Conforming, you will lose everything that is dear to you, she’d said.
Another dreamskin visited me last night. It resembled my lover and I. It stood in an ocean of fire, foretold the end of our relationship and prescribed: “The church graveyard is a market store with rows of love, of couples who were buried together. Purchase their love to stay in love.”
I am losing my sanity, I am losing my skin color—I will not lose my Girlfriend. In my storage, the liquid of love is running low. Only two droplets famish my tongue. I can taste the tears of my lover’s sadness. We must go to the church grounds for our next supply.
My brother is in the kitchen laying out his work shirt on the kitchen island. The bulky iron is soot-marked, and it carries red-hot coals in its belly. Brother wraps his hand around the wooden handle and runs the hot iron over his shirt. The moisture in the shirt sizzles under the scalding heat.
“I know you worry yourself stiff about the family,” Brother says. “I managed to borrow money from a loan shark and covered three months’ worth of fees for our relatives. They won’t be kicked out of the train. So go out and live a little. Take your Girlfriend out.” He laughs at the latter.
“I thought you were getting commissioned for these city projects,” I say.
“There’s a bit of delay in processing the funds,” he says. “Besides, building this residence took every thebe we had. So take time with your art, you don’t have to rush it to make a sale to take care of us.”
I stare at the table and suddenly realize this weight removed from my back. Three months I won’t have to worry about payments that have to be made, or cupboards empty of food.
“My girlfriend says you wet the bed again,” Brother says, pressing the iron harder against his shirt.
“I haven’t been able to see things clearly,” I say, crinkling the skin-color that peeled off this morning
“How old are you again?” Brother asks. “Remember I lost my sight two years ago?”
We’re not blind, we’re only born blind to each other’s true identity. The older we age, the worse it becomes, which is why we call it the Loss of Sight, a dementia toward the ethnicities we’ve lived in, bred under. It evolves to death or an opaque form of living—no one sees or hears you; oxygen culls your lungs.
“It happens sporadically that we haven’t determined the age that people lose their sight,” I say. “My time can’t have come yet.” I look up at him. “What will I forget?” I want to cling to myself.
“Your speech, your language, your skin, your hair.” He stretches his arms wide. “All of this.”
“The house?” I ask.
“Only how you see it.”
“How do you see it?”
“It looks ordinary. Typical. Standard. Like a cubicle made of glass.”
“Like a cubicle made of glass,” I repeat. “Don’t you experience the emotions you evoked in this design?” He shakes his head. It is a language I do not understand, does that mean the function of the house is altered only to him? Does it mean that the hallways do not exist to him as they do to me? How do we exist next to each other yet exist in two different realms within the hand of this very second? Aren’t our rooms organized the same way we experience them? I know I pass the hallway and turn left to my bedroom which overlooks a courtyard. Does he not turn left, too, when he wishes to see me?
I bend my head into my thighs and weep for something I am to lose. My brother does not wipe my tears. He has been here too, and he has not died...yet. It is nothing for me to cry over a pain someone has already traversed.
“Does it hurt?” I push my words through the tears.
“It burns,” he says. “Every day it burns. We’ve learned to live with the pain.”
“How do you live with it?”
“In life there is nothing to do except two things: live or die. Being alive leaves you no choice but to survive.”
“What do you mean it burns?”
“It’s mystic. You don’t feel it in your skin, it exists in a plain somewhere within you. You go to sleep with the burning sensation in your soul, you wake up with the burning sensation; it is only within your dream are you free. When we fall asleep, we enter our own universes where we are free.”
“So…you’re burning right now?”
He sits the iron up, stares at the open cupboards filled with herbs. “No smoke, no mirrors, no fire—but I am burning.”
“Don’t you want it to stop?”
His irises are smeared with sky-blue, his body like my canvass without paint without art. “No one wants to burn, but unfortunately, it is us who burn.”
“I don’t want to burn…I won’t allow it.” My voice trembles. I stare at my fingers, the veins, the blood that courses through them with a naïve power.
His smile crooked, handsome. “Impossible is possible for the power of belief, the power of faith is a miracle enough.”
“Then why don’t you just believe?”
“It has been corroded by the ways of life, I lost it along the way and now I can’t find it. You are pure—you still have it. You have Mama’s strength, I see it in the logs of your ribcage, soul-lit, crackling, warm.”
I sit my elbow on the dinner table under a sprinkle of sunshine and cricket chirps, my chin propped on my palm. “Remember when we’d sit outside in the boma, eating diphaphatha and Mama’s morula drink? We’d sit and recite poems. I miss our family gatherings. Mama always made them special somehow.” We both stare across the living room that filters out into the garden, and centered in the middle is the low seating of the boma made from the Badimo Mountains’ rocks, trees gathered around us, bending their foliage-thick heads, leaning into our voice-licked stories. All three generations of our family would sit there, kids running around in the dark, playing silly games. The memory is sweet across the tongue of my mind, my mind salivates around it, sucks strongly on it, until the feeling turns to ember. Shadows and light crunching in the tall star-clustered fire. Soft earth beneath our feet, footprints and memories left in our backyard.
I will not burn, I will arrest my skin-color to my bones.
He narrows his eyes. “What boma?”
Empty space, empty bodies. The shadow by his feet retreats from the morning light, the sun cutting a line higher above sky.
I point to his feet. “Your shadow is afraid…of the light. It is shrinking.”
“How is a shadow afraid of light that is its womb, its mother, birthing it? For a shadow to exist, light embalms it. Without light, there is no shadow.”
“Without shadow, there is no spirit,” I say, mind distant. “I don’t want you to die, please.”
“Are you prophetic now?” he asks. “I’m too busy to die.”
“But your shadow…”
“My shadow is the one disobeying a law, not me. I’m here. Alive. Breathing.”
“And your spirit…is it with breath?” My elbows, against wood, pain.
“Your breath…is it with spirit?”
Paradox. I slouch in my chair, sulking. I’m never going to get an answer from him.
Cat meows, crossing in between my legs. It lunges onto the table and onto the window sill, watching something with peculiar concentration.
“We have a visitor at the door,” Brother says, smiling.
My Girlfriend.
She and I started off as friends doing collaborations: she’d be the poetess, and I’d illustrate as she spoke; it was filled with drums, smoke, incantations, and the fumes of oil paint. We’d dance. We’d talk. As time crawled across the tense ligament between our unspoken feelings it grew taut until our tongues twisted against each other. Soon our bodies became the house of poetry. We’d lapse into each other, tangling into one fluid, cataclysmic art that relieved us into separate breathless bodies. She is the safe space for my secrets, and I the same.
She’s always exploding with joy, it’s contagious.
When I open our house door for her, she
throws her body against me. I wrap my arms around her and she wraps her legs around me. There is no cure my body knows except this happiness. “Sorry, I’m late.” She hops down. “I had the dream. Our dreamskins were trying to burn me.”
“I’m sorry, love.” The feeling is quick to attack me: my heart is empty. I can live without her. Signs that we need our medication soon.
“The sickness is getting worse,” she explains. “I’m feeling empty, numb.”
“We’ll leave shortly. I’m still helping my sister-in-law.”
“No probs, I’ll just lounge in the courtyard.” My Girlfriend kisses me as she tugs at my box braids. The pain hits me from nowhere: she doesn’t feel me the same way I feel her—her natural self. A part of me I can’t grasp is stolen from us. Would she love me if she saw me for who I am? When she touches me, what does she feel, what does she love? I tug back, thinking about the dreamskin tattooing me with a curse, a pain. My Girlfriend’s lungs are balloons and I’m blowing in the hate and evil that my witch-crafted body can muster. What if I’m destroying her just by being next to her as our lips touch? I don’t want my kisses to be her murderers. A piece of skin-color discretely wilts from my elbow to the floor, a brown flower petal. I’m falling apart. I shuffle my foot on top of it before My Girlfriend sees.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I fake a smile. “I just missed you.” She pinches my cheek and blows me a kiss.
A bold septum ring crosses her nose. Her long jangly earrings reflect the light as she walks. Her Afro is a halo that sits on her head, a place I love to get lost in. Her skin is an oasis for the sun’s reflection, a warm brown that dazzles under its sight.
This is crazy, you only see this in The District on the Other Side of the City, is what the citizens of our wards said about us. It’s supposedly why they named our house Ntlo ya Botsênwa: my brother with the illegitimate child, and my love as a woman with another woman.
My Girlfriend sits in the courtyard as Sister-In-Law and I are preparing the slaughtered cow’s flesh into segwapa. A rondavel is on the far side where we’ve hung the strips of cow meat, waiting for it to become biltong.
“Those who’ve lost their sight are just that,” My Girlfriend whispers, lying in the shaded verandah.
“Like what?” asks Sister-In-Law, and I want her to stop speaking, because her mouth has ruined kingdoms between people. If she tells My Girlfriend how sickly I looked this morning, it’d worry her. Anxiety doesn’t flow well in My Girlfriend’s body, and it’d break my heart if I put her through that.
My Girlfriend points to the strips of segwapa hanging on a line in the rondavel. Flies flit back and forth. “When I look around, I feel like we are like this segwapa, like we’re strips of segwapa—dead,” she says.
Sister-In-Law rolls her eyes. “Are you guys headed to the market?”
“There’s tax to our love, my love,” My Girlfriend says, looking at me. Her lips are painted indigo. Thick gold bangles encircle her tattooed wrists.
“There’s a list of things we need to get for the house,” Sister-In-Law says, ignoring her. “I placed it on the counter.”
“Have you placed it with the money, too?” I ask.
She sighs, pulls slips of money from her bra. “You always think I’m out to cheat you.”
“Because you always are,” I say.
“And you don’t even get taxed for loving her brother,” My Girlfriend emphasizes. We weren’t supposed to fall in love, so because “it stands outside nature and confuses the natural way of things” we have to pay for it before some god will repay “the debt through calamitous ways” and all that blah blah bullshit.
“Eish, I never forced you to love each other and pay exorbitant fees for it,” Sister-In-Law says. “Damn, I walked into that one, didn’t I? I wasn’t trying to start a pity party. I just need things for the house. So please go feel sorry for yourselves somewhere else and don’t forget to return with the house stuff.”
My Girlfriend chews on an insult as she watches Sister-In-Law.
When I’m done helping Sister-In-Law, My Girlfriend and I make our way to the market, crossing streets, laughing and chatting.
“I hate going to the church grounds,” she says. “I’m always afraid that we’ll never make it out.”
“No one but us can make the payments,” I say, holding her hand.
“I know,” she says. “It just creeps me out. Everyone there is so…unhealthy in their faith. They are so…”
“Passionate in the same way we are passionate about each other and our jobs.”
She rolls her eyes and doesn’t bother maintaining this conversation.
“Eish, there he is at it again, singing vile sermons,” My Girlfriend says, looking at a beggar-like stranger walking up-and-down the street.
“Stop noticing him and let’s cross quickly.” I grip her arm and pull her hard. She giggles.
Beggarlike Stranger passed away last year and missed the train’s departure time. So he spends his days on the streets, intoxicated and marinated in the heat of the sun, whistling at girls who pass by. The people in our wards ignore him. Sometimes he steals into houses and breaks windows. If you treat dead people like him who haven’t made it onto the Train of the Dead as if they are human, like us, their touch is made real by our faith in their aliveness. And it’s scary when people like him touch you. You feel the cold lick of death. It’s bad luck. The only way to avoid him touching you is to pretend they don’t exist; it’s like a holy mark guarding us.
He limps toward us, grabs my Girlfriend. My reflexes are shadow-sharp; they betray me for they are quickly exposing the signs that I’ve been touched by dreamskin. I yank his elbow, steam hisses from the contact. He collapses back, palms outward, apologizing. Shock knots My Girlfriend’s face, but she won’t ask how I did that. It is reverse osmosis, reverse dreamskin. Their touch burns, now so does mine. My symptoms are ceaselessly becoming conspicuous, soon they will be a fully-fledged human being who will rat me out.
My thoughts itch: I am sick with something. I scratch myself until my nails dig blood. My Girlfriend and I make our way through the garden to an administration office that has become a lump to the side of the church of the wards.
I slow down, taking in the scenery on the way to the gates. The trees are large with heavy, bulbous fruits hanging from their arms. The garden smells of fresh earth and a rain to come. The sound of sunlight wafts across my face an intoxicating scent. My Girlfriend grips my hand and picks up her pace. “Don’t even think about eating that fruit.” That fruit got stuck in my father’s throat. His throat is a huge lump. He sleeps in the tree, has become its bark, forever licking more fruits.
Approaching the administration office door, we find a young girl cross-legged with a mug of holy water. She is neatly tearing a Bible page, folding it into the size of a sweet and chewing it like bubblegum. She blows out verses that are specific to an infraction she committed. A Sister watches in the distance and whispers, “You will be good, child. You will be good.”
“Parents send their children here to raise their school marks instead of sending them to tutors,” My Girlfriend says, chewing on another inconceivable insult. “People come here for lost lovers, for marriage, for jobs without lifting a finger hoping for miracles to lubricate their lazy asses.”
We hustle into the office. It has figurines made in wood and stone, and fragrances that call back memories we’ve never lived. The silence is moth-scented and wafts echoes of early morning prayers. The small office is heat-packed and stops the cold wind by the door’s threshold so that it seems we exist in one season as we watch through the window another season force the trees into a manic dance.
My Girlfriend nudges me and points at stick-thin children playing outside in the church grounds. Their movements are measured into a slow pace. Pairs of children stand with a remarkable distance between them. Connecting the pairs is a line of wool tied to their legs, forming a fence
for a queue of children to hop a pattern through, like hopscotch. One child hops in, hops out and rejoins the line. Everyone is quiet. Everyone is in sync. The game is so orderly for children, it traps me in its stately trance. I could watch them forever. The wind does not touch their hair plaited in symmetrical patterns of wool, the wind does not touch their skirts or the loose parts of their pants. Air is a viscous liquid around them. In the church grounds, no one relies on oxygen, on time, on human nourishment, only God.
My Girlfriend, an atheist, drags me to the counter. “This always happens to you. If I weren’t here with you all the time you’d become a hermit in this place.”
Coming here always brings the same nervousness I have for confessional.
A lady with dreadlocks is pushing snuff into her nose. She takes a cloth to wipe her mouth, sneezes and spits something out. She pulls a cane from its hiding spot and drags herself to the end of her office where she gives us an opaque bottle. “It belonged to a couple that departed,” she whispers. “The love is intoxicating, but it cures everything.” When she presses it into my hands, her arms are wrinkled with spots. “The only thing she eats is Bible verses. The only thing she shits are prayers,” Sister-In-Law said which earned her a smack from Grandmother when she visited the house. I stare at the snuff the woman has hidden in her breasts.
The Silence of the Wilting Skin Page 4