse whitewashes me or worse turns me into a see-through? But what color am I? Am I really brown, or do I want to see brown? My dead family is still-Black, so that makes me still-Black, right?

  The only thing I can trust to reveal to me what my back looks like is a mirror—something that won’t make a fuss or discriminate me. In a desperate, senseless act, I dash to the useless mirror in my bedroom. Except the mirror does not reflect me. It shows a girl with ghost-skin. We don’t have such mirrors in our wards: mirrors which we can use to recognize our true selves. Our mirrors only reflect those native to The District on the Other Side of the City—never us. No one in our wards is able to procure them. The only time we ever become us is when we’re dead; when we’re dead do we become the still-Black font of sky. I pick the thin pieces of my ethnicity, which are skin-thin, and raise them to the sunlight. “Cover me whole. Stay. Remain,” I pray. “Stop leaving me. Don’t leave me alone. Show yourself. Show me.” I smudge the dead skin color onto my wrist, but it is brittle. It grinds like dead leaves into crumbs of nothing.

  I slam my arm into the lying mirror. “Useless, stupid mirror,” I shout. The mirror shatters. I am crazy, that’s what Dreamskin Grandma did to me.

  Sister-In-Law runs into my room. “What happened?”

  Pieces of myself, reflections of me, stare back at me from the broken parts of the mirror.

  They show a girl a shade that is not herself, eyes that are not her, hair that is not her. They show her a universe whose laws refuse her very existence. A girl who has never seen how she looks. A girl with eyes that can tell the original identity of people, except herself.

  No one has these eyes.

  My eyes became like this way before my Grandmother in dream-skin strangled me. She was the second dreamskin in our family to strangle me after my great-great grandpa. I’ve lived this long, but why do they keep doing this to me? Why me? He gave me what the dead see: the sight of the dead. Now she’s given me the hearing of the dead, for language, for dialect. Grandma said people like me don’t live too long. There’s a mirror that lies at the end of the rainbow that will show you how you look, say the fairytales. My Girlfriend would always sit between my thighs as I plaited yarn braid into her hair.

  “Tell me how I look,” she’d ask.

  “You look beautiful,” I’d say.

  “No, tell me how I really look,” she’d whine.

  “You look beautiful. Your skin is the perfect measure of melanin.”

  “What is my name?” she asks. “What is your name?” She looks around. “See? We are not important. We have no identity.” She’d knot her fingers. “I feel that because no one can see who I am then I’m not real. I mean, if the people of The District on the Othe
r Side of the City are reflected by our world, and it won’t reflect us, that means we are meaningless.”

  I sat on my knees and pressed my hand to her chest. “There is air in your lungs. There is aliveness in your eyes. A law put it there. This universe wants you awake. You are real. You are my mirror. That is all we ever need of ourselves as a community. We are the reflections we want.”

  She yanked a chunk of Afro from her head, leaving a balding spot. “But this—what does this look like? I want to know who I am.”

  I curled my hand around hers. To her, her Afro didn’t look like Afro. To her, it appeared bleached and strained of its length. To her, it didn’t look the way I saw it: natural.