reality & fiction

The pitch must have been perfect. It was the sound his ears made when the world was quiet. That sound he woke up to hear at 4am.

The whine did not feel like nails across a chalk board, nor did he tire of it. The sound was as natural as his ears, hanging there unobtrusive but always present. It was the sound of the tiny hairs in his ear drums hugging each other and playing. A time when they are free to dance to their own beat, not swayed to the beat of vibrating air forced upon them by the world.

His moment enshrined in the sound of freedom. This was it. Shattered. For in the distance was the drone of an underpowered car mechanically muscling its way up an incline. The car might be carrying a baker to his morning mis-en-plus and a croissant or two. After all today was Friday, and I will kiss a pastry her final good bye. Gone – the drone and the thoughts of the baker.

Welcome back the whine of freedom, let me envelope myself in you a little longer, the world is awakening and you will be drowned out. The clanging, banging sounds of life will drown you out.

Whine on freedom.

The Bluetooth speaker sat on the floor playing a pop hit song. It was unconnected to power and drew down on its battery the songs that kept him moderately sane. The song was nondescript but the melody was memorable, he had heard it several times before but couldn’t whistle the tune or sing the chorus.

He sat at his desk with its Turkish walnut veneer and could not help to think that the speaker, its draining battery, and the familiarity of the pop music was a perfect analogy to the lockdown. A melody that had a flurry of words carried by a repetitive beat with a simple message and a modicum of feel-good vibes. The speaker itself represented deeper unspoken feelings. His drive and ability to see this through was finite, his self-belief had a limit, the zest for life that carved the smile in his face was turning sour; his battery was low.

The life was being squeezed of them. They tried to escape, writhing and sweating in a vain attempt to release the grip. The smell of fear was pungent, like the smell of the first rains in Africa, sweet and aromatic, so delicious you wanted to run outside and eat the mud. Their captor wanted to eat.

It had been dark. Not pitch black, but the reddish hue of staring out at daylight from behind your eyelids. Shadows danced across his vision as his eyes darted left and right behind tightly shut eyelids. Terrified to open them, he shut them tighter, grimacing and baring teeth as his cheek and jaw muscles were brought onboard to keep his eyes closed. But he knew they would open. Not because anyone forced them open or his muscles gave up, but because fear had a crowbar and she was prising them slowly apart.

Blood roared across his eardrums deafening them. The blood racing around his brain feeding the roots of fear, powering fear to use her crow-bar to open his eyes. He knew this and yet his heart beat faster. He knew this and yet his jaw clenched tighter. This was a battle of the real and the illusory. The monologue in his head had long dropped the veneer of intelligence and was replaced by the mindless verbal stampede. Words clambered, stood, crushed, killing each other to try and reach his conscious mind.

His limbs trembled. His pores drenched him in sweat. His teeth chattered. He was scared, and anyone who bothered to look up from their life would have seen it. But he could not see them. But flash. Bright! His pupils screamed at the sudden dilatation. Fear had opened his eyes for a split second. With that singular action, she and he knew she had him, and still, he fought on. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth as his teeth ground each other in a pointless attempt to keep his eyes closed. Bright! Pain, dilation. Again. His eyes started flickering open, tears lubricating the parting of eyelids. The droop of his mouth framing the sadness of the loss. The innocence of the darkness was gone.

His eyes were open. And everywhere they looked they saw the same thing. The news about COVID-19.

Naledi was lost.

She had chased the dry leaf across sandy pathways. The leaf captivated her mind with its tumbling form. A representation of her jumbled childhood thoughts. Her laughter chinkled through the empty air, its joyous sound serving as the lead to the sounds of dry grass and quarrelling crickets.

Naledi was simply dressed in her old, comfortable flowing dress, a torn ruin of faded white serving as the springboard for the printouts of barely visible flowers that she had never seen (for the curious of mind it was an agglomeration of hibiscus and plumeria), but she loved the bright colours. The colours serviced to be a star amongst the shades of brown that painted her natural world. Naledi was growing up in a small village in an arid part of South Africa. Day after day her existence was coloured by the browns of the earth and the blues of the sky, only interspersed by the flaming reds and purples of dawn and dusk.

Today, she had started her day with the long trek to the stream to gather water for the day. As the firstborn of two children, she had the bulk of the household chores starting with gathering water at dawn. Each day she headed off in the direction of the rising sun. Today like many before she repeated the chore with the clay water pot defying gravity on her head. She rushed along kicking off plumes of dust with her cracked and parched heels, she took pride in making sure there was water for the family to bath in by the time her dad groggily opened his eyes. Like yesterday, she was in her grove like the pathway was a groove between the wildness of the surrounding bush. The sun shone as it had shone yesterday but the breeze was a lot stronger, it buffeted the clay pot but never slowed Naledi down. That was until the tumbling leaf caught her eye.

She had seen countless tumbling leaves before. But this one was different. Like the flowers on her dress, it had colours that were foreign to her. It halted her on the path, the plumes at her heels settled with the sudden stop. Her eyes glued. On their own, her hands rose to clasp the clay water pot lifting it off its perch and settling on the edge of the footpath. Dad will have to wait. This leaf was all her seven-year-old mind cared about. Over and under it turned helpless in the wind, exposing to Naledi its multitude of never in nature seen before colours. To her the world had stopped spinning, the wind had stopped blowing and the colourful leaf was alive and dancing along the path.

Joy in hand she rushed along to the music of her giggling and the sweet encouragement of the wild breeze. Today she would dance, today she would hold her world, and today the world would remain behind. But the leaf was quick, carried by the breeze that was funnelled between the tall stalks of dried grass that framed the dusty path. Naledi ran, her heels kicking up against her thighs as she tried to hold her world in her hand. But the truth was simple, everything she wanted at that moment was ahead of her. The leaf would stay in front of her no matter how fast she ran.