The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  “Damn it! You think this shit is cheap?” Sister-In-Law shatters my memory, pointing at the broken mirror.

  “I can’t see myself,” I shout, keeping my back away from her eyes. “I want to see myself.”

  “What’s new? Damn it! I thought you were dying.” She rolls her eyes. “Next time you break something, we’re going to ignore you.” The door shuts itself when she walks away.

  Who will tell me how my back looks now? Soon I will have no more skin color—it’s running out. What can I do to avoid replenishing it?

  In our wards, people are lost to the evolving Loss of Sight or malevolent creatures. Prayers are so strong they can turn into creatures of evil. There are prayers of the bad kind. And our neighbors, jealous of the tenders my brother wins, are always praying. Maybe they prayed for this to happen to me.

  The Loss of Sight has become a landmark, a post-pubescent period that can happen to anyone in our wards. It terrorizes the body, but people still live with it lurking in their blood. Brother is sick with it. But he is still Brother. My Girlfriend won’t—will never come near him. The fear is apparent in her eyes, even though she tries to hide it for me.

  I stare at the metal tub shining under the sunlight and I need my Girlfriend to tell me I am okay, that everything will be okay. We used to bathe in it as it kept our bodies alive and warm. When the room was a mellowed gold, the silence a warm creature, she’d sit in the center as I poured sunlight down her head. Her Afro was thick and rich, and when I poured the sunlight through it, it made the same sound when the ocean pulls into and away from the shore, swelling and foaming. I closed my eyes, reveling in the memory, poured the sunlight again and listened to the sound of the ocean in her Afro. Thinking of My Girlfriend begins to thaw the nightmare’s cold presence in my mind. If only I could murder these demons.

  The District on the Other Side of the City

  The city was divided in two by the train: on the east side, the sun rose and set; on the west side, the moon rose and set. Two different types of people lived on either half of it. No one crossed the railway line. One side venerated the other side. It doesn’t take much guesswork to know which side that was: everyone wanted to see the moon, except me. It burned the dialect from our tongue, made us speak in broken accents, our mother tongue thick and deformed.

  We live in the wards on the east side of the city. Our nights are always moonless for we have no moon. We are safer this side even though many prostrate it. They said the sun was the reason for the texture of our skin and so we bathed in it. The citizens of The District on the Other Side of the City have a different color of blood. The moon has an effect on them which makes them shed old blood and regenerate new blood. The moon tides their blood, it comes in waves into our land, packaged, and sells for high profits. They’d rather have our money then our lives. They believe that the train that divided our city in two is a myth, an unreal thing. It is invisible to them, except us. They never come to our wards because their blood has unfortunately become our totem, a totem we don’t preserve but tear into. A totem of ours that is preyed on like a religion. The people in our wards drink their blood like holy water hoping it will make them as beautiful as them. But the blood burns. Every three months, Mama—when she was still alive—used to sit me between her legs and oil my scalp with it. She’d say, “Sit still. Pain transmutes plainness into beauty.” It felt like pain was peeling my scalp off my skull. Days would pass by and my hair would become limp and break off. The blood is a chemical that turns our hair straight and bleaches our skin. Our wards still love it either way. In the black market, it sells for high prices. The blood is processed, bottled, boxed, and sold by street vendors. My brother’s girlfriend is addicted to this stuff, strutting around our residence wearing dead things on her skin and hair.

  My brother’s girlfriend, who I consider my sister-in-law even though they are not married, stomps into my bedroom. “Did you touch my stuff again?” she asks, holding an open jar filled with a colorless liquid: the blood of a citizen from The District on the Other Side of the City.

  I point to my Afro, which I’ve seen for many years the night after Grandpa died, after his dreamskin visited. “Do I look like I touched your shit?”

  Sister-In-Law narrows her eyes at me as if I’m a foggy shape. “Looks like your hair needs to relax.”

  That’s what the stuff did. It apparently made our hair ‘relax’ because it was always held up in a halo, a science that The District on the Other Side of the City failed to understand because their hair always ‘relaxed’ down their shoulders and back, what became the commandment of beauty.

  “Looks like alopecia is relaxing itself across your hairline,” I say, working on my telescope.

  She runs to the mirror, knocking her head against it, even though the mirror doesn’t function in our wards. I wonder if the mirror showed me my true reflection, would it reflect to me the curse that Dreamskin Grandma imprinted on me?

  “Mxm, that’s not funny.” She brushes down her baby hair with her fingers like a mime caught in the trance of its reflection. If only she could see the real me. Our senses—sight and hearing, but not the soul sense, for some of us anyway—are sedated, edited for our well-being. We’ve always known this since time immemorial. Every civilian in the city is a pale shadow of the moon, but the dead have always whispered to us what we are by the skin brown-stitched, taut to their skeleton. “Mama,” I used to ask, pointing at my uncle, dead on the train. “Malome used to be moon-skin, now he has brown skin; he’s your brother. If we’re related, how come our skin doesn’t look the same?” She pressed my lips down with chili and said death is an alchemist, transmutes the unspoken into its known elixir. We were elixir, she said, that reality couldn’t translate. To keep us alive in the wards, this was how it “dubbed” us. But Grandma said, “Reality is some dictator’s manufactured manifesto, but no one can evaporate the soul’s dialect except us.”

  “You know what’s not funny?” I say. “Cashing in on my brother.”

  “Your brother is a very accommodating person.”

  “Should my fist accommodate itself in your ass, then?”

  She rolls her eyes and makes her way to the kitchen with me following her. “Did anyone ever tell you how crass you are? Like, are you too dumb to communicate in a more intelligent way?”

  She places the jar on the counter and fetches a similar-looking compact bottle from the highest shelf in the kitchen. She leans her head back and presses it, releasing three droplets into each eye. She looks at me, blinking. Her brown eyes have patterns of blue feeding into her iris, burning off the brown that made her softer. Her friend—with no medical background—prescribed her to take the blood three times a day until she felt satisfied with the results. And if she took it during Mass, or when the choir’s notes reached a climax and the sun was in a froth of clouds, the marvelous effects would possess her body. At church, she’d wash it down with the Holy Communion or nibble on the blood curd during Mass. I wish she’d stop taking it; she has a beautiful voice, and it’s slowly disappearing. She’s been breastfeeding the blood to my niece and there’s nothing I can do about it because she’s the mother. There are days I wish for our residence to burn down with these jars filled with blood, but that won’t stop her from purchasing more stock.

  “I tried speaking to you intelligently weeks ago but you still didn’t pay rent then. Maybe I should communicate with violence,” I say, entering her personal space. I grab her jars. “These still sell well as second-hand products.”

  “Alright, chill. I’m plaiting three ladies today, I will give you the money.”

  She’s knocked off-kilter by an invisible force and I the same, knocking against the kitchen shelves. Blood leaks down my forehead, a natural red color. For a second, I assume it’s the result of the bone-print around my throat—I squeal in a hot torture of panic. What if my family gets attacked because of me? Some believe that once marked, an entity will slither beneath the strata, it wi
ll squirm beneath the house of one marked by a death-warner not meant for them. A tremor shakes our residence. Screams and shouts scrape every surface of the air. Doors bang, footsteps skid, furniture falls. Every time the train moves in-between our districts, our wards are the only lands to experience its effects snaking beneath the strata of earth that our buildings are rooted to. Cracks scatter our walls. Sister-In-Law runs for her crying baby and we flee through our entrance gates. Sirens sound, and our far-reaching residence leans to one side. It doesn’t topple. We think it will collapse but it stays frozen in space. Everyone in the neighborhood is out in the streets, dismayed, shaking their heads, like one mass of anger.

  “This is fucked up,” says Neighbor 4302. “The city needs to update the architecture. It’s going to bury us one day.”

  “They believe that we’re the cause of our urban disorder,” says Neighbor 4301.

  “But it’s the train that’s causing these earthquakes,” says Neighbor 4297.

  “Earthquakes that The District on the Other Side of the City doesn’t feel,” says Neighbor 4305.

  I fold into myself. Guilt is a flame on my skin. It is not my fault. I am not the cause of the disorder in our neighborhood. They earthquakes have been occurring way before I was touched by Dreamskin Grandma. But what if there are others in hiding, skins wrapping secrets?

  Earthquakes only destroy the lives of those living in the wards. The citizens in the districts are immune to it. Sometimes I wonder if a god decided whom suffering clung to, for it was particular to us, not them. It must be nice to not be targeted by earthquakes, to be free and who you are.

  “Just because they don’t feel it, doesn’t mean it’s not real,” says Neighbor 4302. “There’s a reason the earthquakes are targeting us, that something rotten harbors. Evil doesn’t just come from nowhere for nowhere. Something attracts it.”

  I feel his gaze on me, a heavy shadow. I shuffle closer to Sister-In-Law. But he continues to stare.

  “You know why,” he says.

  I am naked. I am burning naked.

  “Your brother,” he says. “He develops the built environment. You must know something.”

  I sigh, releasing the weight from my lungs.

  “They, the other side of the city, instigated them,” says Neighbor 4295, spit spraying the congregation we’ve gathered. “They are doing this to us—they’re abusing us!”

  “We can’t prove it,” I regurgitate what my grandmother fed me. “We don’t know who built the train and the railway tracks and when it came into existence. Probably before any of us were born. Besides, each year most of the city’s budgets are allocated to The District on the Other Side of the City.”

  “Have you seen the houses they live in?” says Neighbor 4302, lust dripping down his lips. “Towering buildings, taller than ours, that shine under the moonlight, and buildings with sky gardens. Their roads are a labyrinth of highways, they have buildings just to play in or relax in, they have—”

  “Are you blind? They’re so selfish they’re eating into the sky now,” says Neighbor 4303, staring at our earth structure towering into the jungle of sky and clouds. “One of these days, they’re going to knock the moon down.”

  “The District on the Other Side of the City is running out of space,” I say, recalling Brother’s meetings. Brother runs a company that assists in new constructions, refurbishments and adapting old buildings to the city’s fluctuating laws. He’s handled the most lucrative tenders in our wards. But somehow debts slurp his profits, and we still manage to get by. “The city municipal is suggesting tearing down the railway line and restoring run-down nearby areas to accommodate the urban sprawl of The District on the Other Side of the City.”

  “Tearing down the railway line?” says Neighbor 4302; his eye twitches. He never believes what I say. “But—but that’s where we bury our families—in the train. If there is no railway track there is no train.”

  Our families represent a culture we will never get back.

  “Apparently it’s taking up too much space,” I say, and the words feel like acid in my mouth. It’s so much harder to say than hear it from someone else.

  “Our culture is taking up too much space?” Neighbor 4295 stutters. “But each district has the same meterage of land. We’re all equal.”

  “We’re not all equal,” says my brother, who’s appeared suddenly out of the corner of Neighbor 4302’s boundary wall. He appears haggard and out of breath. His eyes rest on Sister-In-Law and their baby and relief paints his face handsome. His hair is ghost-color and wiry, tied into a tight puff that he runs his sweaty hand against. “Are you both okay? I rushed here the minute I felt the earthquake. The civic center came down. I thought something bad happened to you.”

  But everyone ignores his remarks.

  “And who will be the labor force in these new constructions?” asks Neighbor 4302.

  Brother stares at me and I expect him to admonish me later. “The labor force will come from our wards,” Brother says. “It will create jobs. Both in the demolition of the railway and construction of new buildings. Demolition of the railway will resolve The District on the Other Side of the City’s overcrowding, traffic congestions, urban sprawl—”

  “What about the train?” I ask. He hates point-blank questions that are too heavy to handle in crowds.

  “They see no reason for its existence because they don’t see it,” Brother says. “The only thing they see is railway tracks demarcated with a wall on their side. A burial site will be dedicated—”

  “The train is our burial site,” I say. “Our ancestors live in there. Are we supposed to hand them eviction letters and everything is hundreds?”

  “They. Are. Not. Our. Ancestors,” Brother enunciates. “They’re just dead. We’re not supposed to see our ancestors like that. Besides, the train is a transitory space for them. They don’t actually live in it. Technically we’re not kicking them out.”

  “They still mean something!” I shout. Neighbor 4302 nods in pride, in ownership of what I say.

  “Soon you will be seeing some urban features to help facilitate the urban planning of the city’s infrastructure,” Brother says.

  It’s the way he pronounces the word ‘urban features,’ like he’s shoving it under the carpet, dressing its true identity.

  “What urban features?” I ask.

  “Do not panic, every improvement made is for our convenience,” he says, side-eyeing me.

  “The fact that you tell us to not panic only raises our eyebrows. Why is ‘panic’ a thesis to your statement?” says our scholarly Neighbor 4302.

  “Well, change is always scary, and the new presence in our streets will look quite conspicuous, and our superstitious fellow citizens are infamous for treating unknown things as, well, insidious. Which is not the case!”—he raises his palms truce-like— “Just remember it’s here to watch for out safety.” Vague is Brother’s middle name.

  “Watch for us or watch over us?” I ask.

  Brother sighs, runs his hand across his face. “I trust no one will provoke our guardians, the new urban features. It’s been a long day. I’m going to retire to bed.”

  “What will happen if we provoked them?” I ask.

  He says, casually, “It’s perjury. They will impose the law on you as they see fit. Right. On. The. Spot.”

  The neighbors shake their heads, murmuring, walking away.

  “The money,” I say as Brother walks away relieved.

  He spins around. “Shit.”

  “You forgot? Are you kidding me?”

  “What about the tenants’ money?” he asks.

  On one side of our residence, we’ve rented out three rooms to three quiet widows who have shaved heads covered in headscarves. They pay their rent timely, but their walls have become pocked with their woes with time to leave their skin unmarked with wrinkles.

  “Used it already,” I say. “You can’t tell me you forgot.”
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  “I’ve had a hell of a day—”

  “Your grandmother, your brother—”

  “I know! Keep throwing it back in my face. Goddamnit!” He walks away. It’s days like this I miss my sister. She was the only one who could work my brother. The door bangs and silence retreats into the cave of my mouth.

  I am submerged in an ocean of things I can’t control: a curse noosed around my throat will call on me, will cash in on the debt of life I breathe—how in what way I do not know but all the air in my lungs has to be enough to save my grandmother, my grandfather, my ex-boyfriend—my dead family before I become dead. The train will be destroyed, we’ll lose our ancestors; we’ll lose ourselves. Our lives will be erased. I stare upward, the sun bleeds into darkness, nighttime.

  Nightmares, nightmares, wretched things.

  A Love that Someone Lived Before Us