Three Last Borns

Orion wheels through stardust on a windy night tailing reluctant virgins, and a bitch gives birth to a litter at the back of our silent shack filled with snores of children dreaming of large hounds howling menacingly at the slow feet.

Rattling shack-roofs and screeching fences fend stray dogs from a hideout chosen for fresh nuisances on four legs, to be fed and stoned by cherished palms of never-minding caregivers.

And on this night, a man is being raped by two boys at the back of a tavern, clubbed with sticks and beer crates, wounds gushing motley grease and blood backed by heaving breath and dusts of his struggle.

Scanning sordid skies that bore cold witness to his desecration with bleak and worn gazes, he vowed revenge beyond the brutality of prison as the police would only ridicule his castration.

The tale begins with an unwise young man binging until the wee hour of dawn at a cesspool named Crocodile Inn, an infamous splatter of excremental smudge on the tapestry of a serene extension in a turbulent township.

Spending his fortnight’s wages in a stupor of first time worker sugar-rush, swinging about town in search of promiscuous loves of teenagers, he became prey for picking in bloodshot eyes of blanketed men concealing oaken sticks and Okapi blades.

He apparently stared at the wrong girl among the many morose faces dancing in clear view of eyes stripping their half clad thighs looking for nearby shacks to spend the remnants of a stormy night.

His fate was sealed when he decided to leave the mayhem, and without questioning the shadows following his wrangling steps through puddles of muddy water – he was soon spitting turgid blobs waggling in puddles lit by a million lightning strikes.

No covert surveillance was ever necessary for these rookie boys bound to fall short of their saving graces, as they just lunged in attack of a man who was condemned to a night without stars.

Once the beating had reached a frenzy and the victim stiffened and grunting while titters of laughter behind poking sticks rang lowly, Smanga moaned muffled screams that went to the marrow of any humane ribcage.

While he writhed in a pulp of broken bones and mangled sinews, one biy maniacally ripped his trousers down belt buckle and all, and had his sordid rounds on limp buttocks of a man who came to grip shrubs crawling on rusty wires.

Time to peddle excuses for this display of brutal bestiality could not be his concern, as he eventually raised his bruised body from silent mud, with a resolute aim to eternally rein apostolic anathema on this duet of last borns.

Codenamed Skhova, he was first of the sordid offspring bred of initiation clans intoxicated by their taste for human blood, a slight young man, nondescript but as murderous as a serpent that you could cradle for a pet.

Untrusting and arrogant, his small round eyes always on the roundabout, glancing over beer bottles and stuffy ashtrays, he was one who always managed to smuggle any weapon into a place of revelers who wished for no pain but mere muscle strains from dance moves.

A stout and ridiculously short man; potbellied from acid concoction from backyard grannies with recipes for fast acting beverages, lips always dried, painfully cracked with nobody ever daring to stare at them – let alone women.

In their muddled thoughts, akin any crude demeanor of dogs, they are said to have returned to the same tavern to finish last sips of warm beer left untouched even by aloof girlfriends waiting smugly in their shabby bed of rosy death.

A disturbed family was waking up to the moans of their last born son who lost his first money earned as man, a cherished beacon of a fading bloodline wrestling locked braces of poverty.

His secret was to be their own and never be spoken again, as he was to continue life seeing his nemeses waltzing to dreary rhythms of a shameless people paralyzed by disconcerting circumstances.

The name Smanga ripened on his shoulders to be yoke that crucified him in a disgustingly traumatic exhibit, because even though his mother believed the tragedy’s viscid scars, she still was dumbfounded by this brand of cruelty dished unto her womb’s skin.

It was to follow that a very unrelenting sangoma was ruefully consulted by the family, to return the morbid favor to their son’s assailants and those whose blood coursed through their veins.

What followed the avaricious bargain made with a witchdoctor are explicitly wondrous tortures which were to be borne to the grave by the two defilers; faith shattering testaments of the heavy hand of enraged ancestors coupled by an infernal wrath of spellbinders.

***

Privy to this abominable secret was Phonyoka, another derelict vagabond born with an incurable skin condition that left his entire skin seeming covered in flakes resembling dried mud.

Incessantly scratching, sandpaper wearer who spent his school days hiding from mirrors and mocking bullies, he could never make friends, hence his strange camaraderie shared with Skhova. 

Pressed against skin were puss-filled growths the size of marbles, vile even for the most religious hearts; rousing such disgust that it was always decided he would occupy the rear desks at school, and over time growing a habit of loving the backseat of a taxi.

Having spent his childhood mocked and terrorized by others, he grew harboring a simmered vengeance creamed upon his crustily black skin; and it became his resolve to inflict unforgettable wounds on others.

And now incredibly haunted by the ever glowing smile of their victim sometimes seen at tuckshops, taverns and taxi ranks, dribbles of sweat often unashamedly creep down their sour armpits wilting in the heat of castrated rage.

Smanga never went to the police, that they guilefully comprehended; and only the thought of their transgression being wanton gossip among township loafers and former jail-birds was what made their hair stand on end.

Entitlements of their violent natures that sparkled in their eyes were fading with each meeting of these infamous friends, as they were now seldom seen together among habitual binge masters and shebeen guards.

Memory vilified their cruelty and recalling the screams which were loud enough to wake a child intoxicated by cough mixtures, to which no-one woke; those sounds shrieked in their guts as they gulped many their final beers over the following weeks.

The uncomforting bulgy stomach is said to have started growing like a tumor, and Skhova began to be terrified of open spaces, and over a period of nine days he was not seen outside his shack behind his mother’s RDP house.

A faded old coat huddled behind the door bolted with a chain and a lock, the key slipped therein, was the first he set aflame after dousing his property with common household accelerants.

Harnessed against a bed post and more paraffin doused over his person made his attempts at escape futile, and what unimaginable slippery moves that drained strength from a body choking on curtain and mat smoke.

When the fire was finally extinguished in the late hours of yet another day of fierce gales of winds, puss riddled blisters under Phonyoka’s skin were becoming miniature explosives detonated by an unknowable trigger.

A leper and charcoal skeleton, polluted youngsters who refused to accept the inevitable; that a fierce penance was to be paid for their evil, was sanctioned in sorcery.

Blisters became like flames bouncing against Phonyoka’s skull, and he became demented with volcanic migraines which required him to keep his eyes shut tightly with a towel and belt.

And over some weeks, these bilious crowd of sores groping through his scalp left a bumpy terrain of filthy skin strung with flimsy hair strands, his dreams drenched in sweat as he was always tried to disentangle his friend’s corpse from the ruins of the fatal fire.

Being an alcoholic and independent of charity was no shame any longer, and headaches mattered the least when nights were nigh and the tedium of growing shadows relented to giving him cover from prying eyes.

To acknowledge his failures, fragility and catastrophes, he had to drink uncontrollably, and with each day’s tension, fear gripped him and aloneness in any crowd was a safe bet.

And on the seventh week after Skhova’s death, the perversity of chance events had him there at the tavern grappling with small mercies of a passersby, having noticed Smanga throw a kerchief at his feet to wipe his oozing face. 

Eyes misted and narrowed, he sat on the edge of a crate in a dark corner of his favorite place on earth, sipping slowly his only beer as dark purples were smearing the afternoon sky.

Jostled between terror and fantasy, he thought he was imagining the aberration of a man who haunted his waking hours.

But an obstinate puzzle was only sliding into place; his death was riding on the magnificence of time’s fast drift, dejected and sour, a heinous frown cutting its forehead.

Haunted by his mortality, it seemed easier to quicken his own death through drink and infamous drugs; a soul stealing the last snores of sleep in stupor and cold black dreams.

And one night after weeks of storms and growing shrubs when cockroaches were stretching wings in flight to new colonies, he hung himself with copper wires his uncle had stolen from power stations.

Around the eleven mines of Fochville, everyone knew without word having gone around town for many a good soul that depart each day, and his was left not mourned nor cursed, for cursing the dead is anathema for those willing a life.