Bargaining (Part 1)

It felt as though I had been sitting in the car for hours. My eyes fell to my wrist-watch and registered that fifteen minutes had passed since I’d left her side. Only fifteen minutes. It felt like it had been hours since she’d planted a cool kiss on my shoulder. Days since she’d driven a soft palm into my rear. Weeks since I’d felt the sweet moisture of her inside. Years since she’d whispered my name sweetly into my ear. Decades since I’d stood outside on a doorstep contemplating whether or not to knock on the door. The more I thought of it–and that, I did, over and over and over…–the further it travelled from my present life. I knew my mind was doing it on purpose. To protect me from the gruesome truth that acknowledging that I had just cheated on my wife would become to me. No. It was decades ago. Not today.”Daddy!”
A small dreadlocked head popped into the rear-view mirror and beamed at me happily. It was my seven-year-old daughter. How long had she been sitting there? I looked around the school parking lot and wondered when it had been invaded by the little children that were now running and screaming into parked vehicles.

                “Can we go for ice-cream?” The gap-toothed mouth in the rear-view mirror was shouting.
                “Ok,” I said, absent-mindedly.

 I could not stop thinking about the girl that I had left at the hotel room. How sweet it had been to make love to her. How lovely it had been to kiss a mouth that had never uttered a foul word to me. How warm the arms of a woman that never pushed me away felt. I didn’t want to admit it to myself but I had missed it. The lunch-time slips from the world into the embrace of love behind dense hotel curtains. The soft pillow of newly-developed bosoms. The sweet moans of newly-discovered pleasure. I had missed it all.

 Driving out of the school yard I suddenly realised that my daughter was saying something. I cleared my throat and asked,

“O a reng?”

“Daddy…” the face appeared next to my shoulder and scowled.

“You are not listening to me?”
I glanced at it briefly then turned my head back to the traffic before me and said,

“Yes, I am, nnana. Just repeat yourself. I’m not sure if I heard you correctly.”
I felt her fling herself into the back-seat. Through the rear-view mirror I saw her recline into her seat and stare sadly out of the window and then, through quivering lips, she announced,

“You always say that when you aren’t listening.”

I remained silent for some time. My daughter had gotten good at registering when my mind was elsewhere. An ability that my wife seemed to have suddenly lost. Making a right at an intersection, I found myself sighing out loud. I struggled to keep my mind fixed on the present. My thoughts sped between the memory of the girl I had left in the hotel room and the girl in the back-seat. At a red traffic light, I let my arms float to my lap. What have I done? With this question –the question I had avoided asking myself since I’d begun to slowly dress myself in the presence of the teenage girl I’d left behind– a flood of memories returned. My eyes rested on the plump little girl, through the rear-view mirror. This girl whose hands were now folded in a way her mother’s always seemed to be, had not always been plump.

At one point she had been a frail four year old girl lying in a hospital bed with no appetite for even the ice-cream she now longed for. And the day her doctors had revealed that they doubted she would make it through her fifth night in hospital I had wandered through the corridors of the hospital in a trance.
At one moment I had even felt myself to be standing still as the hospital walls rushed past me in the fast, white blur. The sensation of pain seeming so far away. As far as the painful howls of my wife begging some god for mercy, but just like these the pain seeped into the center of me and seized my heart momentarily only to disappear into the space around me. I was a father whose life was falling apart around him. But I could not bear the pain that this realisation brought me. I refused it. I rejected it like I’d been rejecting all feeling deep within me for years. I could not bear to feel weak. Even on that day when my world felt to be disappearing around me I could only roam about the hospital like the soulless being it seemed I’d always longed to be. But even then I had known that my life would change forever. I just didn’t imagine that it would be like this.

The sound of car-horns pulled me sharply out of my reverie. I looked around as drivers drove passed me, their faces glaring in my direction. Some of the faces were angry and others simply curious.

 ”Daddy! You forgot that green means go!”

I didn’t have time to wonder how long I’d been parked at a green traffic light for. Stepping on the accelerator I turned right towards home. And then my daughter said five words that sent my world spinning.

“Daddy, I think I’m sick.”

She let out a soft cough. That’s all it took for my infidelity to sink in. My mind could no longer protect me from the fact that I had cheated on my wife today, after two years of keeping up my end of the bargain. And now that consequences of my actions stared at me through my rearview mirror.

And I knew then that my daughter was going to die.

Again.

Tags: africa, bargaining, cheating, daughter, family, father, fiction, hotel, infidelity, love, short stories, short story, writing

#NowReading

#NowReading

Enjoying it thoroughly. Doing a lot of close reading! [wipes brow theatrically]

Tags: alberto moravia; prose; Italian fiction nowreading close reading writing fiction short stories

Judith

“You’ve been with Judith, haven’t you?”

Nonofo pushed past the large figure that had planted itself in her kitchen doorway. The wall-clock hanging above the framed image of a five-year old girl beaming over a pot of flowers, read twelve-forty-five. She shook off her jacket slowly and increased the pace with which she was walking away rather unsteadily from the voice that was yelling behind her. She realized that she was not walking fast enough as bits and pieces of it’s sentences landed sharply in her ears. An exclamation ending with what she thought to be  “…at this late hour!” here and a question starting with “What kind of mother…” there. Feeling the exasperation of the regular listener of a radio station that seemed to only play one song over and over and over again she marched steadily to the master bedroom.

She had heard it all before. This was the third time this week she’d come home late from a night out with Judith. But the way her husband behaved one would think she’d just come home from a five-month-long stay at a whore-house.

By the time she’d reached the bedroom she began to feel the exhaustion that a night out dancing inevitably resulted in. She sighed loudly as she plumped herself at the foot of her bed and then immediately proceeded to scold herself internally for the umpteenth time that night for allowing her vanity to delude her into thinking that six-inch-high platform heels would be appropriate attire for a night out dancing. She moved her eyes from the fingers that were struggling with the shoe-buckles beneath her to the full-length mirror that faced their bed. She imagined that her reflection was the version of herself that had chosen the shoes at the beginning of the evening and she was the one in pain now. She opened her mouth to begin reprimanding her own reelection. Thinking of saying something like “you’re not a teenager anymore, ngwanyana!” she was surprised by the cascade of laughter that escaped from the pit of her stomach before she had a chance to go ahead with the act of scolding herself. Before she knew it her back had landed on the bed behind her and she was holding her stomach in as if to stifle this unbearable laughter that was streaming from her lips.

“Look at you.”

The deep authority of his voice penetrated through her laughter and she was stunned silent. She kept her eyes closed. She didn’t have to look at him to know he’d be standing in his regular scolding pose: folded arms and a stiff shoulder resting, solidly against the inside of the door paneling.

“Look at you!” His voiced bounced off the stone walls and landed sharply in her ears. She did not move. He made a long clicking/hissing sound with his mouth which they both understood to be his expression of incredible disgust.

“You’re not even ashamed. Coming in at this time on a fucking Thursday. Sneaking out before I get back from work…”

He paused. The brief silence was a “What do you have to say for yourself?” to the room. Nonofo remained still. Her eyes screwed shut, she could feel the room begin to move beneath her. He continued,

“What kind of wife are you?”

Tags: bisexual, family, fiction, lesbian, love, marriage, polyamory, short story

The Grandmother

Mwamba Mulangula

This is my first attempt at a fictional piece for the internet. I haven’t done much editing. Or plot-planning. I wanted to focus on the language for this one. Allow it to tell the story. Feedback would be awesome. 

The Grandmother was standing in the doorway. Her fists were planted on her hips whose girth forced her elbows to jut out in an awkward manner. From where she was seated, The Niece could see the slow up-and-down of her chest — could imagine the old woman’s lungs expanding hungrily as she took huge gulps of the room’s musty air. For some moments The Grandmother did not speak. Instead her eyes were all over the room. First they darted from wall to floor then from the night-stands to ceiling. Then they crawled slowly over the inanimate inhabitants of the room – for they were so many, piled up in corners, flung over headboards, crowded on every above-ground surface, hanging over closet doors. Her eyes drank in the layer of desperation that seemed to cling to each of them. The Niece had imagined that The Grandmother had planned to speak as soon as she arrived. She imagined that the opening of the door, the positioning of hands on hips and the darting of eyes around the room had been actions that were scripted by The Grandmother as she walked up the steps to The Niece’s room. Actions that would be immediately followed by some words. But she instinctively got the feeling that this part had not been on the itinerary. The slow sweep through the room carried out completely by her eyes had resulted in something neither of them expected. With every part of the room that The Grandmother’s eyes went over her face changed.

When she had first arrived, and The Niece suspected even before that, she had had the face of a fighter. An expression that made it clear she had little patience for foolishness. The Niece’s hand had instinctively flown to her back as she recalled the childhood beatings that often followed such a look from The Grandmother. But the look on The Grandmother’s face was no longer that of The Grandmother that had beaten her all those years ago for stealing sweets from a tuck-shop. This expression was one The Niece had seen only once before. At The Grandfather’s funeral three years ago. Hopelessness. It dawned on The Niece that The Grandmother may have underestimated the gravity of the situation. She may have been told details by The Step-Mother but clearly she had needed to see it for herself to truly understand what it had done to The Niece lose everything. When The Grandmother finally spoke her voice was raspy and quiet — decibels below the level both women were accustomed to. To the room, she whispered,

“How long have you been living like this?”

Tags: art, family, ficiton, life, love, scene, short story, writing

Making Time to Write

I’ve been busy.

That’s what I say when it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t written in a while. When a follower of my work asks why Siyanda hasn’t written in a while those words are the ones t

hat roll off my tongue as easily as coins into a drain. And, most of the time, they are true. In fact, all of the time, they’re true. I am busy.

However, Iunderstand that when one has a commitment to introducing a new habit into one’s life –in my case, writing– one must learn to make time to do it consistently. In the past it may have been easy to dive into my 30-day writing challenge but things are different. Firstly, the standard of my writing has  deteriorated slightly due to my in

frequent use of it as a tool for expression. (My language skills are rarely called upon during calculus lectures.) And secondly, things are different this time because I no-longer believe my writing skills are enough to transform my ideas into classic literature pieces that generations of African women will look to for inspiration. Truthfully.

So, even though I haven’t made much more progress in the Francine Prose book I mentioned in my last post because of the registration weekend that’s going on at my university, I found the time to sit naked in front of my laptop five minutes before bed in this ridiculous heat (it’s nearing 30 degrees celsius) and I think that earns me a pat on the back. Because I made a commitment for myself to stick to — that I’m never “too busy” to write!

 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. -Louis L’Amour

 

 

Tags: africa, busy, commitment, excuses, l'amour, time management, writing

Reading like a Writer

I’m not really one of those people that makes New Year’s resolutions. I’m

Aaron Hotchkiss

more of the kind that makes a list of goals on a monthly basis. Sometimes I achieve them. Sometimes I don’t. But there is always something I’m working on.

Right now I’m working on starting my voyage into the ocean of short-story writing. My plan had been to set a 30-day challenge for myself to start writing short stories everyday from a certain date. However, I feel as though I’m lacking the preparation to begin this challenge this week and succeed. So I’ve gotten a bunch of books this week to reset my mind to writing mode. One of these books, and perhaps the most important is Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. As promised by the title, the book is a great tool for the budding writer or in my case — the re-budding writer.

At the moment I’m at the first chapter, entitled “Close Reading.” Now, if you’re unfamiliar with this writer’s tool, here’s a link to a quick summary by Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard University. I’ve yet to finish reading this chapter but I’ve already begun to apply this technique when reading the other books I’ve acquired. Most recently I used Close Reading on one of the short stories in Alice Munro’s collection, Lives of Girls and Women. and found  it very beneficial but also not unsurprisingly tiring. [Laughs] I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up when my next semester starts in a week. Or maybe I’ll have gotten used to it.

In any case, I will keep this blog updated as I continue to learn about reading and ultimately about writing.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Like most—maybe all— writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. ~ Francine Prose

Tags: Alice Munro, Close Reading, fiction, Francine Prose, Harvard, reading, short stories, wiritng, writing tools