kagablog

Mark this child. She is small and white. She sits within a room within a house of many rooms. Outside sway trees upon the rags of roads and blackened paths beyond nurse yet the putrid fruit of men. Her mother lies in wait upon the fire, though in truth the night sweats foul and sweet. They wait to hear of news of war; their father promised to return. I am small and meek, he thinks, and thereby dares to dodge the concern of larger men. But his skin will betray him.

The girl looks on, already now too thin. She will not see her father again. Her mother is already lost, for the canker within her has begun its work in earnest. Years from now it will cause her to see devils and death upon the faces of her kin, even as her body turns foul and pestilent. As the moths gather, the mother creeps to the window and claps her hands to the frame, over and again a dull beat, her wails rising and circling above their heads. But though the girl crouches on the ground, fists raised against those murderous cries, the sounds of this night will stay with her. They have lost everything. The cool white rooms, the swollen bougainvilleas. Blacks floating through the hallways, hovering in doorways, deferent and silent. Darkness on the edge of their eyes. A raw unspoken agony. A lone man scuttles from shadow to shadow, pursued by the coming night while all hide behind walls under bushes, a terrible fear beating within.

Two year later she is in another land, secured within the vice of the white man. She is taken in by a family of flat blue eyes. They pity her. Her country has failed to sustain the dream of cool white rooms, swollen bougainvilleas, raw unspoken agony. Six months in a room in a courtyard behind the house proper. She comes out once a day to pick at the food they set out for her and unfold a worn note upon the creaking kitchen table. Crooking further the bended line of her shoulders, she sounds nothing save for a high keening. They cannot understand her weird bird speech and she teaches herself painfully in fierce solitude from scraps of writing found places and the gestures of others. In the gathering desk, she binds her breasts, puts a heavy jacket on; dressed as a boy to drink amongst the men. With her flat chest and circumspect ways they take her for a nestling grown old before its years, pitiful and unthreatening. For the girl says little to avoid notice, her speech marked irrevocably by the flutterings of another tongue. She keeps a screwdriver on her and one night sticks it in a man, through the kidneys as he relieves himself, twisting once to make sure it will not be withdrawn. He falls to the floor, blood spreading darkly against the back of his shirt. The girl’s face impassive while she lifts his wallet. The device learnt from hearsaying thieves upon the crowded trains between the townships and the mines.

She stays within the city, moving from room to room. She works as a driver, once as a teacher to children terrified into silence by her minatory hold. A month and she is on the move again. She works for wages and when none is to be found she works the bars, wing-closed and then a composed unfolding of death.

These are the months when the city calls to itself and hears no answering voice save that of the wind, which runs the streets, trapped by the tall buildings. As if it too would run from this place. In the early dark she comes back to that week’s sleeping place, her thin shadow stretched into the night, twisting along the lines cast upon the ground by the telephone poles. As if it sought to bind itself and her to this stead. She cooks herself what meagre stuff she might, and if she may, falls to sleep with the knowledge of the pulsing dreamless sky above.

One of these sightless days finds her in yet another stained room amongst men drinking. This time she is a cleaner off work, thinned by a day spent scrubbing scratched floors, chemicals rising so thick her mind can’t stand straight and she loses hours over a bucket of dirty water.
You ever dream of water?
He asked it like he was asking to spend the night with her. The girl turned to the man who spoke. What are you doing here father? This is no place for old men.
You just might be right. His brown face crinkled. No place for old men or leprous girl-children.
He shifted himself. Slowly reached for his cigarettes. Turned a little and a straggling woman stirred into focus. Me and her, we’re going to find water, clean and blue.
The woman beside him turns, holds herself up. She raises an invisible umbrella, bows her head once, dark eyes for a moment unkennelled.
We’re going home. They came again, this time with their guns and their tanks. They told us it was not safe for us to stay here. Lepers live across the valley. They tore it down and burned it all. To protect us from the lepers, to protect us from ourselves. There’s nothing left, so we’re going back, to the sea. Been dreaming of water so long.
She spits at him. Ammonia clouds her vision and burns her mouth. What do I care father?
You, child, are going to help us. The old woman turns to him, a secret smile on her face. He nods. The girl slides a little. I told you so you could understand why we would do this to you. A privilege.
The old couple get up slowly, the man folding her wallet into himself.
I understand, she sneers. Some kinds dream of dirt, the kind you can let run through your fingers; others dream of far off places, far off people. She can no longer sit straight. But tell me, did water ever dream of us? Fools. Where is home if it doesn’t long for us as much as we long for it? Where is home.

Some take comfort from the faceless dark, profit from the quiet it affords them to act on their heart’s outbeatings. But how dark it was that night, how bright her eyes, how heavy the proof demanded of her.