By Eugen Bacon
She sees the wild dog on the eighth day of starvation. He’s a commanding watch, more compelling than the cockroaches Zama’zama has been crunching. Xuma once said the taste of cockroach is like blue cheese or shrimp, and she couldn’t comprehend how a grown, sane human could put a cockroach in his mouth, bite down, chew and swallow wings, legs and innards. The taste is neither blue cheese nor shrimp. Sure, it’s pungent, and crunchy. But neither cheese nor shrimp exhibits the oily hostile taste Zama’zama has now tormented her stomach to accept.
At first, she satiated her hunger with imagination. She conjured everything she yearned to linger on her tongue. Salt-dried bushmeat. Sundried yams. Cassavas and sweet potatoes steamed in banana leaf. Roasted groundnuts crushed into chicken broth.
Her pickaxe is no longer her bread. Isn’t that what she said to Xuma?
“It’s my bread,” she said.
“Our bread,” he corrected, as she convinced him how, considering, it was only proper that he play house with baby Vheleni, still teething.
“I am the one with the trousers,” Xuma said. “You’ll die in the mines, taking my place like that.”
“I really won’t.”
“Grinding rock on the surface is what you do. And you’re good at it—extracting ore from stone. Going down the shafts is what I do. And I’m good at it.”
The radio swallowed his words. Played Smoky Robinson in a 70s soul marathon.
“And with that coughing sickness of yours, how many days do you think you, me and Vheleni can go without food?” Zama’zama said.
And Vheleni cried the way only she could, snatching all sound from the universe as she bellowed in one tiny mouth the gravity of the situation.
Turns out, she knows now, humans can go without food weeks and counting. That’s how long the standoff with the police outside the mine lasted.
She can’t eat her pick, but there’s water. She heard somewhere that a human can only go three days without water. Three minutes without air.
But this water? This air? Where the bodies lay is a heating zone. She can feel the hotness that stalks, then feeds the decay that brings along corpse ooze.
#
All bodies are the same. Different shapes and sizes, but the same. They leak, they reek, they color, and all hues are same, same, but different. Green, blue, brown… the smell is unshakeable. It clings to the walls, to your fingers, to your hair, to your teeth.
#
She remembers how, when Xuma worked the mines, she ground her hands raw. Grinding with bare hands in backbreaking work to separate the ore from the rock. She’d often wondered if Xuma had it better down in the shafts then, with his coughing sickness, she wasn’t sure anymore, to be honest.
But, wait.
Her memories reconstruct, intertwine in tapestry. She’s no longer sure if any of her thinking of the past happened. So she distracts herself with thoughts of cities wide apart—nothing clustered or polluted with air she can barely breathe. She dreams of clean air so rich with oxygen, so free, it hums in the ancient language of robed figures in a parallel dimension.
“Come out, I repeat. Come out now.”
The speaker’s voice from above sounds like muted heavy metal.
Zama’zama remembers Soweto—swaying to the metallic grunt of Demogoroth Satanum. Her body was slippery with sweat when Xuma peeled off her leathers. He put honey with his tongue everywhere inside her skin, and she clawed his back and legs, hauled him closer yet and her legs parted to gobble him.
That very night they conceived Vheleni.
Later, still tangled, he told her about the mines. His eyes shone when he spoke about blasthole drills. “Forget bucket-wheel excavators and all that white people whatnot,” he said. “Tooled with head torches, pickaxes and chisels, we’re gods down there.”
But he didn’t prepare her for the rusted metal cage attached to a hoist, or the half hour it took to reach two kilometers down with a rope. Or the darkness that had a pulse when the battery of her head torch blew. Or the flooding that soaked her torn jeans and chitenge top whose puffed sleeves the hustler, Maseko, tore out to fit her into the cage, an intimate squeeze.
The hardest thing was not standing. Belly crawling in tunnels designed for a child. Everything scraped, bled and scarred. Even her calloused hands from grinding rock that sometimes had a gift, sometimes not, the rock Xuma brought home when he worked. Her back was already bent from sifting out gold from solid blocks of dirt in soft metal trays, before she crooked it more sleeping on sandbags. Xuma didn’t tell her about them either.
What she needed were block returns. A find that would change her life, and Vheleni’s, and Xuma’s. What he needed was money to see a doctor in Soweto for his old-donkey cough.
“Come out, I repeat. Come out now.” The speaker’s voice again.
But Maseko waves his rifle at anyone who cocks their head to listen.
“You fool,” cries Zama’zama. “You will kill us all!”
“Shut up, you!”
“Because why?”
“Your words are lethal.”
“My words are not holding a gun at all these people. I came here of my own volition. And I’ve heard all about you people.”
“Heard fucken what?”
“I’ll tell you what you should know. That I’m from right here in Soweto. That I’m not a migrant.”
“And so what?”
“And you’ll get in trouble for this. Know that you didn’t steal me like the slave laborers you snatch in migrant hordes, you fucken thieving fools.”
“If we’re such fools, who’s holding the gun, eh? Eh? One more word and this rifle will snatch all those teeth from that dirty mouth.”
“Much good that’ll do—my teeth are not gold. It’s one thing to have greed. It’s another to create a whole apocalypse for it,” Zama’zama says.
She’s a volcano of emotions.
She recollects, with vividness, Xuma’s words when she threatened what she now regrets. She told him in good detail what she would do if she couldn’t take his place in the mines.
“You won’t,” he said.
“Watch me now. I’ll dress in stockings and a petticoat, lipstick my mouth crimson and sell myself to the first man who gives a look at my legs.”
“What?” He fell into a fit of coughing.
“Of, course, I wouldn’t!”
“Then why would you say it!”
“To make you listen. Make you see that my going to the mines while you’re this sick is the only way.”
“Is it?”
”I’m not pony-tailed with poodle hair, slim with a petal mouth and vivid kitten eyes. You and I both know that I’m not good enough for an office job.”
“That’s your perception! Gods’ sakes, you goddamn architect!”
“Bloody fucken architecture at the University of Cape Town. Some good it did.”
“Could have got you somewhere if you tried harder—”
“Would it, though? We’re not sapphire-eyed enough, are we? Too bloody black for those white-pepo firms.”
“So what now?”
“So here we are, darling. Facing this darn awkwardness together.”
“It’s okay to ask for what you want,” Xuma said. The quietness of his words struck her. He was done fighting.
Not her, she wasn’t. “But what?”
“You don’t have to leave a whole bushfire razing behind to get it, is what.”
* * *
The wild dog is back. He slips in like this, perks his head between people and stares at her. She sees him ever so clearly in the beam of Maseko’s head torch.
Zama’zama chooses to give the wild dog a name. Cainan. And when he crosses towards her,
He moves
in folds and angles
and the soft lamplight picks his face.
The length of his frame is taut like an architect’s pencil.
He measures out a featureless story, but she pictures devastated cities, crisscrossed limbs.
A canvas of the dead strewn all the way to a scarlet river.
His mouth is that of an artist who knows
how to transform a murmur
into a bite
lagoon.
“Oh, stop it,” she says to her mind.
“I really won’t,” it answers back.
Cainan offers her a severed wrist, and she takes it.
* * *
At first, the hustlers rang bells to communicate with the miners. A winder driver managed the cages. It got very hot and full of dust. Nobody had a hard hat as they chiseled holes into the rock, packed them with explosives to scatter the formation. The most work happened between Shafts 10 and 11. Light fuses hissing. She crawled quickly out of the shaft, ducked around a corner, threw herself into a ball. Boom, boom.
Nobody told her, “Once it starts to hiss, you can’t stop the fuse.”
A slave laborer learnt the hard way, plastered in blood and bone all over the shaft.
She listened for misfires, then crawled back, took what she could, crept on.
Before the government interfered, miners took half an hour break. Now everything was stealth, and time was everything.
Then the metallic voice on a speakerphone came, and Maseko pulled out a rifle so nobody could leave.
* * *
You’re aglow, drifting drifting drifting into hyperspace. Voices in your head murmur childhood terrors of falling falling face down into the stars. Are you a scholar or a drunk? Time-shifted seeing exists you in a space where night has just begun.
You see the rest of the miners as a clutter of symbols: scribes, skulls, hourglasses, candles, grease, smokes, threads, and notations. Their sigma is the equation for mortality to the power of x in supersets of y, where x equals unrequited hierarchies of need, y equals dreams that remain out of reach. After all the parentheses, minuses, square roots and divisions, everyone is nothing but a probability in calculations that will amount to bugger all.
By the thirteenth day of starvation, you see everyone as a fold of shadows, a presence here, a presence there, nothing lingering to define limbs and features, just fogged silhouettes. Wraiths swaying into charcoal arms of death. You try to ignore them, but they haunt you. Sometimes you see eyes, white pupils mostly, but it’s hard to read the signs. Your memories have refused to stay convincing if you don’t bite your hand. Already there are sores. Black earth. Silent songs. Over and over. The faces are lost to you. If you could just catch it, a single countenance slipping through the edges of your fingers, you might believe in humanity again.
* * *
When everyone started dying, they all moved to Shaft 12. It’s a cage platform, standing room, open space—she can see clearly just who is dying. Sometimes Zama’zama considers ambushing Maseko and his fucken rifle. Jump smash, a strike with some heat on it. Snatch the gun, turn it on him.
She wants to be the person who is never one to grind. She wants to be the one who slashes and burns and goes nuclear war on greed and injustice and the unfairness that brought her here.
But Maseko is nowhere near, or she can’t see him. And she’s tired, so very tired. Like the rest of them. Nobody’s eyes bug out with horror anymore when someone next to them dies, their ribs showing through their torso where she can count every single one of their bones.
This time Zama’zama feels rather than sees Cainan at the shaft’s entrance, prowling to come in. He creeps low, keeps her awake. His musk catches in her throat, staves off her hunger from scabby hairs on the roof of her mouth.
The room is combustible—why doesn’t it blow her up to freedom?
How she eats it up, the thought of being free.
The speaker’s voice in muted heavy metal again. “Come out! You’re all criminals! One way or another, you know we’ll smoke you out.”
Then Zama’zama sees him on the ground. Surely, it’s the hustler, Maseko. Writhing in starvation like the rest of them, and without his gun. He reaches for his rifle scattered on the ground, but his hand has no wrist no wrist nowrist.
* * *
You fill simple tasks with gaps, unseen windows where the dark seeps in. Whispers and secrets so close, their fingers burn a solid weight on your shoulder, their breath warm on your nape for the longest time. You try to ignore them, assure yourself there’s nothing there, but nothing is a thing, and it makes its presence vivid and in montage. Dark shapes in stoops and sit downs, no sandbags empty, but they’re filled with the dying and the dead.
So you gather the past you left behind somewhere under a rock, a hiss of salvage and making do. You remember how you and Xuma made love. You also made amends and mistakes—that’s what living is all about. But love was right there with you.
You remember the curl of your baby’s hair. You wish for photos and manuscripts, clean jeans, steel-capped boots.
You feel salty about it—everything that’s happened. About Vheleni—one more mouth to feed. About Xuma—why did he have to fall sick? About the government and its crackdown on illegal mines, and how it went about it, for real? About Maseko and his fucken gun that doesn’t care who will starve you to death.
There’s everything to be afraid of. What if you don’t make it?
You gather all you can bear to touch and seal it close to your heart in a fist you’ll never open without applause or sunlight.
* * *
She’d read about EEG waves of the brain in a science journal those many years ago in a library when she was studying for an exam, but needed respite from digital mapping and biophilic design. EEG—electroencephalography. The burst in oscillation of gamma waves that tricks the mind with colorful images at the moment of dying.
She wonders if this is what her mind is doing now. Shifting beta, alpha and gamma waves in the deepest part of her cortex, making her see things. She wonders if it’ll quieten as she fades in those last breaths, fill her with goodly memories, hopes and longings, all the way to no casket inside mass deaths in the belly of a discontinued mine shaft.
Time, where is time?
Death is here, embracing her, looking into her, reading everything about her it already knows. Death will remember this moment and the one that came before, where retreat was never an option. It is, after all, too late to consider. But she can gather up the cockroaches that have traveled thousands of miles from the surface, and her past will now envelop the sudden length of her present and future.
Zama’zama would give anything for fresh coffee and a day-old cinnamon bun.
* * *
Cainan nuzzles his face against you.
You reach weakly to touch him. He noses you towards a southerly direction. His yellow eyes are the only light in all that darkness. You roll over the rot, the stench, oh, the stench. Oozing corpses whose wrists you can neither see nor swallow. You long for the taste of cockroach. Crunch, crunch. Blue cheese and shrimp. Oily bitter taste.
“Follow me,” you murmur to anyone moving. You don’t remember if you ever spoke to them, but now you say, “Follow us,” in a lethargic voice, and they do.
A porridge of motion. The living stir and belly crawl from the sludge of the dead. Rotten meat falling off hands and legs, bones jutting out as if in sordid statement.
It’s a level down, but somewhere on the way to Shaft 13 is a dead end. You and the wild dog and everyone who could make it have crawled all the way down to nothing. You want to weep, but your body is too famished for tears.
What you feel is grief and loathing for what you have become.
What you feel is want… For… what? For being alive and free.
What you need is the speakerphone so you can follow the muted sound of Demogoroth Satanum to the bluest sky.
But there is no speakerphone.
You and the zombies of what was once human cannot unfocus yourselves from death from death from deathdeathdeath—who cares about gold?
~
Zama’zama closes her eyes and imagines the sun’s kiss, the wind’s sigh. The sweetness of open skies and the aroma of fresh air rushing to her lungs. She wants to smell the sweat and blush on the petal of a blood lily at dawn. To hear the harsh call of a breasted lilac with its green head and lilac. She’d give an arm to see its topaz belly and the brightest wing feathers.
Is that Cainan? His tail brushes her face with a luminous white tip that shows her the zombie she has become. He chatters, and it sounds like, “They’re here, here. Here, here.”
Madness tricks her like this. It gives her electronic brain a death wish. She wishes, oh, she wishes, she could see, just one more time, the fall of a dry leaf from a mopane tree. To feel, for the fraction of a moment, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings on her cheeks—the blue-spotted emperor, to be precise.
She tries not to give herself to death in these walls in these walls in these walls walls walls.
Cainan bounds into view, chatters, over and over, “They’re here, here. Here, here.”
And then he’s moving a boulder with his frame and Zama’zama finds herself with a sudden burst of herculean strength and she’s alongside Cainan, helping. It’s hard to tell what is truth or mirage when around her, people are dying. But she puts her whole weight on her shoulder and pushes, pushes, pushes. Nothing is happening.
Nothing
is
happening.
Then a roll and grind. The boulder is moving moving moving.
Zama’zama collapses in fatigue or relief, but her thoughts are not on rescue. Where the hell is her husband, does she have a husband—was he ever real? Where the hell is her child—was there even a child?
Time is past. And the radio is playing Smoky Robinson in 70s soul.
“We’ve got you, we’ve got you, Sunshine,” he croons in high tenor on a scale that’s beautifully impossible—fucken EEG messing with her again.
She opens her eyes to a kind face that’s not Xuma’s leaning over her. She feels the human touch of rescuers in Shaft 13 lifting her onto a makeshift stretcher, and it’s all cloth, at the end of a rope that hoists her, hoists you half an hour up up up even as you clutch your fist to your heart and murmur, “Not without Cainan,” but they just say, “We’ve got you, Sunshine,” and they’re hoisting you up up to the lip of the universe, where you can hear Vheleni’s cry and the sun explodes your skull and you blink to human shapes holding placards, that say that say you can’t see what the fucken hell they’re saying so you turn to ask the wild dog whose coat
is sable and black
and he has snowy
markings on
his feet,
but a shadow blocks you from him, from the radiance of the whitest sun, from Vheleni’s
cry
Cry
CRYING
as she bellows in the tiniest mouth the gravity of the situation, and someone says, “You’re under arrest,” and the words roll and echo, “arrr-rest, arrr-rest,” as they snatch your opening fists away from your heart and snap them together in cold metal cuffs.
* * *
In memoriam: For those who died and those who survived but suffered terribly in government-sanctioned starvation and dehydration inside the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine.
* * *
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She is a Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus and Foreword Indies Award winner. She’s also a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was announced on the honor list for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
* * *