A short story.
THE LANDMARK
The golden sunrise shaded by a thick blanket of clouds speeding across the lighting sky met her here.The slapping of waters below her as she leaned on her butt against the top rail of the guards that run along the edges of an old wooden pier.The face tilted aside to let her chin smear her left shoulder with an iota of warmth,the sensitive lips going a little open as if to allow in a little blob of gas,the long earing from her right wheezing the fair swarthy skin of the temple trying helplessly to reach for a copper engagement ring hanging from a beaded necklace that squeezed its cheap yet an extraordinare splendor through the inside of her breasts-to any man,good breasts-her hands behind her back,a few feet above the waters of the lake.A stone-throw-away distance from the desolate shore was a scene full of impressions and memories.It carried a fabric of her memories,a fabric with threads of savored life-given exquisite souvenirs she shared with him,yet stained.The stains leaving her devastated and literally felt her heart break and entire body crumbling in pain.
It is at the thick glade of long reeds neighbored by a beautiful cluster of brilliant naturals of the oak that seemed to fight the burst of bloom with radiant yellows of the oleander,that through her penetrating eyes her mind negotiated a path to reminiscence of things -to her-too painful.She could remember that fateful day.His blood,traces of his blood that left the ground below the stalks of the reeds glistening,pools of his blood soaking crimson the earth of once a land whose air smelled tranquil.The smell of blood,so much blood.She remembered and her eyes went liquid.
She drew a corner of her cape to dry her eyes and for once she felt the chillness on the back of her thighs that got to the pants.The rail was dump,it had rained the day before.She had been here the evening before,she recalled.The rippling waves of thunder clattered across the sky as the clouds standing in down pour saw drenching rain spatter on her standing still like a curving of a goddess in an open shrine.Too much in thought that she noticed not the cold raindrops send the lizards to retire after a day basking on the sun on the wooden floor of this pier.The heavy downpour,she thought,was a sign of a heaven that had joined in her dirge.
It was rainy season again-the long rains were here.Every season of the long rains she reminds herself of how lucky she should feel to be alive,how quickly great lives can evaporate into futility and how she survived the slaughter of her childhood days.He survived too.The showers, wetting her thighs tightened in a short,pink polyester skirt slightly below her knees,bared a tale to tell.A sad tale.Why couldn't the story of biblical baby Moses in basket hidden in the reeds retell itself in his life?She mourned.He succumbed to the horror of human butchery.Died for his different twist of native tongue from her own people.She could remember and so she wept.
"Did you have to go so soon?" she whispered trembling with pain made worse by the freezing evening breeze and left the shore that had become a landmark in her life soon after the sun had sunk behind the towering hills.The day before.
Life might have seemed to have turned into a new page with the dawn,punctuated by the musical twitter of little birds,finding her by the lake but she couldn't help the writings on it.The anxious days and nights that followed that last moment she saw him seemed alike.His cries that lastly ended in whimpering pleas when a soul she loved darted on the jaws of death dotting the wilderness inflicted a wound in her heart-a heart now broken.Thoughts even more notoriously clear run back.That day they met here,a bonny girl with elf-like agility and the man she loved.Childhood friends whose relationship matured into a firm friendship.They walked holding hands,they basked,they teased,rolled on each other like little kids.They retold stories of their lives,laughed together and when his flattery was too much for her to bear,he shared her tears when they went down.
Her back was against the trunk of the Cape Chest Nut tree,his left hand on the trunk too and over her right shoulder staring at her,their eyes trained to each other.Standing in front of her with his left hand in tight grip of a small gourd from which they drunk milk he always carried here.
With a voice that lent him special charisma,he recited as she fondled his moustache.
"She’s the idol of a thousand shrines,
Adored in hearts of a thousand men.
She’s been the goddess of the podium
The world assuming her uninvited audience.
Standing there season after season
To cascade the auditorium with poisoning glory
And drown the world with petals of splendid of charms
Quenching their unrealized desires
And melting a thousand hearts away in me
She’s the idol .........."
He hesitated when he saw her blush hiding her face incase she betrayed her emotions.It was too much for a delicate heart but not for him.
"Idol of athousand shrines"He went on.
"A black goddess with skin so fair
A pure Eve in her incarnated
And as her African pride imitates wings of butterfly
A thousand men burn incense of adoration in me
Driving out of their amusement the biggest applause
Adored for her larger-than-life beauty
And for a thousand eternities she’ll rule the podium
She’s a goddess
The idol of a thousand shrines"
Her toothy smile exposed brown traces of the candy he brought too.It was the chocolate he got on his way from college for summer vacation. He drew the mouth of the gourd to his mouth sipped and brought it to hers.She took the last sip of the milk but spit the mouthful at his feet on the fill of something solid in her mouth.At her spit she looked to find a copper ring.They smiled.
"What's this for?"She naively inquired.
"Will you take the isle with me?"He instead asked-his eyes on the spots left by pimples of puberty on her forehead and cheeks.She hesitated,silence hovered between them.She moved closer to him ,looked him into the eyes and her fingers on his lips.Then taking her hand at the back of his neck,she drew his face closer to hers.He felt the moisture of her mouth and pressed his body against hers,her lips arousing him.They kissed.A long wild passionate kiss.
"Nine months from that day we last sunk into your bed....remember?..."She hesitated.
"What?"He bellowed.
"I'll bear you a heir"
An intensive pressure sprung in him as feelings of joy and disbelief ambivalently exploded.Hardly had he let her go off his wrap of a lingering hug when he fell to his feet.Crying as he seethed in pain.She saw the arrow,the blood from the stab on his back.She fainted
The men she saw visit her clergyman father for some rituals she cared little about now stood by her when she gained consciousness.Quavers hanging from their shoulders,bows on their bloody hands and machetes.She noticed the charm,a tiny porch made of the deer-skin that carried a piece of roasted human flesh.An omen to scare his tribesmen away.She turned and saw him lay in a pool of his own blood.A look of pure terror clouded her face at the scene of him.
"Why?"She kept asking.The beasts of horror-her own people-were dumb and deaf at her.They left to the north,to his people for preordained assignment of slaughter.On the reeds she sat Crying helplessly with an empty gourd,a copper ring,a wounded heart and a butchered lover to bury.
The bewildering display of color and sounds of the lake side and the smell of earth and fragrances of wild flowers that filled the air drowned the encumbrances of her seemingly eternal conflict with memories of a fallen fiance.The hair was now floating on the wind enriched by the breeze from the lake.Getting off the rail and strutting on th pier,her eyes over the expanse of the water surface,a thought sneaked into her mind.Something about her belly.She smiled.Rubbing with her palm on it she could feel the child.Her child.His child.The unborn down deep in innocence and acquainted not with the two different ethnic customs and rituals was in her,rich with duality.
(Story by Steve Gichane G.)
