I Can Still Feel It Now

by Wayne Shannon

I used to think he would always be there—his voice rumbling like a Harley-Davidson, his red head and freckled white face beaming, almost luminous, and his sometimes neglected stubble of beard scarce and jagged and refusing to populate any more than the Kalahari.

Barbecues at our place usually ended up in a corner of the garden where rolling laughter muffled afternoon thunder and the smell of rain promised to wash up spilled beer and spoil the grill. An autobiographical archipelago of entertainment and mock-abuse regularly saw to it that the food was cremated, and had the guests drunk on his exploits. He would swallow his beer and bellow on about jumbos and kittens and hippos, and how learning to water-ski in flat-dog infested waters was the preferred method amongst real men. Elephant size stories about elephants, knives bigger than swords, airplanes painting smoke-stream pictures above the Zambezi Valley—there was no end to him.

Once, he and I took a Piper Cherokee into Ficksburg—home of the Cherry Festival and Eastern Free State Airshow—and damned near flew the thing head-on into the Northern Drakensberg granite. It was a miserable day for two boys to be out flying and we had been showing off our aerobatic display skills to a couple of girls in Johannesburg earlier that morning, before heading out to the nimbostratus-covered mountains in the southeast. We popped out of the clouds in rain that was falling in ropes at around four hundred feet and a half-a-mile from the Franshoek Mountain Lodge.

“Fuck me,” I said, pointing at the mountainside we had missed crashing into by nothing more than luck and around a quarter-of-a-mile. “Look at that!”

“Good thing you flew around it,” he said. And then he said, “I bet you couldn’t do that again,” and he smiled that smile that said he would sit there next to me whilst I tried it if I wanted, and if it killed me trying, well then he would be right there at my side. I can see the grin on his face right now.

I wrote a poem about him once. It was not much of a poem. Well, perhaps it was not that it was not much of a poem. Perhaps it was more that he was just so much bigger than any of my poems could presume to be—larger than literature. He would go around reciting passages from it as if it were the only poem he knew—perhaps it was. I even heard him advise a Lusaka air traffic controller one day: “Heed not commands nor threats nor guns, nor waste a second lest you be gone.”

Sometimes, he would talk so loud I used to imagine that his voice could blow doors open or burst open windows, or even send whole towns flying the way they did in those old black and white movies made about when the U.S. was testing the atomic bomb. I used to tell him not to bother calling me up on the phone when he was like that, because I could hear him talking from the other side of town without it anyway. He said it was a gift and that God had given it to him and that there was no way on earth he was going to throw away a God-given talent. I still hear his voice, with the cigarettes in it, sometimes when I am flying alone, or when I am doing the other things that we used to do.

Nowadays I crack myself up sometimes when I suddenly remember the shit we used to get up to. Running away from that restaurant in Hillbrow without paying the bill after scoffing down their steaks and playing catch with a bunch of kids in-between the tables. Sneaking up on those lions in the Okovango Delta with blankets over us, and then jumping up, screaming, running around, and scaring them shitless—he said they had scattered like an Italian platoon under fire. I never thought that it would ever end.

I fished him from the river. I wish I never had. I did not want to remember him that way, but I had to find him. We could not find him at first. We searched from morning until dark for five days, the way you search when you know it is about death. And then, it was a Wednesday, and I saw his shoe floating amongst the reeds on the Zambian side of the river. It was one of those trail shoes, made by Caterpillar, and it had a heel that looked like The Incredible Hulk, smiling. Only he was not smiling. He was lying face down in the water and when I reeled him in a part of him rolled over slowly until he was face down again. I recognized the freckled white skin on his back and on his leg.

They said he died happy. They said he had died doing what he loved doing most. My little brother: dead at age twenty-eight on July 23, 1994. He had been painting smoke-trailed images over the Zambezi River, in a Beechcraft Bonanza, outside Chirundu. They said it was quick. They said he did not feel a thing.

I can still feel it now.

Posted in Short Stories | No Comments »

Here and Now by Faith N. Kobo

Here & Now is a story of a woman’s strengths, frailties, defeats and triumphs. Nolitha Zantsi, born in a small town of Port St John’s in the Eastern Cape, is a gentle and courageous young woman who believes in her inner strengths and abilities to take her to the better life she dreams of and her belief is confirmed after many struggles and many tears. She suffers many losses and abuse for such a young woman but she finds the courage to face life head on without reservations.
At a young age she experiences the painful realization that she is responsible for her beloved father leaving them to remarry and has to battle to prove herself worthy of her mother’s love and the forgiveness of her siblings. Throughout her childhood, she is torn between her loyalty to her mother and her love for her father, and approaches teenage life with her love for her father turning into hatred and her loyalty to her mother being an obligation.
She is raped by her half-brother-in-law who manages to convince her that nobody will believe her. She attempts to commit suicide to run away from the trauma of having to face what lay ahead on her own. She positions herself on top of the big rock overlooking the deep blue ocean that hungrily waits for her to jump to her untimely death. She weighs the previous night’s event against her dreams, as she would sift the bubbles from uMqomboti and her dreams seem more important than anything else.
She falls in love with a man who soon becomes possessive of her and starts abusing her to an extent that she is left with a broken jaw and stripped of her dignity as she is constantly humiliated and beaten in public. She tries to break free but finds herself being held hostage at hand-grenade point by her fiancé. Determined to be free she walks away from the scene and the relationship despite her fear from his threats. She chooses to rather die than to live a meaningless life.
It takes her ten years before she opens herself to another man. This time she is sure everything will be alright. She marries a reverend, convinced that abuse of any kind is a thing of the past. It is hardly three months after the big wedding day that she is called the devil, abused emotionally, physically and spiritually by her husband. Having been failed by the church to handle the situation she files for divorce, despite her Christian & societal values.
After the divorce Nolitha still finds it difficult to trust another man but she believes that men are not all the same. She has forgiven the men that entered her life and left it scarred, she loves and admires the man she is yet to meet who will repay a debt he does not owe. She loves the baby she is yet to conceive and the boy she is yet to mother because in her experiences she learns that what really matters in life is here and now.

Posted in Short Stories | 2 Comments »