The Silence of the Wilting Skin

by Tlotlo Tsamaase

  Parts of me are juggled up, I feel amiss, out of place, but I’m back here now in this space trying to call back that spirit of calm and creativity, trying to paint with my breath, my lung the paintbrush of that world I wish for them to see, so they see it with the eye I use, not their eyes for their eyes suffer the poverty of sight: they are blind. I am nonsensical, words are too poor for my imagination. Hold me now, please.

  We are back in our residence, My Girlfriend and I. A lone tree stands in the courtyard. It sways, dizzy from the wind. The night clocks are told by the rooster, we change into creatures of moonskin. We turn into bones. We turn into water.

  “Your brother is gone, and so is the rest of your family,” My Girlfriend says. “We don’t have their bodies but we will treat it as if we do.”

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

  My Girlfriend scrapes my hair off with a piece of sharp metal. The hair is part of the past and I watch it flake to the ground. Lightness settles in my chest. The death that surrounds the funeral accumulates into toxic dirt beneath my nailbeds; it is senyama. I wash the senyama from my skin to avoid it drifting off from my skin for our living-dead to inhale and suffer from. The fire flickers as it feeds on the hair shorn off from my skull and the clothes that belonged to my family; pieces of it flicker to the sky, and I watch it waver likes motes of my family. Tears leave my eyes and never return what feeling they take from me. My family is gone and I am not—but I am.

  “People are boarding the train,” she whispers. “We should, too.”

  “I. Am. Not. Leaving. My. Home.”

  A circular mirror sits in the ground, and I see the widow’s reflection from last night, followed by their gestures. Except the mirror does not reflect them. It reflects the other side. In it the night is a material that is both thick and soft. It runs through my hands like viscous liquid. It’s the third month today, and every mirror in our wards does not reflect us. When I look at myself, I see someone with moonskin. I wonder how I look. My Girlfriend appears now telling me that it is time, and I sense the inclemency of blindness. The older we age, the more our sight goes. I pace my hand along the motifs painted on the wall. Would these too be erased? What will replace them?

  “There is no longer waking nor sleeping in this world,” My Girlfriend says. We walk behind our residence, and take the same path my grandmother took when she was dead: towards the Train of the Dead.

  “Where have you been,” I try to ask, but there is no voice to my thoughts.

  The train dissects our city, its rails creak each time it moves, it’s like teeth scratching the night air for special offerings. As it stops on its platform, it collects the living who want to leave.

  “See? People are leaving,” My Girlfriend says.

  Grandmother stands on the threshold, beckoning to me, but I hold My Girlfriend back by her waist and tell her to never step foot on it or the air would refuse to fill her lungs. The train whips past us and it smells like the graveyard near the church grounds: the scent of wilting skin. I race behind it, searching each carriage hoping it will be absent of a family member. Each time I catch the solace in my grandmother’s eyes, it brings my knees to the ground. No one offered my grandmother a seat. Hunched-back and wilting skin, she rests on her walking stick until it makes a hole through her chest straight out of her back. And you came by because you were worried about me. You took me outside. The sun was a solitude hand across the fields.

  I am startled by a movement on my side: My Girlfriend. She utters, “You’re still dreaming. Sepoko.” An ancient word for people who still lack an understanding for those who left.

  “If they want this land, then they must indulge in the things they call ‘superstition,’” I whisper. “That is our army.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The dead on the train, the earthquakes, the ghosts, the widows—they want our land, they can have them as well.”

  “But how are we going to do that?” she asks.

  “First their developments must be destroyed. Second they must fear this land so as to never step foot on it. The train is due for its arrival. The only way to evacuate them is to haunt them with our ‘superstition’. We will start the earthquakes. The earth will swallow their evil. For now, we must wait for the death train.”

  “What if the earthquakes fail?”

  “Then we get on the death train.”

  My body hurts

  The clouds are crying. The air dry, crackling.

  I have been thirsty for days. The water I drink does not quench. A streak of white slits the dark sky, the sun half-setting into the horizon. A loud crack, the snapping, breaking sky. No shatter to ground though. There is no sun. It is nighttime. Sun-bulbs are constellated along the streets, the pavements, the murram roads, the tarred roads. It is a silent, sleeping night.

  It’s been weeks since My Girlfriend and I have been living together. Another earthquake has come and gone. Another house has come and gone. Ward 5 has been replaced by a phallic-looking structure. Parts of the railway tracks are dismembering. We’ve tried fixing it, but it disperses again. The earthquake has left a chasm in the neighborhoods and markets. Our homes are down. We have to start rebuilding our lives again. My Girlfriend and I make it towards the wall by the districts, which in some way protects those from The Districts on the Other Side of the City from the train’s death. Ours always crumbles down when we build it.

  “We can’t build a wall against our ancestors,” My Girlfriend whispers, wearing a long-sleeved jersey in this humid heat. I stare at the only glove she’s wearing. Odd.

  “They’re not ancestors,” I repeat my brother’s words. We sit on the wall overlooking the districts, watching all the houses safe in their yards, safe in their land, safe in their sky, and wonder what it feels like to be safe. The Shadow is a solid thickness in the air, translucent, but not permeable by people—specifically us. We can’t ever break into the districts.

  My Girlfriend has a mellow look in her eyes that makes one want to pray. “The earthquake is going to shake the sky one day and the stars will fall down and burn our land.”

  “But the sky belongs to everyone,” I say.

  “It doesn’t.” Her jaw tenses as she notices something in The District on the Other Side of the City. “The building material…I recognize it. It’s the same as the one in your house.”

  I look at every structure that swallows everything in its presence. Everything is shiny and magnifies the sun’s hold. It hurts my eyes to look. The glare, the reflection, the greyness of it all blinds the trees that they have begun to fade.

  “They have already started the rehabilitation of our buildings,” she says. “Everything in our wards is changing.”

  “The construction is only going to take place in the fields by the railway tracks,” I say. “It’s empty land that no one uses, yet. That’s the first stage of the city development.”

  The air expands into coolness as a mass shuttle of raindrops jet from their station of clouds. We hop up, giggling and push-playing each other, yelping “Pula!”

  “See who can balance better. I’m a tight-rope walker.” She is a bird, arms outstretched, an airplane in the midst of mundanity. She is a sleek blade traversing the slim top of the wall, gingerly stepping over the sun-bulbs propped onto the wall. One step after another. I look down, the ground below folds in and out of my vision. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, nausea thick and puffy as cotton in my mouth. The base of my spine tingles with sweat. “Hey, help, feel faint,” I try, but the wind snatches the words from my mouth and chunks them far away from My Girlfriend.

  She’s widened the gap between us.

  Don’t look down. Don’t look down. The wind sways her from the sides, grabs her side with claws to take her down.

  “Be careful!” I reach out, only grasping the loose fragment of her scent, wavering in the wind.

  She turns her head, her straight-set teeth spa
rk with laughter. “Come on. You’ll be a’ight.” The wind jitters about her, shaking her clothes about, a tornado encircling her. I’m still on my fours trying to balance myself. Too late. The sun-bulb cracks, a sizzle of smoke astonishes the air, shards scar its skin, the air whines down into empty black.

  Her scream punctures the night apart.

  The dark eclipses my sight, I lose my balance, scrape my arm against the abrasive brick surface as gravity drags me down. I am a meteor; the ground punches my face. Earth and pebbles fill my mouth. I sit up, groaning, wiping dirt and hurt from my bruised face. I can’t see. I can’t see! The dark has covered my eyes with its hands. I flail around. Pain fires up and down my arms. The sun! Where’s the sun!

  My Girlfriend’s screams hold my body up, maneuver me through the dark mist toward her, until my foot feels her body first. The sun-bulbs flare. It was a power outage. The air exhales with the last fall of rain. She holds her knee to her chest, her foot soaking in the muddy water. I yank off my coat and wrap it around her, guide her toward the train station shelter.

  I scream when I look down. Her…her foot is gone.

  Cleanly sliced off.

  My body hurts. My body hurts. Pull yourself together.

  “My foot,” she cries. “My foot.”

  I bow down before her, inspect her leg. There’s no blood. There’s no blood. Her foot is gone. Dismembered. “I’m going to pull your pants leg up, okay?” I look across the tracks hoping to see her foot. I need to take her to the hospital, to the traditional doctor. What am I supposed to do? I fold back the fabric, the amputation reveals no broken-off bone or nerves and tissue, it’s brown, smooth as skin. She’s no longer screaming. In fact, she’s seated up staring at me. Just staring at me. She stands—no, don’t, the hospital, we have to go, I say—she stands as if on both feet, but the other’s gone. I stare back, mouth gaping. The sun-bulb lights surround her form with a bright halo. She points blankly at my exposed arms. Where the raindrops touched my skin are constellations of transparency, the spots like telescopes to the other side, sending sharp pinpoints of light through me.

  “What is wrong with me?” I shout, trying to flee from my skin. “What’s wrong with us?”

  “What’s wrong with them,” she corrects me, staring at the wall that separates the two parts of the city. “It’s the districts’ doing. Pain. A notification, not of bone fracture but of erasure.”

  I rock myself back and forth. The pain I felt from earlier wasn’t from the fall, it was from the rain, scorching my arms with… “Pain is a notification of what?”

  “They’re decapitating us with erasure, rain their tool.” Her face is a stern blade of anger. “We’re already disappearing. They’re not just building on our land, they’re building erasure onto our skin. Such bad guys, such heavy artillery. They’re closing in on us. Low blow.”

  “Now it’s my foot. What’s next? They’re decapitating me bit by bit,” she continues.

  “But…we can’t just disappear. Where will we go to?” I shake my head. “No, what if it’s not the districts’ doing? What if this is how the missing people disappear? What if we’re becoming Translucent?” I look about me. “I don’t know what to trust. Can we trust the air? Who’s the enemy?”

  She laughs, but it’s not a happy sound. “Spirits have more existence than us. I can see a spirit better than I can see myself. The dead are already safe. If we can’t join them, we have no home on this land, we have no home in the land of the dead.” She looks at the districts again, and this time a sad wind wipes her tear away. “They are destroying everything. I told you: Danger stands in every doorway. It doesn’t have to be loud as a bomb or a gunshot. It has the feet of silence.”

  When I look down, I scream. “Your whole leg has disappeared!”

  My Girlfriend is smiling. “The train. I can hear it. It will be here shortly.”

  Slowly her waist is disappearing.

  “Just stay with me for these last minutes. I want to remember this when I’m dead,” she says. “Stop fighting it.”

  The darkness is filled with the Keeper of the Gates, watching her death. Their arms raised toward us. She falls to the ground. “I’m sleepy,” she whispers.

  “Stay awake, please stay awake.” Half her body remains in my arms. My tears splatter her face.

  “Just hold me,” she slurs. The death train needs to get here now. I need to get her onto the death train before she disappears. We need to get onto the train.

  The Keeper of our Gate pushes The Shadow into our huddled space. Every civilian is lying on the ground, except some…who were touched by Dreamskin. They’re huddled by their families’ sleeping bodies, crying. I try communicating with the Keeper of the Gates. Again and again. I plead to it for help, stupidly thinking it will help. My throat throws up my own language in italic forms into the air. The pain welds itself into my stomach. My Girlfriend lies on the ground with black shiny eyes. The Keeper of our Gate raises its formless arm, catching my words, changing their letters and throws it back into my face like dice, so they transform into new sentences in my mind: your language does not fit this market, does not fit this society. Those words must be what it tells me. My Girlfriend’s eyes are liquid black and they melt down her face.

  It raises its hands. The first time I hear it speak: Rain. Water falls from the skies in torrents and violence.

  The Keeper of our Gate holds me down without touching me. Nulls my screaming. Something tears into me without touching me. It performs surgery on me, and the words are gone, the memory is vacant, and I can’t remember who I am. Now you are suitable for society, for the market. I stare at my arms and touch myself expecting blood and holes, but there’s no physical evidence of what the figure did. When I look across the street, I see another me whom I can see through. This me is broken, not straight, her bones jut out, her mouth is laid with flies and her tongue lies on the ground, bloody and twitching. The Keeper of our Gate stands watching. The cold fog evaporating from their black cloth is perfumed with elation.

  I’m dense with hysteria. I stretch my hand to the remaining lips of My Girlfriend. The air has devoured My Girlfriend. She is gone. She is dead. My scream is a sword into the clouds. They murdered every bit of me. I will murder what they know. In the distance, the time of tomorrow, the Sun begins to bleed. The horizon absorbs her blood, but soon it will overflow. Soon everything will overflow with the solitude dragging of Danger’s feet into our oval mouths. The war has started.

  You Were Still Alive Inside Your Mother’s Womb When They Decided to Kill You

  My Girlfriend was born on the train. The week after her mother died.

  I know. You’ve been eager to hear this ever since I started telling you everything you can’t remember. I mentioned it once and I’m surprised you didn’t bug me to elaborate it. It was hard for me to reiterate what happened to My Girlfriend; it presses trauma to my bones, makes me live through the experience. She suffered. You suffered a great deal. I should be happy you don’t remember, but the memory you gave me torments me—I don’t know why you’d want it back.

  You were still alive inside your mother’s womb when they decided to kill you.

  I can never reveal it without feeling nauseous. See, her mother wasn’t ready for a child and sought someone to snuff its existence. It is a terrible thing to recall this, it sends my body into spasms. The body parts were severed as they were one-by-one pulled from her mother’s vagina: the legs, the abdomen, the head crushed so as to ease its exit from her. After that, the rest of My Girlfriend’s home was sucked out, as if she never lived in it. The fetus lived through the abortion three times. My Girlfriend survived through that three times. It pains me to imagine what torture she lived through before she was born, how she fought to survive, how she was forced to survive, to live through it to sustain a stupid law, a law breathed by our culture to not terminate pregnancy. That experience lived in her mind, it lived in her actions, in her memories—she always wok
e up screaming, remembering the tearing off of her limbs.

  The first three attempts had the fetus extracted and buried. Each time it failed, they exhumed the burials and found nothing but earth and plants. Not one limb of you was found. They knew then that her body was not compatible for aborting. They knew it is a law by the ancestors. A law that cannot be defeated, yet they tried.

  I am so sorry, love. I am so sorry. Please don’t cry. When you were born on the Train of the Dead you couldn’t consume what the dead consumed. You were given to your uncle and you stayed with him until you found a way to pay for your living.

  Most citizens’ noses couldn’t detect what language her scent spoke. Her thoughts painted the air amber and had a peculiar scent to them. You could always tell where she had been in the house from their trail, from what she was thinking. The scent was putrid and stronger when her thoughts were erratic and burning with doubt and confusion. Those, unable to read her thoughts or the language of her scent called her smelly and threw powders of soap at her. When happy, her thoughts perfumed the air with pure intoxication that flowers bloomed and wilted in one swift moment. She tried to stop thinking. She tried to cover herself up.