The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  “You make me happy,” I say. “You shouldn’t need to pay, otherwise we’d both be broke.”

  She traces her fingers on my face. “I wish I had your eyes.”

  “I’m afraid envy will drown you, sometimes. I wish you wouldn’t envy things you’ve never experienced.”

  She twists her lips, drinking again. “I know.”

  I pull the glass from her hand and smell it. “This is not the wine we brought with us. It is blood.”

  With casual occurrence, she takes it from me, drags another sip and says, “I know. They change everything whenever it suits them. They are forcing us to eat our people. To drink our people.”

  I throw the glass against the wall. It won’t paint it red. The wall refuses our blood. It is The Shadow. It is Them.

  “What is wrong with you?” I shout.

  “I came into this world terrorized by the instrument of death. I came into this world dead. My love, I am tired and I will accept what is.” She kneels, runs her finger through the glass and the liquid, and sucks her fingers. “Whatever I eat is altered. Whatever my bones wear is altered. Whatever I see is altered. Not by my choice. I am tired of fighting this power around us, this power coming into our lungs, into our eyes and taking control. I will just drink even if it is the blood of my people.”

  Abyss-Dust Feet

  “You fell asleep for the first time last night,” My Girlfriend says, kissing me awake. “I guess you just needed to be home for a good night’s rest. But please close your eyes next time. I’ve never witnessed someone sleeping with their eyes open, but it’s terrifying.”

  I have wet the bed again. I am jittery and my still-Black is pale.

  My Girlfriend pats my face. “What’s wrong? You look shaken up.”

  She presses her palm to my forehead, then flicks her hand. “You’re hot!”

  Words refuse my mouth. When I sit up, the color doused on my skin has peeled off onto the bed covers, and it looks like the dead, wrinkled wings of a butterfly. My Girlfriend covers her mouth. She twists me around to look at my back. It looks like the skin of bone.

  “We are bones now,” I say. “We are turning into bones.” My eyes are covered with the opaque film of sleep. I can’t see well. The house is foggy, but certain parts of it are still surviving in my memory.

  In the fall that morning, My Girlfriend stands in the ablution Brother designed. Worried, she stands me in the center where the ceiling opens into a great big circle, and she undresses and washes under the shower of the winter Sun. It splays itself on her body, and drains into the floor, a liquid gold, fusing the brown into her skin. I watch and feel something stir in me. Ecclesiastic light floods through the hole in the ceiling down her body. I kiss her and she kisses me back. The whole universe exists between us. For some time, perfect things do not evade us, but it does not last, for she leaves these words in my eyes, “Danger is coming. The Keeper of the Gate is remarked by you. It can’t touch you, but it will figure a way to touch you. Once it touches you, you will be vulnerable.”

  “Is that a prophecy?” I ask, smiling and curling my hands through sunlight-wet Afro.

  She twists with the air, the air is fluid; it is the undercurrent of water. My Girlfriend’s mouth is a jarring wound, mouthing: “I am dreamskin.”

  I stumble back. When did I fall asleep? I just came back, I think.

  “You chose to not sleep and invited us outside to join you,” the wound with teeth in her face says. “Your insomnia strengthened us.”

  “Stay away from me.” I fall onto my back.

  The room is dreamskin. A body is naked. The bed has my body. A light treks through the dust in the room. Braids flit—the air carries them like water.

  “You are asleep, but you are awake, too,” My Girlfriend says, wearing dreamskin.

  “No,” I shout, running outside the house. I must leave this place. Dreamskin people will burn marks into my skin. I want them nowhere near me.

  I run inside our residence to call Brother, but when we return outside, the girl who looked like me is gone and so is her tongue. I am gone. My tongue is gone. What stands there is a dog chewing on something. All I remember of that day is the neighbor screaming at me because my hands held the dog’s mouth ajar as it whined. My sight turned to the space behind me, called by the feeling of being watched. I saw braids in their full length and still-Black arms unconnected to a body being dragged on the dusty ground around a corner. I ran toward it, but I found nothing. The braids looked like mine. The arms looked like mine. It was later I realized that the decapitated me began to haunt me since that day, trying to reclaim my body.

  I stood in the street, the sun burning insanity into my skin until I collapsed.

  ***

  During the night, my bladder full, I pass through a passage to empty myself. The silence in the corridor has a cold fog to its form. At the end of the corridor stands a white rooster. It stares at me, turns and walks away. I peek outside hoping the chicken coop wasn’t left open. I damn Sister-In-Law hoping she didn’t leave it open after she picked one for dinner.

  I follow the rooster’s path to the open door. I find myself, half-tranced in a dreamwalk, overlooking three women in the courtyard with the bones of a tree standing behind them. The night is a heavy, shadowed material that dresses their bodies with heavy fabrics to their feet, to their wrists. The fire makes the tree’s deformed silhouette dance around itself for the silhouette bears the same shade as bark and night. I try to rub the crease of insomnia from my eyes, which is still dripping tears of dreams and nightmares. A metal tub stands in the center, gleaming light; the three women stand inside it, and in slow motion they cup the water and run it over their body, one after another until the water runs out of breath and volume. A cold liquid treads itself across my skin, threading itself into my bones, and snuffs the air from my lungs. My heart remains silent afraid to betray my presence to them.

  The three women steer forward, their fabrics brush against every surface, a sweeping incantation against the ground, giving voice to an oft-muted air. They stand in the same manner as if a mirror reflects each unto the other, a pantomime. They look identical. The wind is colored by the smoke and its body is serpentine, refusing to dissolve into the air. It swivels, drawn back and forth by the women’s voices, conjuring its movements. Don’t look at the moon, the three women sing, it will hypnotize, lull your senses, your knees will knead the ocean until it has kneaded your breath into itself.

  Their rooms overlook the courtyard, the plastic stripped off their windows; their living quarters have dark eyes. Something flickers inside their room. A shadow is dancing. Traditional beer brews in the near corner of the yard. Inside their rooms, the branches of a tree are burning. The smell is pungent, the fire grows. The rooms have quiet shadows that evoke the creature of solitude.

  The widows do not talk, as if words are things they must not excrete. Beneath their abyss-dust feet, a folded leteise sits. They are wearing an outfit made from leteise, swung into night, swung to their dusted feet. The air has no breath, it carries their limbs like water. The metal tub shines so brightly that I can taste the sharp metal in my mouth. A girl with braids the length to her knees, covers her face except her lips, and whispers, “Ntlo e sule.” I follow her outstretched finger: it points to our house. A baobab tree stands with one limb hanging a human torso, a human torso hung by its head full of long boxbraids, swaying in the air dusted with gravesand. It is My Girlfriend.

  I return to my room and find My Girlfriend has sat up with her arms outstretched before her. “I look like water,” she whispers. “I look like water.” I am losing My Girlfriend. Her body used to be tinged by the sunset, a russet color.

  First we turn into bones. Then we look like water.

  I put her in the metal tub to contain her. I am losing sense. My Girlfriend is glass. I see through her. She is near-invisible, but she still feels herself more solid than stone. Her voice dwindles to a whisper. Soon I will
be unable to hear her, to see her, to feel her. There is no reason for the train’s existence when there will be no body to bury. The Shadow. They. Have found a solution. I gnash my teeth. The railway tracks will be destroyed. We will disappear from ourselves.

  My language becomes sin washed from my mouth until I can’t taste anything.

  I stare at the floor. “They’re not just destroying the railway tracks, they’ve put chemicals in our water. Soon we will have transitioned and assimilated into who they are or nothing.”

  “Shh, you still have a fever—you’re sick. Your dreams are mingling with reality. The Keeper infected you. Please, you need to rest,” My Girlfriend says.

  “Grandma,” I whisper. “My dreams are becoming worse.”

  ***

  I am unsleeping and the day walks into our room on hindfeet of light. The space beside me is empty. My Girlfriend is nowhere. I walk the hallways looking for her. The main door is ajar, and wind wheezes through the holes in the plastic windows. Silence is quieter today as I walk barefoot over the stones paving the path leading outside our yard. A white horse stands at the entrance of our gates, neighing and kicking out its feet.

  I walk back into the house to find Brother waiting by the dining table for me.

  “Our neighbors are selling,” Brother says, holding a mug of coffee. “We should consider selling. The real estate market price for our house is high. We can find another plot of land and start afresh.”

  “So the same thing will happen?” I ask. “I am not moving.”

  “We can apply to transfer the house to another area,” my brother says. “But it’s more expensive than uprooting and starting again. We won’t have enough money to be able to live in this home anymore. It’s better to sell now and leave.”

  “We’ve lived here our entire lives.”

  “Developers have structured their idea in this area.”

  “What will be put here?”

  “A luxury condo with mixed-use facilities,” he says.

  “We are being wiped out for luxury? We spent years building our luxury, building it for our family estate—it will be all wiped out?”

  “It’s not being wiped out,” he says. “No one can control the earthquakes.”

  “The Shadow controls the earthquakes.”

  “Honestly, why do you listen to this foolish talk?”

  “Did the city promise you something for you to consider selling our luxury?”

  “I’m running a company to help sustain our lives,” he says. “The only important lives are people and not buildings. What matters to me is that we have a place to sleep under, to have fun in, to eat in and to be safe in, even if the place we live in is under constant change.”

  “Your moralities are like a seesaw.”

  “Listen, we have been declining the city’s offer for a year now,” he says. “The longer we refuse to sell, the lower the value of the house goes. We’ll have peanuts left.”

  “How can we remove that Keeper outside?” I ask. “It’s destroying our lives. This thing that we speak—this new language—these words that burn our tongues, why must we speak this way? I miss the way we spoke.”

  “Accepting change is transitory as accepting its difficult nature; it will take time but you will come to terms with everything.”

  “Whatever you said makes no sense,” I say. “Besides, no one is going to buy our house when it is marked by the widows. They aren’t cleansed. They say our house is dirty with death.”

  “The city doesn’t believe in that,” Brother says. “The citizens in the districts are immune to superstition.”

  I return to my bedroom. My Girlfriend is against the window staring at the sky as if asking it to take her. I fetch our syrup of love and oil it around her tongue with my tongue. I wrap my arms around her. “If we don’t leave, they’ll taint the air to poison us with insanity. Our reality and dreams are mixed sometimes. We’ll kill ourselves. We should just leave.”

  Decorations that should remain stuck to the walls are unfastened from their nails and fall to the floor. Someone is shaking our house. Our bedroom is a box of matchsticks, everything moves around like matchsticks caught in a whirl. All it needs is a catch to burn. I yank My Girlfriend, and we hide beneath the bed when the earthquakes thunder through our wards. There is no point in running outside: the earthquakes will be there, too. The only place they can’t touch is the sky. A wall crumbles onto our bed. “I love you,” My Girlfriend cries. “I will not die today,” I say. “I refuse for us to die today.” I grip her hand and pull her with me towards the entrance gates of our home. The Keepers of the Gate’s fabric is in a fervor of delight. I run my hand through the debris of crumbled adobe wall and lodge it into the Keeper of our Gate’s back. The piece of debris reflects off it and hits me in the stomach.

  My Girlfriend bends over me and she is an angel smothered in hurt. “We have to leave or else we’ll die!” she shouts. “We have to find safety.” We walk down the path towards the gate. Sister-In-Law, baby wrapped to her back, comes screaming. “Your brother! Your brother! He’s hurt!”

  My Brother’s body lies in the dusty street, covered in too much sun. The Keeper of our Gate leaves its station, walks toward my brother. The Keeper sways its heavy obsidian fabric back and forth, sweeping the dust from my brother’s skin until he is bonelike. I scream to him. The molecules of air fibrillate and hold my voice away from him. The Keeper picks My Brother’s body up. My Brother is loose and wrinkled, his face is expressionless. The Keeper picks My Brother’s body up and wears him: the Keeper pushes its arm through his shoulder blade—my brother shrieks in pain—and it pushes another arm through the other shoulder blade until he folds out and it stands in his body. The Keeper is wearing my brother. It is wearing his legs, his arms, his strength.

  The sun is a dull ring; it has burned a dull taste onto my tongue. I awake to my brother shaking sweat from my skin. “Stay away from me,” I tell him. I push him away with beads of translucent things falling off my skin. I lock my doors and my knees and have beads that I count through my fingers. My sweat drops down like pebbles. My brother knocks and shakes the door handle.

  “You are not my brother!” I shout.

  The shadow that is reflected in the space below the door slowly retreats, but his form stands, still shaking the door. “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 spirit. Something felled them.”

  I collapse onto my knees and reach out to his retreating shadow. I grasp a thread of his shadow. I twine it around my finger, pulling every thread of it toward me. It is all I have of My Brother. I will wrap it around my knitting needles and knit him whole.

  My shadow wants to retreat, too, to flee, I tie myself around it, cold with sweat, my throat with the dull taste of castor oil. I jump into the metal table, hoping my shadow will remain an ocean I can immerse myself in. As I climb into the metal tub, a sharp piece that juts out catches my skin; my skin is a loose fabric, it tears open and I bleed the color from my skin. It drips onto the ground as I move. It is pouring out of me and I don’t know how to contain the color coming off my skin.

  “Help me,” I pray to someone. Drops of brown paint the bottom of the metal tub. I press my finger to the droplets and smudge them against my wrist, but they evaporate to ash. I am disappearing. No train. No vain. I continue bleeding, drowning in the water of my shadow, in the ocean of my ethnicity. Rather I drown in it than in anything else.

  “I don’t want to die,” I try to say, but the air refuses my voice. “I don’t want to die.”

  Mercy is a pastor walking the hallways to pray for my sins, my existence. Mercy is a nun, caught in the cobweb of a dirge. My voice is being pulled like a string from my mouth. Someone keeps pulling and pulling it. My bones won’t wake, won’t fill out my arms to move. I have no power to stop it until I hear my voice coming from outside. Someone has my voice. Someone has my v
oice. They’re Them singing with it, singing loud and proud. And a crowd, an audience claps, commands them for a voice they never clapped me for. Where is this audience coming from? Why do they accept a voice in a stranger who can’t understand it? The Keeper wears my brother’s body; the Keeper wears my voice.

  I can’t remember them. I can’t remember the people I loved. Where are their names? I wake up; we are burning.

  The Keeper wears my brother’s body; the Keeper wears my voice.

  My Brother is dead. My voice is dead.

  Scent of Wilting Skin