Category: stories

Sitting outside, enjoying the sounds an incoming storm. The wind as always, ungentle in its caress of the huge indigenous trees. Making their branches snap and crackle in protest. The leaves generating an unrelenting chorus of complaint. Seed pods clapping the ground as they fall. All lit, and framed by irregular bolts of lightening. The cacophony of back benching frogs celebrating what will be, a night of froggy passion. I love Africa.

I sat at my dining room table. A table dominated by gaping holes and crevices where the wood had worked in its past life. Spaces where nine inch nails had slowly been screwed in to hold the feet of the railway lines. The crevices yawned where the wood had aged itself away, broken down into dust and whipped up by the wind to restart the cycle. I love the simple boyish fact that I could drop a knife through my table or when I read a book my fingers crawled across its surface and picked at the curved holes.This was purposeful, I asked the carpenter to plane off only a sliver from the planks surfaces. Only because I was a tactile person and I wanted the imperfections of each plank to buttress each other at every joi. I wanted my eyes to run along its surface bouncing between the hues of red and black. During the occasional bounce my eyes would bump into a crumb trapped in a crack begging to be rescued. My boyish endeavour would send me off to craft or find a tool to rescue the abandoned morsel. It hardly ever took longer than a minute to free one but the smile lingered on the corners of my mouth for a full five, it made me wonder, did the person who left the morsels do it for my pleasure? Towards the end of the rescue mission the speck would be flung from the darkness of the crack and onto the light of the table top, and for the final act I would inhale, and with gusto, I exhale and lose the crumb forever. 

This table is my sanctuary. Somewhere to retreat from the monotony of today or yesterday, it allowed me to envision tomorrow. Sitting down on the un-cushioned bench seats I can free my mind. The benches were plain, a simple design from page two of the ‘how to carpent’ book. Yet to the eye they were complex, each one topped with a two inch thick slab of rhodesian teak, their heft would make anyone’s arms and back break into song. A craggy bench-scape hard on the ass. A myriad of external canyons snaking across the wood made for a splintered frame of the tiled floor below it. The spaces between the wood did not welcome my ass but they bit and chewed on it as I sat, when I stood I left with a map of the gnarly bench waving good-bye to its negative image. My simple comfort.

Breaking my eyes off a crack that was determined to meet its neighbouring crack to look at the table cloth I smiled. Traditionalists insist on a tapestry woven from natural or synthetic fibres as table clothes whereas modernists rely on two-dimensional transparent extrusions. I was in the camp of traditionalists, the natural tapestry was my choice, millions of fibres bleached and woven together. Unlike the traditional traditionalist, I had a collection of tapestries covering my table. Some of them were thick and hefty containing monochromatic dyed prints and some were plain. Each book had a vague to no reason for sitting on my table, the jumbled tablecloth of books occasionally reminded me how much reading I had to get through. Occasionally they pinged me with guilt, about the number of unused notepads, Winston you can start a school. But it never bothered me for long because this was my dreamscape, I loved the multi-storey piles of random unrelated books precariously hanging over gaps in the table. I loved the sense of trepidation when my eyes settled on a 1500 page dictionary perched next to the 1000 pages of Tolkein that itself was challenging a collection of Bertrand’s letters as to who is the tallest.

The table was not simply a literary haven with books and pens, it was a dreamscape. Lost between the volumes were 2 tea candles floating between unrelated tales. I had brought them to the table during a power cut with the well-meant of ambition of providing myself light but oddly never got round to lighting them. They were scented, and scent in its intangibility has the power to make you feel like there is a company when you in the room alone.

First thing on Monday morning.

A noise pierced the dream. Shattering the single focus. Causing his body to break out of beautiful sleep. He was not yet awake but his subconscious was reacting to the first few milliseconds of his alarm.

A tensing of his sleeping gut and a spasm ripped across his back as his ears fought to locate the sound. The the left, his left ear shouted. His right ear vaguely responding to the sound attempted to muffle it by refusing to fully engage his ear drum. Unfortunately his left ear was not a partaker of this hide the alarm game and had sent his eardrum into reverberating shimmer of silent acknowledgement. His brain had heard. It now knew it had to kick into gear and disturb and destroy the world it was building to the monosyllabic pulse of the alarm. In brain time it was a slow introduction of noise jolted his conscious awareness. His consciousness screamed “Get that sound, silence it!”

His left paw grovelled around the crumpled sheets with a single minded fury, kill the noise. Once his fingertips felt the cool lifeless, noisy plastic they wrapped themselves around it. Now the challenge began as the cellphone was hoisted from its hiding place in his sheets. His challenge had 2 options, swipe to the left to silence the noise for 24 hours or swipe to the right to silence it for 10 minutes. In the slit seconds between the pulsating noise his fingers could inadvertently give him the illusion of peace, for only 10minutes. He had to find the will between the spells of vulgar wordage and curses upon digital circuitry to pry open his eyes.

Sweet, innocent pupils shielded from the world were wide open hugging the edges of his brown irises. The two pupils began to sweep the darkness involuntarily towards the cacophony that shook his consciousness awake. He had the cause of the sound in his hand but he had to look at it and see where to swipe. The faint embers of artificial light tugged at his eyes, sexy, inviting but dangerous, he knew this somewhere in a part of his brain that decided to ignore the call to action. WHAM. A thousand pixels. A pocket sized computer, Skynet, lit up his unprotected pupils with hundreds of colours all chiming together wake up! The naughty bad of his brain that insisted on snoozing was hastily woken up by every nerve in his body as his retina singed under the assault of the pixel war. This was no different to yesterday or the day before, retina burnt and frustrated blinking accompanied even greater intensity of vulgarity. Even as his eyelids crashed together to hold out the barrage of light he knew it was all in vain. The phone was touch screen, he had see what he was doing. He opened them again to hunt down the virtual button to silence the incessant noise, alarms should automatically switch off when your heart rate hit 200 his brain calmly thought of a new feature.Damn it. The courage was now his and he sacrificed his one good eye to keep a bead on the the silence button. His fingers though were frantic reaching round the phone and triumphantly swept left across the screen. As he smirked in the dark he thought he could hear angels singing whilst the duvet lovingly embraced him and the pillow tenderly caught his falling head.

What had been retained in his head in the form of vulgar speech now started to seep out of his mouth. This time of day was according to folklore the hour when witches went about their business. In the era of the alarm, it was a new type of curse that was cast, he was no different, the master wizard of his bedroom. When it was darkest men and women swore at their weaknesses and cast vulgarities across their motivations and loving aspersions towards their beds. He was no different it started like a distant rumbling of an onrushing train, barely audible. He swore, cussed and let the fabric of spacetime and morality feel the weight of his vocabulary.

At this point, as with the final seconds in life, everything sharpens into focus and is weighed accordingly. Do I, should I, why and when have to stand strong and account for themselves. Asleep broken for the next 18 hours is no laughing matter, he thought, when I die can I be dead forever. No archaeologists hammer should announce its arrival with sharp pings on his mandible nor angels on horseback blowing trumpets raise him from his final slumber. That one, he would be selfish with because he would have no motivation to crack its bliss.

After a few seconds of existential monologue interspersed with a spicy sprinkling of cuss, he swung his feet off the bed. No sandals! The sensation shot up his heels and lit his achilles as the chilly tiles bit into his soles. Rumph. Too late for flip flops the cold had done its job and woke his toes. His sole focus had changed to his bladder and its unbelievable weight. He needed to empty it. That presented a challenge that every man since the invention of the indoor toilet has faced, unwilling flesh. As he stumbled to the toilet he thought his forefathers would have greeted the morning with proud golden rainbows glistening in the starlight. Grumbling away he began his morning contort.

Hovering in the corner was a flat square . The square was contoured and coloured in hues of brown. 

Below the rainbow brown surface were four pillars. Each pillar reached up from the ground and touched a corner of the square. The cylindrical pillars were a single shade of silver. A sad silver shade only good at reflecting their surroundings and keeping the square off the ground. The square and pillars were the simple construct of a table. It never thought of itself as simple, let alone a table.

His mind was a cocohony of square thoughts. Each thought a simple truth, isolated from all other thought but identical if only in their complexity. His mind was a reflection of the hive of activity that occasionally occupied his back. His back was only his back when he decided to it to be. It became his back when hard circular objects were placed upon him. At times he decided it was his face. It never occured to him this was a unique thing to do. Face swapping was his way of escaping the mottled thing that never did anything except stare and stare and stare. The truth, and do not tell Tafula is that mottled thing was a carpet, a badly dyed collection of polyester yarn that was showing its age. The carpet was hardly ever cleaned and the mottled effect was highlighted with ingrained bits of food and shoe passengers.

Tafula was alone. He was the only living piece of furniture. A square freak. Even the chairs that surrounded him in a faux warm embrace were lifeless. His own legs were not alive. Tables unlike us are not hewn from a single piece of wood, especially in this modern era with mechanical carpentry. Tafula’s legs were milled out of nickel and aluminum alloys mined in Africa, smelted in China and finished in Bristol. Ok, milled is a stretch. The alloys were poured into a mould, left to cool and finally dipped into a bath to create table legs with a  matt silver finish. That is the story of Tafula’s lifeless legs, they will carry him for the rest of his life.

In this world devoid of craft and life how was Tafula living and conscious? It all started several hundreds of years ago with a brown dusty seed falling off a giant teak tree. A tiny hard husk hid the promise of life. The seed had fallen to the ground in North Western Zimbabwe. In that time seedlings were all the rage, a carpet amongst a forest of tree trunks. The days were spent waiting for the rains, soaking up the water and slowly unfurling themselves into samplings. They chatted and played racing for the patches of sunlight under their moms beautiful purple and green frocks.

When he was a boy the world was abuzz with animal life, some small and some absolutely huge. The older trees whispered their tales in the winds that swayed them. The stories seems endless, talking about times so far gone that they could only be measured in when the rains came and went and not in the daily pulse of the sun. That pulse, the ebb and flow of when the trees woke up to eat the light and watch the life of the savanna playing out its never ending rhythm. Tafula and his fellow samplings lost a fear with each passing rainy season. They raced towards the sun, trying to outrun the animals that would seek out the juicy green leaves that kept them alive. After a few decades of rainy seasons they had outgrown all the animals except the hulking grey elephants. The elephants would wrap their trunk around a young tree and pull them out of the ground screaming. Even when you were a few decades old the young bull elephants in a show of strength would push trees over and sometimes even managed to kill them. If as a tree you were lucky you survived and grew up as a mangled heap of foliage, alive but never tall and true.With no elephants Tafula’s existence would cover hundreds of rainy seasons. He made it. He grew into a large impressive tree on the edge of a kopje where a greek emerged from the random rock pile to make its way across the plain.

From his throne he watched various battles play out in the plains, from prancing impalas to majestic lions. He  saw good lions rule, bad lions rule and even the occasional mediocre mangy male hold court in the rocky outcrop under the shade of his branches. Lions were always present, sometimes they thrived but more often than not they barely made it from one season of plenty to another. He occasionally grew attached to a pride male, but could never do anything but watch as that male ascended to his own kingship and finally get ejected by a younger, stronger male. He had always thought the whole thing was a phenomenal waste of energy and the main reason lions never lived long. In those days his thoughts were vivid, filled with colour and awash with sensory stimuli. He could almost reach out and grab the strands of grass that tickled his huge trunk. He did sometimes let the tricks of the wind allow him to caress a lioness perched on his limbs. The limited sense of touch he possessed was a liability when random troops of baboons moved through his branches between scavenging episodes. He hated it when there was no pride in his kopje and the baboons made it their home, in those years his limbs took a pounding, broken branches were the order of the day. 

During one reason the tree that would become Tafula noticed a new bipedal animal roaming the plains. It was a medium sized creature that nearly always carried an object of some size or shape or colour in the limbs that never touched the ground. It would come and go particularly when it was raining. They chattered incessantly, quieter than the baboons but just like them they never fell into complete silence for long. Ok maybe the tree was unfair. But only because they did not insist on swinging from his branches. They were innoculous. Tafula had no idea they would be far worse than the time when the rains vanished and the grass gave way to sand or when the blazing fires licked his leaves. Their love of fire was the first that would have raised his woody eyebrows if he had any. They were the only animal that he ever saw make fire by rubbing his dead branches together and they were the only animal that needed the fire when the sun went to sleep. He thought of them as the fire animal, they needed it to sleep, to eat, to chatter louder, to stay warm and to kill. Fire, and more fire. Fire would bring their offspring the tools to fell the tree giants of the savanna. One of those giants Tafula watched them quizzically as they grew old in his shadow.

The day came. When the fire animal would swing an axe into the heart of the tree’s belly. Cutting at his thin bark into his hard flesh. It started off as a mild stimulation. He was not worried because unlike the other trees he could not be pushed over by elephants, his flesh was harder than them all. But the fire men took turns, moving the axe amongst themselves. Tafula, was now in agony. He leaves fell to the ground, silent green tears. The wind howled through the gaping red hole in his belly as the sun baked his flesh. He now struggled with his balance, his once proud crown was now threatening to snap his back in half, collapsing him to the ground. He watched helplessly as they worked their way around him. He looked down at his eviscerated centre both galled at the horror of why they would do this but also captivated as he stared into himself. The tree looked at the sharp shards of his flesh that formed a carpet under the working men’s feet and wondered if they were looking back up at him. All his might, the hundreds of rainy seasons could not help him for he had never learnt to speak, to cry for help. With the mortal wounds cast. The men stopped. 

The rains came and went. Tafula could feel the coolness of the drops on the few remaining leaves he could muster up. He could not convert the food in the ground and the light on his leaves into him. He was ring barked. Another rainy season came and went. Soon there were no leaves. An upright shadow of a tree stood on the edge of the kopje, marking the spot where a giant teak tree once lived. His mind still worked. A consciousness caught between age rings. The men then returned to fell him.

His skeletal remains were chopped up into manageable pieces. The heavy, heavy wood was loaded into wagons and taken away to be worked. The men had not come for timber furniture. They had come to build a railway across Africa. They carved him into 2m long sleepers to hold the railway up for the trains to run along. Sleepers, was what the men called the heavy pieces of wood. Sleepers, was what had become of the teak trees. For the next 60 years the sleepers held the commercial success of man on their backs. For man his success was unheralded for his species but the plains around the the railway lines died. Hunted, burnt and exploited, life disappeared.

None of that history was stored in his memory. His consciousness was a splintered collection of rough shards. Fast forward 60 years and rail as the economic backbone is waning in Africa. Poor maintenance and corruption has diverted the transportation business to heavy haulage trucks, where money is to be made by private individuals. The tracks that had supported commerce slowly rusted and warped. The sun and the rain having their way with the long pieces of iron. The tracks that had burdened him would soon be peeled off and repurposed. In the dying years of the railway compounds had sprouted alongside the tracks where communities could catch cheap, slow transport to their work in the city. Young boys and girls spent many an afternoon playing alongside the tracks, playing hopscotch between the sleepers. The idea was not to step in the gravel that supported the sleepers but to only run and skip on top of the pieces of wood. One of the boys, Thabani was an exceptional player. His feet effortless skipped atop the sleepers never touching the gravel. He was undefeated and would reign supreme his entire childhood. His feet seemed to glide along the slabs of teak that had been weathered to a coarse grey over their decades in the sun. Thabani’s feet seemed to know that his calling was to be a great carpenter, and never missed the opportunity to feel the coarseness of weathered wood along his soles. 

As a man, Thabani had a home in the same compound he grew up in, just a few meters from being trackside. He had taken up carpentry in high school and excelled going on to get an A in his O’levels and winning prizes for his creations at the Polytechnic college. Mr T, was his nickname, whether is was due to the influence of the A team in the 80s or the fact that through his teenage years he always had a t-square in top pocket of his school uniform or maybe it was easier to yell than Thabani?

Mr T was known throughout the compound and across the city as the go-to carpenter for bespoke work. His creations forced the viewer to caress the curves and prod the edges of the wood. From tables to chair to kitchen countertops to beds, Mr T made it all. He never made any curios however as he had a practical streak in him that refused to waste wood by creating fluff. He insisted wood was to be worked and it was to be used, not left in a corner for the occasional glance. His fame meant that the railway company reached out to him when the decision was made to repurpose the railway lines, they wanted worthy carpenters to convert the sleepers into the highest quality furnishings. He could hardly believe it. He had often wondered as he walked to the local pub what he would do with the wood from the sleepers if given the chance. He knew that they were all older than the city that had sprung up around them, they were from a time before man came here. What could be a fitting piece?

The music had kept a smile on my face, a perfect mix of dance-hall, hip-hop, and a drizzle of a melodious female voice. The drive home always felt like it took half the time it took to get to the office.

Twip, twip, the alarm signalled the security was demanded by the very pores of Johannesburg – the City of Gold. Walking up to my doorway I thought I heard the shuffling of someone being busy in a kitchen. I should have stopped and taken stock, but my bladder insisted I barge through the door and relieve myself. Key in, turned, handle gripped, turned, door open. Then, mouth aghast.

There he was, a stranger in my house. Taller than me with a short evenly cropped hairstyle and eyes open wide beaming shock back at me. They asked intently who are you, I verbalised, “who the fuck are you?” I stopped at the door, my bladder fell silent, once again security and danger danced across my mind. With an unbroken stare, and the confidence of someone in his home he said, “I am Marvin.” His face continued the sentence his mouth could not, who are you? But I refused to answer the subliminal question, and continued with my line of questioning, what are you doing in my home?” “Your home?” Question ping pong played between us.

My brain did a quick check of the couch, TV, books, dining room, yes is my home. His brain did a quick check of the couch, TV, books, dining room, and yes his brain said this was his home. The question the couch, TV, books, dining room asked was “who are the two of you?”

The crippling nagling feeling held his fingers captive. They were behind the bars of his mental dearth. In a barren moment they stared at the keyboard, each facing a new letter and trying to define a moment in words. Not spoken. Written.

This was his today and his tomorrow reflecting what he learnt yesterday, but never believed. The days rolled with the bouncy motion of a rotating hexagon. Dadum, darum, datum, over and over the days turned with midnight, morning, afternoon, evening, night, and a dream bouncing off the floor. This was his writer’s block.

The story is fast-paced, so he ran. Syllable chasing vowel and vowel tripping up consonant. Speed is the be-all. All that matters is how fast the words are sewn together. He doesn’t know it. But his legs feel it. Lungs groan and complain. What a moment to speed passed the present.

This is the fastest little story. It knows it can, letter after letter it races on. Folding over itself in the race for the next full-stop. Committing to hurdling over commas it stretches its legs. Counting to thirteen and leaping with alternating letters forward, a practiced hurdling stride propelled the story to her fast ending. Yet the page dragged her back, a plain white anchor holding her back from her goal.

Page after page her little letter legs strode on. Quicker and quicker they went, a blur for the reader but that didn’t matter. Her story was not to be read but to be sped. She only knew there was a finish line ahead, but didn’t know if it was on page 1 or page 100. Somewhere in the whitespace ahead, her story will end. All that mattered was getting there. A dusty swirl of letters floated in the wake of her racing feet. She is speed.

The reader read the blur, letter upon letter, and sentence upon sentence barely noticing the increase in speed. A slight headache warned the reader that this story bolted her own destiny and was not going to be captive to his lackadaisical reading speed. This story was meant to be read fast, tongue twistingly fast. Where the voice in his head tripped over its tongue. That was the only way to race to the end of the story. A blur of sound, letters, and pages as a single story.

For sale! The signs barricaded the soon to be empty stores from prying eyes. The signs littering the transparent glass, attracting prying eyes to stroke the unknowing mannequins. One store, then randomly another all had the ‘for sale’ signs, markers betraying their weakened states.

As a newcomer, Naledi made her make-shift home in one of the weakened stores. She could hide in the crowded traffic where everyone was unseen from everyone else. Her nerves constantly fought to betray her presence, but she steeled herself against the power of fear. She knew she had to be calm and be still if this was to be her home. In the corner away from prying eyes Naledi’s eyes pried each shopper as they made their way about the store, gorging on cheap prices and the envy of owning the store merchandise. She knew stores, many of them are what made the city the city.

The battle she fought minute after minute was to remain undetected and unseen. She stowed herself away, not because the shoppers or the shopkeepers could harm her, but because the mall’s witch would get rid of any interloper. This mall was the home of a city witch, one with some power to commander all these stores and attract all these shoppers. Naledi knew that power was drawn from the unbridled lust and ambition shoppers had for each other, malls were where humans came to strut. They reminded her of cocks in the village confidently strutting and threatening potential competition. She knew that with each passing minute the likely hood of her detection grew, and she also knew she had to watch carefully and learn about this mall.

The mall she was squatting in was on the edge of a small town, it had been the first collection of lights she had seen the night she landed. To Naledi this was the largest structure she ever spent a night in, it may as well have been a palace. But it was a typical small-town mall, more shopping centre than a mall, a random collection of shops trying to sell the cheapest of the cheap. Each item in each shop wore a price tag that was itself a race to zero, the cheap price hid the limited functionality and durability of the toy, tool, or piece of clothing. Cheap was king. The sale signs that draped themselves over the dirty storefront glass were an indication that the mall was not doing well financially. A mall that was financially unwell meant its keeper was also unwell. This is all she knew.

Tumbling along the dusty floor the bones kicked up powdery blossoms red chocking dust. After each throw the dust slowly settled back down on the floor, and who knew how many times the dust had risen and fallen; far more times than the sun rose and fell each day.

The witchdoctor wrote prescriptions for fertility, longevity and every ailment known to the village based on the patterns of the bones. No one knew where the bones originated from – it could have been a cow, a goat, or even a distant relative – but everyone trusted what the bones told of tomorrow. Whether a warning about future danger, or celebrating future success, the bones were never doubted. Umama held them in her hands and bid them fly well with her hoarse voice before throwing them determinately against the earth floor.

Three rainy seasons ago the same bones, or ones just like them – no one knew how long bones lasted – spoke of a young girl being born to a couple who had two other children. She would be the last child for the young couple. The unremarkable prediction was told to a nondescript visitor who passed through the village on the day of the first rains. The visitor looked like a city dweller because he had a suit made of shiny flannel and even shinier shoes. He never bothered to introduce himself to the village elders as was the custom, instead he made his way directly to Umama’s hut with no visible means of paying her. In those times payment was typically a sacrificial animal or maize meal or some other tradable item like tobacco. He swung his lanky carefree frame with empty hands towards the entrance of her hut without a care for the children staring at him, or the men taking a break from their late afternoon millet beer tasting session.

He was unusually tall and had to duck to enter her hut, but his deep baritone voice escaped the hut as he greeted her. ‘Sabonani (hello) Mama’, he said, she ignored him and continued her incomprehensive chants. He was not going to follow tradition and wait for her, a dull clang on the floor interrupted her chant, halting it instantly. Her eyes shone, reflecting the dull yellow lump of material that sought to camouflage itself with the red dust that coated the floor. But it was unmissable. Her mind abandoned the discussion with the ancestors that had kept her in a trance and welcomed the capitalist god that rested in a divet in her floor.

Umama knew exactly what it was, she also knew that what this man came for must be extremely important. The gold nugget focused her, and even made the bones buzz in the tiny calabash where she kept them. She looked into his handsome, lean, naturally smily face and wondered what could he want to know about so badly. He in return, simply asked, “I come asking about a girl child.”