Tlotlo Tsamaase

by Eclipse our Sins (html)

  A low frequency forces itself into our ears, a burning signal, Morse code. The disparate breathing of the earth, its belly. By rote, I rise. Unfold my skin-coat; it ages slowly. I pick my thought-dial, it refuses to connect. Our soul’s bandwidth isn’t strong enough to carry our message, it needs funds, and maybe in many lightyears, someone will hear our story light the sky. Communication and commerce have merged with our bodies, tore its way into our minds with no need of access codes and passwords. It needs our bodies more than we need it. When we were young, Mama used to chide my sister, Botshelo. Botshelo thought of every unforeseeable bad thing. The divorces in our family. Men who weren’t supposed to touch girl-child nieces a certain way. Affairs that clung to the dark in the closets. And every time Botshelo woke up, she wondered if the city had shat her out yet, had purged her yet. She’d see me and hope ceased to light her eyes, so she’d lie back hoping one day that she’d actually die.

  As I enter my sister’s room, her soul-light flickers as my shadow stomps on it. Her sickness is a gauzy yellow veil in the bedroom. Soon I swallow its acrid taste, bitterer than bile. On the other side of the house, I hear her thought-dial ringing, endless, the hour hanging fruitlessly on the limb of the only technology that connects us. She hardly opens her mouth. But her thoughts always crowd me in the kitchen as I knead bread, hoping to deep-fry magwinya for us. And now, whoever is calling us is impinging on our thought-dial’s bandwidth—we bought two to share five winters ago; we may as well share the same skull. I feel Mama Earth’s force clench around my body, and I do a quick prayer, I will police my own thoughts before they’re skull-born, before You feel their whisper bend Your bones. It’s a hard thing. Our bodies are no longer the refuge of our souls. The flesh soul-holders are grief-stricken.

  Botshelo sits in the dim light, her feet dusty with not-belonging as she ropes sectioned parts of her Afro in wool. For days she looks like this, a medusa with maphondo-styled hair. Her time-hole is rusted and old and hangs next to the rain-wet umbrella by the door. That’s how I remembered that tornado day. The mud footsteps that led to her bedroom. The miasma of her sickness and sweat that hung humid-thick in the air first notified us she was sick, but she wouldn’t tell us why. That’s how I remember my sister. Her time-hole, a metal thing that stored everything about us: biometric data, digital life, AI assistant, bank accounts, medical aid info—everything, yet it wouldn’t tell us what she did.

  I pull aside Botshelo’s tattered curtains, and a bird, something rare in our city, sits on the windowsill pecking at our window.

  Botshelo sits up from her bed, joy brightening her eyes. “Death’s coming,” she says, staring at the bird. “It’s knocking on our window. My window.”

  “That’s not a good sign,” I say, sighing. I knock my fist against the window. The bird throws itself into the air, flapping its wings.

  My sister crosses her arms, a sour twist to her lips. “Why won’t the doctors just kill me if they won’t save me?”

  “You know why they can’t kill you,” I say, crying. “The city still needs your body connected to the grid. How else can they connect to your soul?”

  Our souls light up the riches’ avenues and streets we can’t even call home.

  “Now, here, it’s time to go for your meds,” I say, dragging out her wheelchair from the closet.

  She pushes herself into her pillows, sulking. “Please, tomorrow. I hate that place.” She raises her pinkie. “I promise I’ll be more agreeable tomorrow.”

  “It’s the only way they’ll let us live here,” I say, folding the wheelchair back.

  “But this was our grandmother’s home. It’s our home,” she cries.

  I walk toward the bed, wrap my arm around her. “Things will work out, let’s just be a bit more patient.”

  “People used to live longer than this,” she whispers. “Sisi, we expire so fast, but why us? Why not those who had the chance to enjoy Mmê Earth? Why are we living in their shit?”

  I hold my head in fear of it snapping off my neck. So, like always, my sister counts my fingers hoping that they stay even.

  “I shouldn’t have sold my eggs,” she whispers, “to the manufactures. Look at all those abnormal manufactured humans. Yes, they live longer, they’re resilient, but still, we’re still humans, we matter as well. I shouldn’t have signed up for the experiments to save this family—look at me now, they destroyed my body. When it wasn’t satisfactory for them, they fired me, took me off their payroll. They don’t even give a fuck about me.”

  “You were gone for years,” I whisper, “what exactly happened?”

  She realizes now the acerbic rise of the past, existing in this little room of ours, burning her tongue. Realizes how she never spoke of her experience. Realizes how her discomfort triggers the trauma. I watch her, silently calculating, sifting through her thoughts, editing them then throwing them away because neither one sounds good.

  She pulls her knees to her chest, peers at me through her thick eyelashes. “Why am I the one who’s ashamed when it should be them who’s ashamed?” It surprises me, this response of hers, the light sharpening her pupils to a dark pinpoint in her brown eyes.

  “What did they do to you?” I ask.

  “There are many of them out there.” She rests her chin on her knees. “I don’t know how many. I’m going to die without knowing how many . . . ” She hiccups. A sob. A tear streams down her cheek.

  “How many what?” I ask.

  Her grip tightens around her knees, her shoulders clench forward, as if gripping onto her secret. Maybe she realizes that she doesn’t have long to live, maybe that’s why she’s slowly opening up to me every day.

  I catch her teardrops and massage her shoulder. “How many what?” I ask softly.

  “Children.”

  “Children?”

  “My . . . ” She sighs, digs her head into her knees, then in a muffled voice, whispers. “My children. The manufactured ones.”

  No one in our family likes her mouth except me. They’d gagged her with soap once. She woke up to find him with his arm down her throat, soapy and acrid. She couldn’t even scream. His thought-dial, unlike ours, was portable. He was authorized by the family to do that. Their reputation was more important. Perhaps, at a microclimate level that’s how it started—accumulated from every family, from every district, from every nation to the whole continent until it overwhelmed Her, Mmê Earth. So when my sister tells me she has children, I think it’s just her typical mouth speaking silly stuff.

  “The plan behind the experiments was to migrate the upper-class citizens into a more resilient body that can withstand our climate,” she whispers. “They’ve already paid body rentals and purchases of the manufactured bodies.”

  My respirator makes a hoarse noise, then I realize it’s me gasping, choking. I clasp my hand to the respirator, as if it’s in the way of my breathing. It’s the shock, filling my bloodstream with adrenaline. Is this what Mama meant? Someone is killing our land. Someone is our enemy. Someone in our midst hides in our color. Catch them! Catch them; if your land dies, you die.

  Our land is our bodies.

  I’m supposed to love my sister, to care for her, but each time I look at her, I feel this grudge, its furnace burning in my body. I stare at her as if she’s holding a knife to my back. I could be next. I could be Mama. I grip her shoulders, my sudden movement stunning her. “Why is She doing this to you?” I ask. “What did you do to Her?”

  “To who?” she shrieks.

  “Mama Earth!” I yell. “What did you do to turn Her against our family. Are you telling the truth? I ask. “Is this why you’re re-sick? You only become sick when you’ve sinned against Mama Earth.”

  “I became part of their experiments, part of their sins, and yes, I may have sinned.”

  “What did you to Her?”

  She clasps her ears with hands.

  “Please don’t be ashamed,” I say. “Just tell me.”

  “Everyone sins against each
other thinking they’re going to live forever, thinking they can trick Her. You can’t. Sin leads to death.”

  “You’re the only one sick in our family,” I say.

  “Even malome is sick,” she yells. Malome; uncle. “He thinks I don’t hear him at night, creeping through our passage into the toilet, vomiting every night, his diarrhea filling the toilet bowl, him wearing heavy garments in this heat wave. He’s trying to hide the rash from the sin-fever.” Her eyes turn deadly on me. “Soon you’ll fall sick.”

  There are secrets in our family. Terrible secrets that lie on our skin like rash. The rage in me burns. I stare at the blatant, gaudy sickness clinging like a batshit lover to her skin. The rash. The boils. The scathing lies. What did you do to become like this? Are you still my sister? Why do you cling to your secret like this disease clings to your bones? What pollution did you impose into the environment that it turned on you? Did you burn down someone’s house? Did you talk down to someone because of their religion? Did you kill someone? Mother Earth no longer stands for such pollutants anymore. I ask these questions only to myself because she won’t say. Who are you? I hate that there’s a part of her that I don’t know. Mama Earth knows all our secrets, Her and God and the Universe, and They will not let us live freely with them.

  “Haven’t you learned anything from Itumeleng?” I ask her, reminding her of the family fable, the death of our brother.

  A family fable:

  The only reason someone becomes sick is because they sinned, did something terrible. Last summer when the sun was boiling the air, my brother was one of many behind the xenophobic attacks on foreigners’ businesses—looting, burning, killing. The next morning as I made breakfast for the family, he sat in the middle seat as usual. He tried to eat the bread. He tried to drink the coffee. But his mouth was skew, and everything slipped out. The next morning, his mouth was slack, teeth unhinged. He had a knife. Scratched at his skin.

  He was allergic to his skin.

  He scraped it down to white flesh that was just as quickly flooded with bright-red blood. He became allergic to himself. The only cure was death. Mama Earth was trying to purge him as he tried to purge the outsiders; but not as quickly as he snuffed them. She did it slowly and painstakingly so that perhaps remorse diluted his rage. Only good and God and Allah or whoever holy you believe in will exist. All evil will be extracted out like a bad molar from Mama Earth’s mouth. The rest, She will purge unto death. The racism and exclusion too, hit back like a bad wave of locusts, harbingers, a pandemic of encephalitis. The population was low. They tried to manufacture new people who’d be more resilient to this new climate.

  Tomorrow is looking for Future

  We still continue to sin. I have been out, looking for a second piece-job; it’s been a failure. I am brilliant, I am smart, I am talented—I know that, but I lack the privilege and wealth to get into “somewhere, somewhere.” Every department’s response: “We are looking for someone with mass appeal,” they say, every snow-white strand pulled tautly from their scalps. “Your work, your body is not a fit for our list . . . unless you are interested in signing up for our experiments.”

  I was desperate, but not that desperate. Look at what they did to my sister’s body, and I still have to take her to them for meds. But I didn’t want to be blacklisted for my attitude, so I bowed my head, smiled, and thanked them for their consideration. When I stepped outside, I couldn’t breathe. I was filled with a burning panic at the truth: there are walls built around me. I can’t see them, but I can feel how they suck at the air around me leaving me unable to breathe. All the things they want me to censor about myself will eventually censor my existence in their eyes; from this, as Mother Earth has dictated, they will die. But they don’t believe in this “superstition” like Mama didn’t. And now she sleeps in a grave.

  On the way home, I tried contacting my sister, but she was not responding to my thought-dial, so I had to storm up the dirt-stirred concrete stairs. She’s probably with her boyfriend. Lung-borne pollutants proliferate the air, obscuring the hallway’s path. I bang on an apartment door—her boyfriend’s. I bang it again. He, the boyfriend, yanks it open. Climate change has made a home in the marrow of their bones. His studio apartment contains doctored air hyped with amphetamines, secondary meth-smoke.

  The lady downstairs selling gene-hacked vegetables told me that she heard from a neighbor that my sister and her boyfriend stoned a young couple a few days ago.

  I refused to believe her. “They’re not violent people,” I tried to tell her. “No, not my sister.”

  “They called the couple terrible words, said they’re sick, yet your sister and her boyfriend are the sick ones. What fucker does that to another human being? Bashes their head in because of their love?” she’d asked. “They’re sick, I tell you. Demented.”

  Then the old woman hobbled to her workstation to pick up her thought-dial and sent me the image that was circulating through many thought-dials. The couple, two young girls in love, lying huddled in the street. My sister and her boyfriend, their hands bloody, their eyes rabid and fierce.

  I staggered backward. “This is not my sister, no, she’s—she’s not capable of this.”

  “You’re so foolish with your faith in your sister,” she’d said.

  I want to rid our city of this pollutant that continues to destroy our world. This pollutant that infests my sister’s body. If my sister dies from sin-fever—no, I can’t watch her die so that the world continues to live. She is my world more than this Earth is. It’s not her fault—but this is her, hurting another human being, for what reason?

  “My sister, she’s only fourteen,” I whispered. “She’s just a kid. He’s twenty-three.”

  “Dating a kid. Perhaps that’s why he’s doubly sick.” The old woman grabbed her thought-dial back. “The police don’t need to lift a finger,” she said, “Mama Earth will sort these criminals out. They deserve what’s coming to them.”

  Actions and thoughts lead to real sickness. Stoning someone can give you a disease worse than cancer. And I see it now, what Mama Earth is doing to them, the encephalitis sickness of their consequences, gripping to their sharp cheekbones, as they limp around the small apartment, looking puny and pitiful. A cackle of thunder as if Mama Earth laughs over this. My sister’s boyfriend is shaky, at first, bones brittle, cytosine rife with anxiety and depression like every other citizen, and saturated with commercial ads that probably sprayed every tester at them from every façade with cleaning agents to protect society from their sickness, charging them an automatic “small” fee that they couldn’t pay.

  “Why?” I ask. They both stare at me stupidly.

  “I’m sorry, I was puking,” Botshelo says. “I didn’t have my thought-dial. Just saw your message. I’m ready, we can go.”

  “Is it true?” I ask. “Did you hurt those women?”

  Her lips tighten into themselves. “Don’t believe every rumor you hear.”

  I raise my rusty thought-dial. “I have evidence of you and him—” I point at her boyfriend without staring at him—“hurting them.”

  “It was a misunderstanding.” She picks up her luggage and drags her body to a stand. “We’re going to be late.”

  I stand in her way. “Why did you hurt those women? They’re barely holding on to life at the hospital.”

  “Speaking of the hospital, if we don’t leave now, we’ll be very late.”

  I shake my head. “Take your damn self.”

  As I turn my back on her, her voice reaches out to my neck. “You think you’re so innocent. Don’t neglect your family or Mama Earth will punish you like She’s punishing our uncle. You’ll be next soon.”

  I turn to her. This is my sister. When did she change? Become this way? Is it the sickness now changing all that remains of her? In the days to come what will she turn into before she dies? Does she still love me? No, not if she will stoop so low to threaten me so as to do what she needs.

  Chemical weapons fond
led Earth too much. I guess the environment became sick and fed into her, then she became sick and fed into the environment—this cycle, no quarantine. I remember we’d drive for miles, the fields barren, the quarry a white-torn wound in the earth. The earth tried to swallow back its ocean, but it came back in tsunamis, washed aside our homes in toxic acid. My eye-feed blurs, another village has gone down. Everyone is living in temporary housing, but the rich stay in the sky, smoking it up, because they can afford it.

  I slam the door leaving them alone, wiping tears from my face with my fist. My family is falling apart, Mama Earth. I’m sorry, please forgive them, I yell at the sky.

  I step outside, the heat boiling the air. Fuck.

  We have become foreigners to Earth, and it has turned xenophobic.

  hidden-by-night

  Darkness falls. The moon clicks into place, like a bullet into the chamber. I must hide. I catch sight of the moon, half-slain, a stranger. Why is Mama Earth punishing my uncle? What has he done?

  Nightly. Moonlight sways through the air abnormally, and once in contact with skin, a rash quickly develops. Severe asphyxiation initiates. Soon death befalls the body. The moon is a toxic beauty. We must remain indoors; the tectonics of architecture are built to restrain outside toxins from us, and our toxins from the natural environment. It’ll be only an hour before the city shuts the moonlight out.

  Night; the world dissolves into black. All I hear is humming rain, panting breaths. Every noise slows down to a heartbeat. Soul-lights flare. Only the broken moon’s shadow tells us the time. I can leave my residence now. I will follow him, the honorable uncle, to see what he does under the cloak of night.

  Maybe once I witness his ugly actions, then I will understand the sickness that pervades my sister, that is killing my family one by one. As I follow him in the dark—through the backstreets, the gravel road, the barren fields, to a lowly place between two hills, a tavern overlooking a bonfire—my thoughts burn a feverish gloom, evaporating from my skull, almost exposing my hiding place. It’s not just us, there’s a tavern of them. Oh, dear, God, Mama Earth—it disgusts me what they do. I crouch lower behind a cactus. Moon, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins. A tavern of them stand, dancing and drinking around the bonfire. Laughing. Little children. There are little kids here. How can these people laugh at this evil they create?