“I keep having this dream…”
It’s a cold late-winter morning in a café that is situated in the trendy part of Johannesburg, the café is struggling to survive because most of its client base died nearly two years ago, half of us died nearly two years ago thanks to the virus. I still come here though because it’s a familiar place, it’s a place from my past that still held on to its warmth. A waitress makes her way to my table in the corner. She has the coffee I ordered earlier with her, she places the coffee in front of me and the steam makes its way up my nostrils. I give her a faint smile, she returns it with a smile of her own.
“Anything else?’ she asks.
“No” I politely say to her. She walks away and I wrap my cold hands around the hot coffee mug. As the heat fights off the coldness from my fingertips, my mind can’t help but wander off. The café goes quiet, the only sound is from the ticking of the clock on the wall. I take a sip of my coffee and I close my eyes… I let the silence take me to my darkest memory…
I’m at his house, just outside the door. I frantically knock on the front door of the average township home. His mother Angela, a woman in her mid-fifties who had this stern look on her face and beautiful dark brown skin like his slightly opens the door.
Angela peaks through and sees that it’s me, her face turns into disgust.
”HE’S NOT HERE!” she shouts.
She slams the door on me and from the other side, I hear her say “Go away! Your kind is not welcome here!”
Feeling defeated I wait a few moments before turning to leave, a scream from within the house captures my attention. I recognize the voice, the tone, I would know it even from a scream… it’s him. I run to the door and put my ear by the wood that makes the door and that’s when I heard them, the voices, the chanting, and the screaming that would be the soundtrack to my nightmares.
I take a few steps back and find a moment to be brave, I run around the house towards the side of where the screams are coming from. The bathroom is where the screams are coming from, the window offers me a view of what’s happening inside.
And I see him, Thabiso...
Painted red by his blood, his face barely clinging on to life as the blood seeped from the various wounds on his body to the floor. My heart sinks as two men both carrying bibles dressed in white robes with green and blue waist belts tower over Thabiso as he curled up into a ball on the bathroom floor. The two men pick Thabiso and put him in the bathtub and fill it with water.
I bang on the window as hard as I can trying to break it. A third man walks in, he sees me on the other side, and he ignores me, his kind rarely sees my kind as people. He opens his bible and pours something from his pocket into the water that makes Thabiso scream in agony. Thabiso’s screams drown out my screaming as I shouted his name at the top of my lungs. The two men hold Thabiso submerge his head underwater, his body shakes violently.
“NO! STOP! NO!” I screamed as I run my way back to the front door and tried kicking it in. Time stopped moving when I finally broke through and run inside the house. I could see Angela by the bathroom door kneeling and praying. The third man sees me and closes his bible before he could say anything I pushed him out of my way and went to towards Thabiso as the other two men let his body sink into the tub. The water was all over the floor but I managed not to slip. I pulled him out of the blood and water-filled tub as everyone else just looked on.
Thabiso’s eyes are red, filled with blood. I cradled him trying to soothe his pain. I could feel his life slip away.
I’m brought back to reality when the waitress returned with my refill, and as she left I felt a familiar warmth… his.
THABISO:
“I keep having this dream…”
Silence. Loudness. Warmth. Coldness. Slow. Fast. Love. Hate. I feel everything all at once…
I wake up naked surrounded by darkness and right by my feet is where my lifeless body rests. A doorway in the form of a triangle appears… it pulls me against my will.
I’m home, no not home… I’m where I died.
My mother Angela crouches on the couch rocking back and forth, fear on her face and bags formed under her eyes from the lack of sleep. The lights flickering on and off as I move across the room, a dark shadow towers over her, no not a dark shadow but me.
She’s clutching a bible. A knock on the door startles her. She looks at the door for a while, the knock comes again. Both the shadow and I follow our mother to the door.
“Who is it?” she asks with so much fear in her voice, how long has it been? How long have I been torturing her?
“Angela… it’s me.” The voice from the other side replies.
She sighs and opens the door. She hugs him, the priest… our killer. My shadow, no my rage grows and engulfs the room. The triangle doorway appears again and pulls me in, I’m back in the darkness but I can still hear my mother and the priest. He tells her that they did good work in getting rid of the demon in me, the demon that made me love men. Did they succeed? In taking the love I had for Lihle?
A coldness takes over me, I’m numb. I see myself back in the house, the shadow is even bigger than the last time. I face it, the shadow has a name. The Void.
The lights violently shut off. “He is here…” My mother tells the priest.
“Who?” he asks her. “My son” she replies.
Lights flicker in the kitchen and the shadow and I appear. Angela sees us, she doesn’t deserve the title of mother anymore.
Angela points the priest towards us in the kitchen but he can’t see us, just figures. The flickering lights slightly blinding him. The priest walks towards us in the kitchen. “I am a man of God I do not fear evil.” He says but we are not evil. We face him as the void because we are older than his god.
The shadow drives itself into the priest’s mouth, his eyes turn black, his body twists violently and demonic growls come from him.
Angela watches in horror, her bible catches fire, she drops it to the floor, and the entire house catches fire. I appear in front of Angela, a tear falls from her left eye. I wipe it away and hug her. She catches fire, her screams echo throughout the house but they’re silenced by our raging fire, no my raging fire. The doorway appears and this time it doesn’t pull me but rather I walk freely into it, was this my purpose? Revenge? No.
I’m no longer surrounded by the blackness just memories, no not memories but right now. The doorway appears again, one last time.
The doorway takes me to the café, there he is by the table in the corner, our corner. The waitress walks through me, the perks of being an in-betweener I guess. I sit in front of him. He can’t see me but I’m hoping he can feel me this one last time. I touch his hand and he stares right at me, he can see me, His face a mixture of sadness and joy.
“Are you fucking here right now?” he asks as he looks around. The joy, his eternal smile fills me with warmth. It’s the smile that broke my defenses on that bright summer day. I feel saved. I grab both his hands into mine and he gasps, “You’re going to be okay.” I stand and kiss his forehead, one last romantic gesture for this tragic love affair and I fade into the void, and we both let go. I wonder what strange new worlds “moving on” will introduce to the both of us.
