She tried to skin herself. In the end, she couldn’t erase herself from herself.
“We have no sovereign rule to anything, not even the life in our bones,” My Girlfriend said once.
I wanted to give her hope, but I couldn’t grow it in the garden.
I. Am. Burning.
I can’t remember them. I can’t remember the people I loved. Where are their names? I wake up; we are burning.
We are invisible, more opaque than spirits, but we still exist. No one sees us, no one hears us. The cubicle glass is a magnifying glass through which the sun goes through. This cubicle sits on stilts. It’s a machine for living. We walk through the city streets, the places that we used to call home, painted the color of air. They walk through us, they inhale us, they yawn their comfort in our invisible forms. This is not home anymore. My body is not home anymore. I can’t switch off the pain—it is a sun in the sky, always burning. The language that was a tenant of this place can no longer call this home. It is buried in Nowhere, a place without mention, without a signal, without a connect. But I saw Language one day, sitting in their home, looking nervous and scared and so tight to itself as if avoiding inhaling too much space. Sometimes I see Language as a toy that a kid kicks through what used to be our streets. Sometimes I see Language smashed continuously by someone’s teeth. Sometimes Language is burning in the fireplace or being ogled at in a window-cased box. But the one place I never saw Language in is my throat, my vocal chords, my ears. I can’t remember how my voice used to give birth to it. I can remember how Language felt when it passed through my lips. Pieces of us are scattered everywhere, and my pain is bleeding in every crevice it finds. I’m still searching for a god who will allow my skin. Please come now. Please break this glass cubicle. Take my bones at least. Give them rest. Give them home. Here I am: I am burning. Of all things, death refuses me. Here. I. Am. Burning.
My skin wilts silently, fluttering by like a flower’s petals. The Keeper wears my brother’s body; the Keeper wears my voice. I wear my soul.
Hope is my warrior. They didn’t believe in the earthquakes, our dreamskin, the ghosts haunting this place, the train. If it affects them, it could scare them off. “If we work together, we can call on the train, the train will call on the earthquake. They don’t know the rules. The ghosts will wreck them. The dreamskin will scare them. With casualties, there’ll be dreamskin everywhere.”
The wail of the train announces it arrival.
I leap onto the wall that separates the two parts of the city.
The tracks rattle, metal groaning against metal.
I will fight the death wrapped around my name. I will step onto the train and become who we are. It is a lie, being near the dead doesn’t destroy us, it wakes us up, makes us alive.
I am not crazy.
I am not crazy.
I am not crazy. “You want our land, you’ll take our problems!” I dig my hands into the earth. “Earthquake!” Shrapnel slithers through the ground, the tall-knife structure buckles—the façade is patchworked in diamond-shaped metal pieces that buckle at the edges—it creaks, shoots out every piece of its face.
I scream to the sky. “That’s your weapon there, spitting out large pieces of bullets!” They bump into the ghost-like dead ones, one starts chewing on their legs. “You’re not supposed to touch them. Respect their space. You didn’t believe in our train, in our dead, in our earthquakes. Here’s your land!” The world groans, the world shatters, their chess pieces fall into the chasm, the mouths of the angry earth.
I am Translucent. We are alive.
450 Suns Later
The graveyard is open today. All day.
I walk, run, fly toward the train station. She is there. In the third carriage.
She turns around dazed, My Girlfriend. The sunlight is a miracle around her form. I can still tell the color of her eyes: a flicker of brown. I can still tell the millions of coils holding steadfast to her head. I can still tell the dark brown gripping her bones with fear. I can still tell who she is.
My Girlfriend stands in her birthplace, the train where her mother died giving birth. There is shadow to her spirit. There is smile to her teeth. She is not vacant of holiness. She is fluffed from evil. The train glitters under the sun and moon in the womb of blue sky. Down the steel steps, she goes. She kneels before me, presses her head into my thighs. “I still love you. Do you believe that? Can that just be enough for you?” Her light brown eyes shimmer with tears.
I wipe her tears and kiss her cheek. “Our love is not a mirage on the horizon. It is here. It will always be here…”
The train takes my family and my lovers to and fro the abyss. They live part-time in ancestral land, they live part-time here. My ex-boyfriend is my husband. My Girlfriend is my wife, my first partner on the hierarchy, my husband the second; he follows the first partner’s orders. Our family name is Mohumagadi.
My Girlfriend smiles. “I have a name. I have skin-color stitched with the ethnicity of my tribe.”
My family step down from the train, still-Black. Always still-Black. Their skin-color is stilled to their bones. Mirrors in every smile, every speech, every tone. They are still here, they are still a part of us. We are near the dead. We are sacred.
With war, there is blood, there is irrevocable death. We live through dimensions, we love through dimensions. She is dead. I am alive. We are lovers.
Acknowledgments
Firstly, thank you to the super-awesome Michael Takeda who saw something in this novella to offer publication. Many thanks goes to the Pink Narcissus Press team, Duncan Eagleson for the cover design and to Josie Brown for her superb editing. Thank you to everyone who supported me with my writing—friends and family. Thank you to Aubrey for reading early drafts of this novella and offering your comments. Also thank you to my writing critique buddies, past and present, who’ve helped me evolve as a writer—Cheryl Ntumy, Sharon Tshipa, Jen Finelli, Steven Hanton, Tshetsana Senau, Virginia Harrington. Thank you to my crazy but awesome and hilarious friends/family: Boitumelo, Omphile, and Lesego. I much appreciate the following mentorships that provided me with such invaluable lessons: Justina Ireland’s Writing In The Margins and Kate Brauning’s Breakthrough Writers’ Boot Camp program. Thank you to my writing mentor F.K Omoregie (R.I.P.), who read my terrible stories and offered me advice to be a better writer. And thank you to you reader for picking up this book.
About the Author
Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana writer of fiction, poetry, and architectural articles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Prisms anthology, Terraform, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Wasafiri, Botswana Women Write, and other publications. Her poem “I Will Be Your Grave” is a Rhysling Award nominee. Her short story, “Virtual Snapshots” was longlisted for the 2017 Nommo Awards. Tlotlo Tsamaase works and lives in Botswana. Find her online at www.tlotlotsamaase.com
The Silence of the Wilting Skin Page 9