kagablog

- Tell me a comforting story.

- There is nothing better than lying in bed at night with my two miniature daschunds, Saffie on my legs and Brontë pressed tightly against my side.

- Tell me a poignant story.

- A little girl walking home after spending the afternoon in the woods (they seem like woods to her, but in reality it’s probably just a veld densely populated with trees), and under her clothes she’s wearing a matching pair of underwear and a vest with the face of a little girl imprinted on them. Except she’s not wearing the pair of underwear anymore. She’s left them in the woods because she had to use them to wipe herself after taking a shit. And she’s scared.

- Tell me a happy story.

- I remember my sister and I swimming with my Dad when we were young, how he would do a couple of lengths of crawl, turning the tranquil water into a sloshing, rushing and receding turmoil of waves, quietly subsiding back into tranquility again once he sat on the edge of the pool with his legs dangling in the water, the little waves lapping more and more quietly against my body and the sides of the pool.
He would sit there on the edge of the pool in the swimming trunks my mother bought him for Christmas one year, those neon blue swimming trunks with its neon-pink and green flowers, and water pouring, then dripping, from his shoulder-length grey hair, kicking his legs lazily in the water. I would swim between his legs, grabbing hold of his calves on either side of me and allow myself to be swooshed through the water as he lifted me with his legs. I remember the feeling of his calves in my hands, the way I marveled at the hair on his legs trailing back and forth with me in the water.

- Tell me a story from your childhood.

- When I was living on a farm outside a small town, my friends and I used to walk to and from school. And as we walked the dusty roads we would pass, each day, a cripple man carrying two buckets on his way from the center of town. And we would make fun of his gait and laugh. One particular day after school, we decided to follow the man. We followed him to the river and its reedy banks, and we hid in the reeds as he made his way down to the river, curious about this man whom we saw every day of our lives, and why he was going down to the river with those buckets he was carrying.
We watched him as he put the buckets, which we now saw contained milk, down and began undressing. We were shocked, nervous and began giggling as only 10-year old boys can giggle. We watched him enter the water, naked with the two buckets of milk. We watched him pour the milk into the water and sit in the midst of it, the milky water swirling around his dark skin. We ran off, scared. I’ve never been able to get that day out of my mind.
- But what was he doing?
- I don’t know. That’s why it has stuck with me.
- But you can’t just end the story there! I want to know who he was, what he was doing there, why he bathed in milk in the river, why he was cripple?
- I don’t know. But I find the beauty of that story in the fact that I don’t know those things. We don’t have a beginning or an end, or a neat little parcel with all the answers. Isn’t that what stories are about? Stories that run into other stories that run into others, like a complex network of trails leading into one another, unsure of where one ends and another begins. They don’t satisfy our need for linearity, for encapsulated meaning. And that’s what makes them beautiful.