By Tiro Makhudu
“For the longest time, she was uncomfortable with cars. They made her feel vulnerable and exposed like the large, corse hands of a grown man were sliding up her ribs to grab a fistful of her supple, pointed, virgin breast to squeeze and rub. The perverted sensation of his hands between her thighs and his liquor ridden tongue on her neck and in her ear lingered on her skin and olfactory senses for years. She focused her gaze on a tiny black bird in an old tree that proceeded to build it’s nest that day her stepfather took her to the edge of the village at the bush. The day he took her to the edge of life itself.
She was unaware of the tears streaming down her face as he reached over to turn the knob that reclined the seat. It took an eternity but eternity would never be long enough no matter how sincere and desperate her silent prayer. She reeled at how at ease and natural Sticks was through the whole thing. It was almost mechanical and she an object being taken apart like one of the engines Sticks used to fix behind the little corrugated iron structure she would from this day know as a house and no longer a home.
Only that one black bird that was building a home of its own was her witness and didn’t have the guts to either come to her rescue or at the very least, speak up when she told her story. It didn’t care. Not when he started and not when he finished the fourth time, sticking his tongue in her mouth and then his fingers to push her lips and cheeks back into a smile.
The song that he played right after as he opened another nip of old buck sounded distant to her muddled mind. It was as if she had fallen off the edge that Sticks had taken her to. That perhaps she was under water but not drowning, never had existed or most vividly, that she was no longer a human being. He sat there calmly and drank, smoking his rothman’s and making every every drag last just like he whispered in her ear that he would make her last.
Sticks finally passed out. She sat there motionless, arrested by a deep shock, paralysing fear and unbearable pain. The pain was in her heart, in her mind and in her tiny body. It occupied her entire being in the most coldly clinical and unsympathetic way imaginable. She never contemplated taking her own life. She was dead already.
As the sun touched the furthest reach of her village, she finally scraped together the courage to leave. She had not pulled her skirt down yet. The shock hadn’t permitted her to. She untangled the bunch around her waist and rolled down her skirt before buttoning up her short sleeved shirt and gathering her bag and panties off the floor of the front passenger seat.
Gingerly, she began to make her way back home in a fog of confusion, selfhate and guilt. She felt both betrayed and responsible at the same time. Somehow, without thinking, she was home but like a vampire waiting to be invited in, she froze at the gate and couldn’t enter. Soon an approaching figure in the distance compelled her to enter but by 9 that night, she had still not been found. Had she not been found hours later, balled up next to the kennel, dazed and shivering, she might have caught her death and her pain would have ended.”
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By Tiro Makhudu
Tiro Makhudu is an aspiring writer who has written for several local television productions and a voice screaming the narrative that needs to be heard with no one willing it to tell it. With an unapologetic, no-nonsense approach, Tiro holds no punches and purports to wake the spirit of his fellow man with the belief that that woke spirit will translate into a sharp and pro-African weapon of a mind that will deliver the African from his mind, body and soul penitentiary. An Africanist through and through and all-round social commentator, Tiroseeks to plant his tiny seedlings in the landscape of the discourse that will one day give rise to the brightest Africa that the winds of change and hands of time will allow
