A Dark Energy [1 ed.] 9780797496972, 9780797493339

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Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd Chitungwiza Zimbabwe

Copyright © 2018. Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited. All rights reserved.

literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with over 20 books published. He writes in English and Shona. His work has appeared in over 400 journals and anthologies from over 27 countries, translated into Spanish, French and German. Find his books here:http://www.africanbookscollective.com/ authors-editors/tendai-rinos-mwanaka.

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a publisher, editor, mentor, thinker,



Straddling literary genres this novel explores themes related to family, love, politics, life and existence. It is the story of a man pushed to breaking point and how that, inevitably, impacts society.

A Dark Energy

Don is the only child of a happy family full of love, but it does not last. At 6 years old Don’s parents are burned in a fire through arson, and suspects his father’s brother is the culprit. As the family fights over his father’s wealth nobody wants anything to do with Don, particularly the Uncle whom he suspects of arson and ends up taking most of his father’s wealth. After a difficult upbringing in orphanages and an abusive old man Don starts working at the C.I.O (Central Investigations Organisation), Zimbabwe’s security intelligence organisation, as an agent. Despite this apparent success Don never deals with the existential dilemmas he has as a result of his childhood. He becomes a loner, he doesn’t believe in love, marriage, or happiness until he meets Lilian. Soon after he is called into the president’s office to cover up an extramarital affair. When a political rival of the president, the corrupt defence minister, ‘bones’ gets wind of the cover up and unsuccessfully tries to blackmail Don something terrible happens and Don becomes thrown back into the darkness.

A Dark Energy

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

Mwanaka, Rinos. A Dark Energy, Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,

A Dark Energy novel

Copyright © 2018. Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited. All rights reserved.

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd, Chitungwiza Zimbabwe * Creativity, Wisdom and Beauty

Mwanaka, Rinos. A Dark Energy, Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Publisher: Mmap Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd 24 Svosve Road, Zengeza 1 Chitungwiza Zimbabwe [email protected] https//mwanakamediaandpublishing.weebly.com

Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [email protected] www.africanbookscollective.com

Copyright © 2018. Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7974-9333-9 EAN: 9780797493339 © Tendai Rinos Mwanaka 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

DISCLAIMER All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mmap.

Mwanaka, Rinos. A Dark Energy, Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Chapter 1

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As the two halves fell away from one another, he could hear Mosquito gargling a tune made from the scraps of his voice. Scrambled tones garbling the message; meaning was lost in the melange of sound. He got lost in the listening and felt the unusual cadences crackling with agitation. The violent intensity of it all amazed him, the feel of metal against human flesh. The phone had been ringing on and off for some time, though he had ignored it as just another found element to the music of the knife rippling through Mosquito's voice box, but the ringing had continued. Even though he had been ignoring the telephone, he knew he had to answer it. No one else was inside the house with him, so the responsibility fell on no one else but him. Annoyed, Don made his way into the living room to silence it once and for all. The atonal wails had been eating into his music, into him, into his shadow reverie. He got his hand around the handle and took it to the ear. His fingers were dark, brown knuckled bones, raw and tight, these were the hands that had been splotched with dribbles of Mosquito's blood. Before meeting phone to ear, Bones' voice boomed, rhyming with the what-what-what, into Don’s ears. "What are you trying to prove? What do you really want? Huh? What, Don...?" As if Bones doesn't know what I am doing? Don mused, is he really unaware of it? He had already told Bones, so he knew Bones was

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scared. He knew he could simply have cut Bones' call, but somehow he felt he wanted to hear Bones talking. It made him feel important somehow, secure. Maybe, it was that Bones was still there and that he was also still here, listening, wobbled by chance, though weighed down by circumstances. Whatever. This upheaval remained a mystery to Don. "You know my offer still stands -a million- Don and you stop all this. Don't you think it's time we let bygones be bygones…?" Hahahaa! That's unbelievable. Don was not laughing as such. What? It seemed that Bones still thinks I am a kite on his string, he couldn't help musing; Bones thinks I will obey every tug of his heartless fingers. Beware Bones; the time has come when I will refuse you. But, he could only imitate Bones' statement. "Pwii pwii pwii pwii pwiigones." Such sugary-sweet forgetfulness! Yet Don knew; that's what Bones wanted. He knew, though, that he wasn't ready. After all, why should he be ready? To be lowered into the grave, then to be enclosed in the greying soils, and thus letting bygones be bygones. He will be a bygone too. Not now, not before I accomplish what I promised to Lillian. No, he hadn't told Lillian that, not really. He knew he didn't have to tell her. He had made that promise to himself. He knew if he made the mistake of telling Lillian what he had intended to do at the gravesites, even she would have dissuaded him, sweetening him out of it. She would have been sure to communicate that from beyond. So he hadn't told her; he hadn't told anyone. And, Bones continued with his prattles. "You know what Don?" Rhetorically, Bones asked himself, or Don, maybe both... Don didn't care. He hadn't cared a hoot when he cold-bloodedly sliced Mosquito.

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"What?" Don answered Bones. Don was simply bored, after all, what was there to know? Lillian was dead; Mosquito was dead. And, it was when Don had cut Mosquito's windpipe that fear, horror and hate replaced disbelief in his eyes. A drawn-out fizz note buzzed like a mosquito out from his memory, came biting into his ears. Pig and Bones have to die, too. That was all the truth there was to know. "I have always thought we could have worked things out, but you were...you were so uncooperative, Don. All the same, I am so sorry. An event like that makes people very sad, Don." Such a sardonic take! Don couldn't help musing to himself. Mosquito hadn't believed him, either. He couldn't believe it himself when he told him he wanted to kill Mosquito the way people do to fattened chickens. Mosquito had given him this look as if he had thrown a rotten egg at the president. An event like that makes people very sad…hey. Bones was, even now, trying to fake an apology, or was that really sympathy? He didn't know which was with Bones. "I really am sorry about what happened. You know what, Don…I never wanted it to end up like that." What had really made him into such a peach? He couldn't say these words into the receiver. He knew Bones was a rotten one to the core. "I could have –in actual fact- we could have..." I really have to stop him. He wasn't in the mood to listen to Bones' sorry sorries for they were no longer helpful to the situation. "We could have..." Done what? Do what now! But he exploded, "Hey. Stop this!" Don thundered into the receiver. He felt his voice in the earpiece, as well as an ambient presence around the room, booming, livid...

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Remember Don, this bastard couldn't care less whether someone dies or not. He only cares for his schemes to come to fruition, only for that. Why was he faking this sympathy, this caring, as if he really was sorry things had become that bad? He had everything to do with how and why the world had manifested itself in just this way. Really? "Just remember we have a score to settle, Bones. No matter what, I said, no matter what, Bones. I am going to get you. Do you hear me, Bones? I am going to get you." Bones had to listen well to these black lines. Lines said with such deep intensity, needled as black crows pecking at a paper thin skin to get at what lays beneath. "Bones, from now onwards, watch your step. I am right behind you. Any false step, any wrong footing, any minor mistake, and you are gone!" With a hoarse whisper into the receiver, Don hissed dangerously, like a viper. "You are gone. Gone to wherever Lillian is. You will follow Mosquito and it's not so long from today, Bones. It may be a day or so, but I will have peace. Maybe then, I'll forget all this. When that happens, then I'll let bygones be bygones. So until then, I have to have you like you got the only person I loved. Bones, I am this thing you thought you liked. I am transformed by your cruelty. I am darkened by your hands." Deep with persuasion, his voice vibrated through his tympanic membrane transforming into an electric virus flashing along to find a place in his neurons to infect Bones with the poison he had once incubated inside of him.

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"This transgression of yours has been tattooed painfully repeatedly across and throughout my very being, Bones. It defines me as it will come to define you." Don didn't want to hear anymore of Bones' mumblings, blahblahs of apologies. So he slammed the phone back into its hook and walked out of the living room, back to his music. He can't recall the emotions now. Perhaps there were none. He doesn't remember. He only remembers the tightening of his hand, the dark knuckles on the knife as he sliced Mosquito. He remembers the blood. He remembers the blood making small pools and little insipid streams. He remembers the gurgles, the choking breaths, the blood spattered whispers which punctuated the tangled end of a misery. In the roofless skies, the chill of a bone-white quarter moon clung like the inverse of an old bruise on the skies. Perhaps, the moon was a strange bird migrating slowly across the sky. On that night, Don felt like the moon. He felt his heart unsettled on its perch behind the ribs, beating its wings, trying to free itself from its cage. Some distance from the bench on which he waited for an end to come, he could hear the river wandering softly, playfully unraveling a winding thought. There, he found ecstasy in these hallucinations, in the killing, in the faint squeaks, and the still inaudible voices Mosquito was still making. Death's rattle neared to this violated place. He remembers then that the emotion returned. It shook him. Perhaps it was Lillian's shade crying, calling his humanity back into an emptied vessel, begging for mercy on Mosquito, asking him to accommodate human folly, to forgive him who had killed her.

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But, what good is forgiveness? What good is forgiveness carried one handful at a time? What good is forgiveness that emerges only from one side? What good is forgiveness when a vengeful fire still ravages his heart? Forgiveness is praying for rain, longing for the water, but not for the thunder and lightning. No. Lightning and thunder are not likely to give up on their child so easily. Forgiveness is no better than splashing water to hold back an invasion. Rage had already gathered itself and was crackling with energy. The shade of Lillian's compassion evaporated in a half-remembered dream. Perhaps, Don was already damned. Witnessing Mosquito's last heaving protest, a question yawned through the exhaustion into him: Is death such a frightful sight? A quiet voice arose from the depths. "No. It is banal." No more pain; no unhappiness; the advent of nothingness; why does the surprise freeze on the dead's face? It comes for us all. With the hair matted, Mosquito's tongue was now snagged between the teeth, eyes gaping unbelievingly wide open. His eyes were no longer sparkling but dull, soulless, lifeless, staring wide –terrified. Again, the voice arose from the depths, "He's asking whether you were capable of this." All he could wonder in response was whether Lillian had asked her murderers those questions as they killed and raped her. Had Mosquito provided her any answers? What were his answers? It was the same answer and in the same way. This was the time for the returning of a favour. Maybe, he had become berserk. Maybe, he had metamorphosed into a serial killer. Maybe, he was the anti-Christ incarnate. What had become me!

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How he had changed he wasn't very sure. He felt normal. He had every control over his mind. Like a dope-addict fumbling along the trajectory of addiction, revenge had evolved. And, he had evolved along with it. He had tasted something that neither would he ever forget nor would it earn that which he really wanted: Lillian’s resurrection.

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Chapter 2

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Where was he now that what he stood for no longer mattered? It was only the previous morning when he last spoke with Bones. The killing of Mosquito was only two days before that. Clearly, much had happened before all that. The days bled through his brain as he mostly did nothing but howl into the nothingness and wait. He was caught in an unwinding of events, one event leading into the next. He felt he had moved too far, returning was no longer an option. He was already too blooded, too battered, and too desperate for an end to this addiction that masquerades as a life. Yet, he had to complete his task. He couldn't think of any better way to explain it, or to stop doing what he had set on doing. It seemed that the clock was going both backwards and forwards, as if his life was being lived in both directions. Sometimes, the clock told him it was night, or –again, that it was daylight. His world was dark; the curtains closed; the windows shut; his eyes focused inwardly into a core which he seemed not to even see. It was a train of events since he started breathing, maybe when he found out in life that he was a loner. It was a long time ago, it seemed to have happened in another lifetime, but still very poignantly felt. Then he thought that he could never love, or when he was at thirty, and grappling with Thomas Hardy's obsessions in Far from the Madding Crowd. In this book, the character in this madding crowd was twenty eight. Don had enjoyed reading this book, he remembered it was the year of "A" level

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studies. He was now thirty and that character was twenty eight, and also; that he had given up hope of ever settling down with anyone, someone, forever, maybe that… Maybe for a lifetime of it -thirty years of it- he was now counting downward to himself: immense, imponderable, but still there. After all, Don was still there, on the bed, thinking, hallucinating. Was he thinking as such? What was he thinking of? He couldn't put words to what he was engrossed in. That, maybe, it started when he was falling in love with Lillian, or when he was in love. In the first moments, it was surprising that he could be in love. He could be there in the middle where honest life happens. Love made him feel like the tall Himalayas, setting a high stage for loving and giving. This love, making his heart glad of the life that he was living; it was a train of events, when he started thinking of her as the love he had always hoped for. Then everything was faster, like lightning, all the more faster than he had foreseen. It was faster like the air that carries the sun's light on its back across the morning, afternoon and evening's trees. It was a train of events; some day in the morning, he was the happiest person on earth, and by night's fall; he was not even living anymore. In that night's fall, he could feel that the best years of life had happened without him, scratching, searching; his brains. He felt he had lost the biggest part of his life trying to understand why the grains of dust haven't stopped falling on his inner plains. And that, no matter how defiantly he had tried to scrabble himself, ever after that night, that his insides still remained dirty, soiling him. Those grains of dust didn't stop

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falling inside him, even as he now reclined on this bed, he felt the dust, still falling inside him. He didn't have a prayer. He didn't even know how to stop them from raining down on him. It was a train of events in which all his inner grounds were now clogged with those dusty grains. His inner grounds were now a burning red desert landscape, a red shift, the whole scene a successful dominion over his soul. It was a train of events; and then he realised that it really had started way back when he was growing up. Growing up, was standing between diverting roads while still retaining the choice to be what either of these roads shaped. It was half wise, half puzzled, and half asleep that Don wanted to be a politician, and envied himself as the president, some years into the future, he would enthuse. And, in that day into the future, he thought he would be the president of Zimbabwe. Then, the lies the politicians were selling were cheaper and easier to believe in, even though they were lies. Their lies abducted him, seduced him with the awesomeness of their promises. It was easier to be gullible when one was still young and believed whatever the politicians preached. In most cases the politicians would preach on how voting for them could mean they were going to eradicate every ill of the society. This utopian society that they preached for and proposed is usually good fodder for the young people's undiscerning mind. Seduced by this utopian proposal, Don dreamt of being the president, of going all over the world; attending as many dinner parties as was possible. He heard, in the newspapers, on the radio, the president was always off to somewhere foreign, Paris,

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New York, London... He dreamed of these places. He dreamed of meeting other presidents, being escorted by a full parade of military and civilian security personnel to 10 Downing Street, to the Elysee Palace, the White House. The sounds and sights of the president's motorcade whining and whirling down the streets of Harare were the sounds and sights that helped shape this burning ambition inside. Later on, that liking began to fade. He had come to hear of mass killing of civilians for the most basic of rights. He came to understand what it was, when it was all up to one person to decide whether a God's creature lived or died. He was also able to watch a hawk gliding high in the winter skies, then diving, swooping over its prey, and finally clutching the stunned animal in its claws before shooting back into those blue winter skies. The slickness of it all! And then the feasting; digesting its prey perhaps a mouse- on a branch of a tree by the outskirts of the Budiriro suburb where he was staying. The astounding lonesomeness of this eagle, the impossibility and inevitability of that non-human existence abducted and disturbed him, especially in his belief in the rightness of that natural animal world, let alone the human world. But still, later on, he also came to know of the waste of pain that came with a killing field. Chimoi and Nyadzonya shaped this disgust in him. People had simply been strafed for the right to life, the right to living freely in their own country. The rest of us can only hope that it was enough, but people were also being killed for the right to equitable land's share, the right to education, open to blacks and whites.

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One has to leave it at that for one wouldn't want accusations, seeing that in the very act of seeing this; it creates a lot of hot noise. One has to learn to be less blind in the judgment. Back then, people were being killed for the right to going anywhere one wanted to go without one being accused of trespassing. The country of a heart's tides has no boundaries and cannot be too deep, and thus, someone should be able to wade to its boundaries, but people were being refused this. People were also being killed for the right to work together as human beings, not as human doings- that kind of working together that was not a picket-fence kind of working together. People were being killed for these rights and many more... He saw a lot and heard more. He didn't want to be the president anymore if it entailed killing his fellow Zimbabweans as if slaughtering fattened cows. So, in his mind, Chimoi and Nyadzonya became just about that, killing for the love of it. And unlike that sharp-taloned bird in those winter blue skies, it wasn't a matter of consumption but of brutality and extermination. Innocent and helpless people had been sliced in cold-blooded madness and no one seemed to bother, not especially the president then. It was so discomforting for Don to live in that imminent plague, but he lived through that liberation war-era. Maybe, like bird markings that takes as long to disappear; as long as endless days of high winds could be able to scour these bird markings. Ever after that, Don was beat! His mind resisting this all-encompassing need in him to confront these strange images: Sometimes he would feel disturbingly aware that the stone he had sat-on for years was

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growing bigger rather than wearing thin. Stones were born without legs. It was the world surrounding it that is the stone's limbs, eyes, or ears. The stone was supposed to stay put on in its place of birth and thin out or maybe move a bit by some force acting upon it. For this stone to move it had to use its fingertips, limbs and eyes. In so doing, it thinned out. Just thinking of the birds, other wild animals that have sat; pissed and tread upon this stone. The sun that split the stone into bits and pieces, to study the indigos within them, so as to figure out about its own billionfold years' existence shinning on this stone. Owls have hooted and the ravens have shivered, and the doves have cooed on top of this stone. Obviously, the stone has a name. Its actual name is Zimbabwe. Giving it a name- Zimbabwe- was an act of empowerment. Rhodesia had empowered something else and in Zimbabwe, we are saying in this name-giving act, this stone belongs to us and to no one else. On top of this stone, all the shivers, hoots, coos, and even other former names of it, were chiefly angry oaths like giving up on oneself. He knew of the elements: it rained, the cold came, the blustery winds, and the frost ate in. Yet still, there was no need to hurry this stone, each individual New Year descending slowly and heavy. It was a stone; he became a stone on top of this stone too. With such majesty, he felt like those stones. On top of him were other stones, binding him down. On top of the stone he lived, yet seasons never stopped coming. Each season, it seemed, never found its mark on these stones. There were other people who sat on the stone in his presence, people who sat on the stone in his absence, and

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opinions that have been made to sit on the stones. Their illuminating, corrosive effects! He remembers of people inhabiting, an opposite world to his thinking, beliefs, and colour and people of that same world of his arguing, fighting, and killing. And he supposes; all these people were indefatigably always trying to find reasons behind their imponderable presence on this stony civilization. Yet still, he also knew that this stone, like him, had its own mad moments of drama, passions, and misgivings. That, it was also constantly acting its own theatrical performances out to a dumb and blind audience like that old wise proverb. Constant dropping wears away the stone. Awake, aware... the stone, and he also knew that on this journey, he wasn't warm, to begin with; he was helplessly watching this stone growing.

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Chapter 3

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And then a little later, growing up; had happened like a case of the hiccups. One day the world suddenly became larger than his family, so things began to slip in and out. Such that he had grown up a listless youth with nothing particular to value but a restless burgeoning need for a life as a politician. Upon realizing that he didn't want to be the president, his world upended. It turned out he didn't want to be anyone. So, he thought, I am a naked creature. He feared he could kill if he became a clothed creature. Nakedness signified re-birth, newness, and unadulterated being. This became his place of resistance, to stay naked, and the fights were against clothing himself with anything. But the more one fights against a thing -the more a person resists a thing- the more one becomes it. It happens without awareness until, one day, one wakes up to discover that he had mellowed. That the road one had chosen had taken him so close to where he didn't want to go in the first place. All the same, in a hidden jar of hope, Don pursued his studies. He went through primary, secondary, high school, and then to the University of Zimbabwe. High school, at Chinhoyi high school, in the Mashonaland West province of Zimbabwe, had its own particulars. He was a shambling youth, awkward and with a wry smile that rated the attention of an abundance of saucy high school girls who would text and call him incessantly.

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At the University of Zimbabwe, he completed a degree in Security and Defence. Maybe he wanted to defend himself against those saucy girls, their brazen pert breasts, bursting through colourful mesh tops. Even at this university, he had to protect himself against those saucy girls, still flaunting the banner of youth, some of whom would paw him, momentarily, instantly, without invitation. In his quiet moments, he enthused; I want to defend myself from something larger than these harmless girls, even my countryman and everyone else, from abusive politicians. And later on, that became his career. That also became to him a job and a belief that didn't really pay a lot. After the university, he worked at the security agency (Central Intelligence Organisation). In 5 years time at this agency, he was promoted to become a special agent, now working in the office of the president. So it seemed destiny's hands had revelled upon him: the threads and strings that had tied him towards what he had fought against all along. If a person protects politicians, he felt, that man was already a politician. Funnily, the country's security wasn't as important as the president's security, so that anything that was slightly against the president became a huge security issue. Even jokes on the president were a security threat. With that ideology, wasn't one already upping some political ant by giving this support, having this job? But all the other people never knew his real job, though. On the surface, he was just another private investigating agent. That's what was written on his card, Mr. Donald Muchadura. "a private investigating agent."

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He ruefully would laugh at himself, that he probably had declared the full weight of rented authority behind those italicised words, "a private investigating agent." On a piece of paper defining him as "Mr. Donald Muchadura", as if a piece of paper could really change him into something better, better than what he was, better than all the other people- as if it could transmute a person into a bar of gold. He had an office at the corner of Robert Mugabe road and Angwa Street, in central Harare. Laura, a secretary at their private investigating company, and his partner Johns also manned this office. With Johns, they had been together since the first day at the C.I.O. They also came to talk, much about their lives, hopes, loves, especially Johns' side of these things. It was always like this with Johns. "Hey Don, there is this sweet girl I have been seeing. I am crazy about..." "Hu, hu, hu Johns, another one, hey?" Don would answer him, that playfully, though unconvinced. Of course he was. He couldn't help being this sarcastic for he had heard many a story that had started like that with Johns. "This one is the one, Don." "Is she?" "Yeh man, she is different." They were always different with Johns. They have to be different with Johns; otherwise, one of these girls would have stayed. How different is what he hadn't figured out, yet. And so he would ask Johns, how different was that one? "What's so different with this one, Johns?"

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"I just know, man; she is so different." Johns could also be so stubbornly, so indifferent, especially when it comes to that issue. He knew that Johns would always be vague when he was asked that question. Don tried to push it, a bit more thinking he could get some headway this time. He asked Johns. "Different, in what ways, Johns?" "Like...uhuu..., like, you know, man." Don knew he could now only ask the wind that question; like what? But he would try to help Johns out of his own jungle of love, by killing off the discussion, he would say. "Like you are in love with her, Johns?" "Yes man, like that. I am madly in love with this one, Don." "Ok, ok, ok!" Don raised his hands up, placating Johns to stop. He just couldn't help agreeing with him just so Johns could let it go. It was always difficult to push Johns beyond that point. In Johns' mind, Don had always been the poorer for not believing in love. "Give it some time, friend." He couldn't help advising Johns. He had to be that cautious. Johns always had a girl he would be seeing. Always to Johns, the girl had to be the best ever, and that he would be thinking of marrying her. Only that after some few months, or days, or at the mercy of sudden impulses, Johns would be talking of another one who has replaced the worthless previous one. This story will rumble from there, onwards. Such that Johns' love story was like those tall tales children tell when they are telling stories. …ingeniously, the Hare cooks the Baboon but the Baboon comes out of the boiling, sizzling pot, alive and inedible. Then the Baboon, and for the

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mad pursuit of its own foolish inspirations and dankish cravings, takes the Hare's sweetheart... Only, for those listening to the story to discover how ridiculous and painful it can be to be the Baboon. The Baboon, in this story, doesn't have the faintest idea what to do with the Hare's girl. To this Baboon, this girl's sex, her very femaleness, and his very maleness are the real corrupted truths. Then the story will rumble on disjointedly, difficult to follow, without a climax or conclusion, into the early hours of the next day. When the child falls into deep sleep whilst telling the story, and when one thinks to himself that a new day brings with itself a new outlook, it is baffling to discover nothing has really changed. That the story still rumbles on; it is now a train without the driver, and that one is still so far from getting the beautiful kicks of the story. At one time, Johns and Don had come to be known as D.A, that is, Double Action, due to exploits in cases where they were assigned together as a team. Two very different lives becoming an action clothed in words. "Doctor", as their boss was known by the whole Charlie-ten (C.I.O) gang was so discreet in matters they dealt with. He was the doctor of information. One wouldn't know to what extent an assigned case can be explored. They were only given their assignments, what they were going to do, where and how in skeletal details. They were supposed to stick to that or divert when they were under unforeseen compromising situations. That is only when they would vary from their course of action, and vary they will within reasonable uncompromising limits. They also take every other

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permutation and combination into consideration before diverting from their course of action. He was responsible to the Doctor and to no one else, not even to the Doctor's second in command. Most of the times, no one else knew where he was. When he was not in the office in Robert Mugabe road, Johns would be there serving their clients or just giving that impression to the clients. They were specialists in all common law offences, but rarely went around ferreting for evidence for client's cases. They had other agents. These other agents were the ones who did most of the work the clients thought they did. It's not inconceivable to reckon that these clients believed that when they saw either one of the two, Don or Johns, out of the offices, it meant they were investigating other client's cases. Don, or even Johns, could only help when they were not engaged in their work at the agency. Laura, their secretary, was no problem; she was game. The Doctor had commended her to them. She was a former agent who had had a job gone messy. After a long leave, she had been readmitted, not in the proper agency itself, but as a pair of eyes. Hers were a striking beautiful agate-brown and ears for the doctor and for them, too. In life, we all make mistakes, don't we? And they are especially destructive in our workplaces, but mostly in our day to day life. It's as if one has taken a false step and then falls headlong into the abyss. This is the sad case of our lives as humans. That was the sad case of their lives as agents, as well. It could be because of the politics of their lives, which was always a dirty game.

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Are politicians generally that dirty? Are politicians bad, as bad as what is called bad by the general mass? Don't butchers kill animals all the time, like it's a way of life for them? Does that make them any bad? Aren't good people always stepping stones for politicians, even good politicians? There are those politicians who are always eyeing the next highest position. They don't care how they get there. If it entails having to indulge in the most despicable of all human follies; even if it asks for murder, strangling, deceit, lie, betrayal, utter insensitivity; they will do it. To these types, it is a question of whether the end has been attained no matter how. No matter who gets hurt in trying to achieve that end, no matter any tiny loose-ends of their unfinished carpet still hanging out? It's about them always for they can always control their own environment so that they don't just accept what they don't want to accept. It's them who deserve everything. It's them who will decide when to spin in a few more inches, weave a strand, and design a new pattern on their carpet. They are like fish, in actual fact like most fish species. Politicians are poisonous fish which have a lot of mercury, or phosphorous or melanin. Some fish can even smile at you, so will politicians. If someone wants to deal with us, then it would do no one any good because they won't win. It is these politicians' policy, it's the way they view everything. To these politicians, they are a godinsect particle, a demiurge so they don't take responsibility for their actions. If anyone is interested in fighting for his or her right against us, then better they be more than prepared. For it is going to be a tough out and out war. Tooth and nails, claws and fangs, it's the

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ultimate jungle thing. Death maybe, is the ultimate departing point in this warring, and usually these politicians will win. To them, there are no stages to follow, no chance to others, no walking. Why walk when one might as well run. No to the chameleon's way, no to the tortoise's way for they are silly, bloody lazy animals. Mr. Mazarura, nicknamed "Bones," was in politics for only one reason, power and to use it for his own ends. He was such a huge kiss-ass when it comes to power, or more succinctly, when it comes to power, he was a huge dredge sucking up sand. He was the Defense minister. Did Don and Bones share the same interests of defending people from the murderous humans, from raging maniacs, from the likes of Bones himself? Bones' interests went a lot further. He worked to be the most feared and the most powerful person. He could sweet-talk the birds from the trees to fly down, and come under his protection. The only problem is that these birds would end up roasting, to make a delicious meal, obviously for Bones’ phthisical needs. When he preached, even wild animals would gather, sitting attentively, listening to his wisdom. Bribery, coercion, blackmail, and framing were not vices but aides to achieve his biggest objectives. His biggest weapon was manipulation. Have you ever seen anyone that good; then he has to be second to Bones. In less than four years Bones had moved from an unimportant Rural Councillor's position in the Mudzi area of Mutoko, and then waltzed through the ranks, not because of good performance at the work place. Bones had a way to get around people. He was now the chairman of Jongwe party, the ruling party. He was a powerful leader by himself, and in all

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respects, he was the second to the President. The President was scared shit of him. He was even more powerful than the president and the President knew it was a matter of time or a matter of discretion before he surrendered his head for the chop. He knew if Bones got ahold of that woman whom the president had had that unfortunate affair with, then the president would be history. Bones was master of manipulation, terror, confusion, destruction. Bones had fooled a lot of people with a feigned understanding bearing. He had left a lot of anger, wrath, hurt, pain, tears, sorrows, bitterness, disgust, and disenchantment. He had left a good breeding ground for revenge. A lot of people wanted Bones. Don wanted Bones too. It was for different reasons that he wanted Bones. He was also sure that he was wanted by Bones too, in fact each wanted what the other had, took for granted they could simply have it. As far as Don was concerned it was more than that. It was this form of trying to cutoff this syphilitic cancer that was growing and infesting with sickening rapidity that he wanted Bones. Bones had to go! Bones was now becoming a thorn in the flesh of the good of the country's citizens. He was pollution to society; a god of depravity, a dark vampire, feeding on the moral fibre of the country's citizens. Sick! Insane! It was just that kind of insanity too unbelievably normal but gone to the absolute deep end. Too shocking, and too sickening true, not to be untrue for anyone to disbelieve it altogether. Kill, kill, kill!

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He found that as simple- and as short- as the chime of those words; as pleasurable as watching a half-cut millipede trying to move on its other un-destroyed part. Bones wanted to stomp the whole world, especially its goodness, until what's left was only morasses, sawdust, in wet pulpy form, utter blankness, nothingness, meaningless more meaningful than death. He wanted to take the world by its laurels and throw it into the abyss until kingdom come. For that, Bones simply had to go! It was as simple as that to Don. Thinking about it was as simple as that, but Don knew it was much more complex. How to do it? It was for humanity's sake; that he had come to live for, so for humanity's sake Bones had to go. But he knew how still a difficulty it was? The savage beast never left loose threads dangling, unguarded, or at the mercy of the beckoners coming up triumphant. Bones didn't leave weak spots on his winding networks. What wouldn't one do when they discover that their job was the most worthwhile thing to them? Don't they try to make it all the more satisfying?

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Chapter 4

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What would they do when they discover that their jobs aren't the only most important things to them? Consider the beginnings of this story: They have always thought that they didn't want anyone. With Don, it had been since his parents died when he was a child in a fire disaster. He felt he was not able to love... All those long years of growing up he had slowly seen this himself getting tricked by this other himself that seemed to bless. In the beginning, this himself who blesses would bless but will end up taking everything away from him in exchange. Growing up, the wanderer's need to hoard things had run deeper and furious in him to counteract this himself who blesses and takes everything back. Don thought he could run away from this himself by holding things inside. So that not falling in love became the only practical means by which this hunger to hold things inside, this deep and furious wonderer's greed, this need for perpetual movement, rejection, had fed on. He would see his own life slowly becoming a marvel of reductive engineering, an artful shrinking of a life into one that had no recourse to enjoying ordinary things like falling in love... That was his compass in his inner suffering insides. He had developed a picker for that compass inside him; a trusted Don inside him who knew what was good for Don outside him. That picker would tell him, severally, that falling in love meant that he would only be forced to build homes. And that once he had built those homes, like his mother and father who built a love nest and loved each other to bits, he was

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afraid he would be burned down inside those homes. To him love burns things down into ashes, and so it meant whenever he made those homes, there were just rooms, small dorms of bare essentials, always carrying in them the script of where he had come from. A sparse, spotless room could easily be vacated in case of a fire disaster. This strictly self disciplined way of life had ministered to a need for imminent mobility, which he had taken to be his deeper calling. He would tell himself, I don't want to give up this animal grip on my life that I have developed over the years. And yet, he couldn't will away this feeling of the isolation of the years, as if he had travelled so far…too far. How too far of this too far, how so far was this so far; he wasn't even sure of. To be alone the way he was alone was not his doing, maybe; he couldn't have gone further than his heart had send him on its irregular circulations. It seemed it was always guilt that had spurred him on this road: that he should have died with his own parents. Like incessant winds from all corners of the globe, women would strike upon him from all the directions but never reach the core of his centre. These women would be different like all Adams created by Adam, including Adam himself, but he couldn't feel himself in these women. At other times, and to find his centre in these women, he tried with sober determination, with brute patience, to reconstruct these women into what he wanted them to be, but none could survive him. He could only feel the place they should have been when they were not there with him. And his bigger problem was not to know how to act in women's company which always stopped him, making him carry a weighted tightness in his chest whenever he was with them.

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It was only his cold core that he felt when he was with these women. That snowy core of his centre was always encased in a thick caste of ice to protect him from knowledge and ravages - of the changes of seasons to come- of the attachments that would wreck badly. This core of centre was a thick caste of ice that he knew always becomes a fortress trapping his desires and forbidding entrance of acceptance. He also misguidedly believed that others were building their own castes of ice, like his misplaced belief. The women would eventually figure out he was wasting their time and leave him. But, in the heat of these women's wake, he could hear his life skree skirk-skirk skreeing through countless beds and nameless faces, semen, blood, egg whites. After that he would listen to himself. It was like he was listening to a stranger emoting alone. Not as a confession booth, but still trying to understand that cold core of centre, he would talk to Lillian about all that later. They maybe in the park, or at home, or sleeping, and he knew he had to let it go, that feeling, a foreboding feeling that everything might return back to the way it was before he met her. It is this feeling he constantly fought against, even sometimes when he was with Lillian. "Losing is what I don't want to experience again, Lillian." He sometimes put that feeling into these words. Lillian knew what he meant with all that. She knew the feelings, she loved him and when you love someone you will understand. Sometimes she would assure him that she was going to be there, for forever but sometimes she knew she didn't have any control over that, but could only be there for him, only then.

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She would tell him that tomorrow had to come first before they live through it. She knew talking things out was helping him dealing with some of these things inside him. So that, most of the times, the best she could do was listening to him. Don would tell Lillian that he had loved his parents with all that was inside him but that they had died. That when he came to love it at the orphanage; it too had gone away. In his silent moments, he would admit to himself the depth of all that had happened to him. In those dark deep worlds he would think of his heart, even now as he reclined on the bed still wrestling with his life, as still vaguely valentine in shape. It appeared to his inner eye as a malformed thing. Fatty, smoothly and glossy on the side that gives love, wizened in wrinkles and festering with boils, lesions, and abscesses on the side that might accept love. He thought; he sometimes wondered which was worse, the size of his heart or the condition of his heart or even the unfathomable abyss in which it hang over his life and happiness. Fighting against affections, afraid that someone might tag him and abandon him again like what his parents did to him. And when a steady affair was on the cards, it had to be torn-off before anyone was obvious of it..., being there. And he would tell Lillian, sometimes lightly. "Until you came through, I just didn't need anyone. I had given up hope of ever sustaining a keepsake affair." He knew he wasn't even trying anymore when he met Lillian but couldn't help himself… Though deeply he had felt something, he disdained its voices; he told himself it was just a fling until he reckoned it was much more than that.

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Until he recognized that all those years he thought he had given up on love, rather he had been functioning at a subconscious level. He was in search, in constant pursuit of something, puzzled to try to understand how, and why? The things inside him were much more complex than he had thought. Why they were like the subtler workings of hunger and want, the different painful worlds emptied out by the two, and he was always living in the worlds between the two. Living between an empty gnawing way beneath the ribs and a dull ache numbing the soul, never knowing when someone would force their way into his rabbit's hole between the walls of those two worlds. "Was I still that way when Lillian came into my life", Don would question himself, later; "resisting affections, even now, windward, wayward- free as a falcon?" He would tell himself, "God, I knew, even then, I thought, I needed to take risks, plumb emotional depths, and explore the frightening dark along with the uplifting light like I am doing right now with Lillian". It depended on the tide and flow of the river, the sea's swell and waves on the beach. Sometimes the river deposited metal wreckages, ropes, stones and all unusual kinds of things. Sometimes the sea emptied on the beach, seaweed, baby-crabs, mussel shells… He just collected most of these things and kept them. How precious was this accumulation of clutter and habits, a tic, the old smile coming out, a structure of standing grudges, not knowing the radiant luck of a simple day in all that...? In fact he just felt like doing that but one day he woke up to discover that he had worked out what all that really meant to him. He felt he didn't need to do that anymore or to keep all that detritus with

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him because something else had supplanted all these sad peculiar activities. He discovered that he was in love. That, being in love; felt so beautiful! He didn't want to run away from it, if anything, really? He could have danced a storm with the joy of knowing, that at last, he really, truly...and madly, loved someone, a million prismatic versions of his love for her. He could have climbed ridges, highlands, rooftops, hilltops, mountains, and belt out; his lungs out until he was hoarse or until he could hardly be heard anymore. Not to be outdone by the songbirds, he could have sung about his love for Lillian, competing fiercely in opposition to the Cicada's silver-wire fluting until he had silenced that songbird. He could have scribbled pages and pages like a mad poet about his love of her until every imaginable superlative had been wrung out of him. Until the pen runs dry, until they took away all his papers and pens and maybe; lock him up in the asylum! Even at that, he could have written it in his heart like stars in black winter night skies, and what's more... He lived it!

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Chapter 5

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He met Lillian a year and half before, one cold and wet July morning in a coffee place in Leopold Takawira Street, in downtown Harare. They were at the counter at the same time. There was this new waiter. She was deathly so slow in serving them their coffees. What started out as an attempt at commiserating with the new waiter and with each other ended up with the two sharing the same table? They decided to share company, trying to tie that moment to a stake, as if they knew each other from long before. They were two strangers trying to connect, with a cup of coffee in their hands, her sweet sincere face begging for conversation. He couldn't help noticing that she was a very pretty girl. She was 5'8, sweet, sweetly built, ebulliently rosy. She had a schoolgirl's form, laughing flowers for eyes, beautiful smile… She had broken hearts where she had come from. She wore an emerald green summer dress with a floral pattern, with just the right splashes of yellow. Though he was wary and past caring for that kind of human contact he could relate to her easily. He felt instantly the real and raw need for a woman, the company of a woman. It was as if he had locked his heart upon the moment she was born. "So, where are you from?" He asked her that tentative coffee date question when they had settled down, on brown oak chairs and a round oak table. She replied him.

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"I am staying in the avenues area, at a flat in Fife Avenue." Just a wheel down the kopje hill area where I stayed, he thought to himself. "In the same neck of the woods with me", someone might have said, and he keeps going on and on about this, in these thoughts infested stays in their flat, as if he could find answers why she came into his life at that moment. "I am Lillian, Lillian Chenhamo." She offered her fragile hand, and he encased it in his huge paws, and said. "Lillian, I like it." He took a shallow broken breath, and then introduced himself. "Don", and finished off, "Don is my name, I am Donald Muchadura, but people just call me, Don, you see..." She was smiling sweetly, shyly. He had kept her hand encased in his hand a little longer. He let go as if a bee had stunk his hand, and felt foolish like a little boy with the sweet little girl he likes a lot. So they talked inside the measurable space of this coffee house, but inside the measurable immeasurable globe of lives. Then, he hadn't told himself he was chasing a metaphor for the reaches of her heart. The waiters were floating around with trays of tea things, the bustling suites, warned faces, dry from morning shower or shave. The glistening faces; wet faces, wet clothing, wet umbrellas, and the smell of winter rain mixing perfectly with the smell of coffeethe smell of tea and fraying bacon, the smell of cinnamon of baking bread and other confectionary things. Smart dresses and the commanding roar of traffic passing through Leopold Takawira Street. The incessant soft drown of people talking!

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Sometimes she just smiled into her cup of coffee, white teeth arranged neatly like sailors parading on deck. Don was dazzled by the lighting strike of Lillian's smiles. Sometimes, her shapely face dissolved into a knowing smile; her face full of warmth and the rush of blood into his stomach, growing into a ringed thing inside his belly. Some other times she just stared into her coffee. Other times she shook her cup a little bit, took a gulp, and folded her hands around the cup in order to extract warmth for her cold fingers. In between all that, they talked and enjoyed each other's company. "So, what are you doing for the rest of the day?" It was a bit later. She sat her cup down. Her lips were glowing honey and moist with the hot coffee. "It’s my father's birthday tomorrow. He turns fifty. I want to get him a present." "What are you planning at getting him?" "He loves woolly things, so I am going to get him a sweater." Don gazed her squarely in the eyes while Lillian regarded him sweetly with those keen brown eyes. Her eyes reflected a different history to his. Some soft singing opera arias drifted through to them. Cello like boned combs, tones of a harpsichord that doubled up as a trumpet, the viola, the violin, all exposing the intricacies as no more than a resonating dish. Don leaned closer as if to hear the music, and so closer to her, he could smell her musky; sandalwood scent, rain and soap. "I am not holding you, am I?" He asked her. "No, you are not; I have a lot of time on my hands today." "Could I help you doing the shopping, or just accompanying you?" She didn't think much about that before she said.

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"Ok, I like that", and smiled shyly. So after paying for their coffees, he accompanied her. He loitered with her through the still densely populated late morning streets. Around them surged the late morning Human Ocean; bicycle shoals, lorry whales, cars and posters. In some places the roasted scent of coffee impassioned the morning air. He wasn't giving Lillian a lot of help as such in choosing the sweater. He just wanted to be with her, to spend some more time with her, to keep the feeling, to enjoy something clean and outdoorsy like the morning air. They talked. She told him a bit about her father and mother. How lucky she was to have those kinds of parents. He told her she was lucky. He didn't tell her anything much about himself- his family. He only told her that they had died a long time before, but wasn't ready to tell her how they died. That his parents had left his life, leaving without a parting nod. That he still regretted that they had not been made more a part of him as he was made a part of them. But mostly, it was the waste of never really getting to know them, of the years they could have spent nursing him to growth that he regretted. Relatives were not helpful; in fact, no one wanted him in their homes. Uncle, his father's older brother refused to have him. To this uncle he was going to be an expense, an unnecessary one for that matter. Talk of his father's wealth then it wasn't expensive for him to claim it. In actual fact it was his God-given right to take everything, surprising though, it wasn't his obligation to raise him. His entire father's family also refused to have him. If they couldn't have his father's wealth, they couldn't have him, too!

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After all, what would he really have done since he wasn't sure of who killed his parents? He hadn't seen the person, neither the police had found the culprit, but he knew, he was now so sure, someone had been behind it. In fact what would a six-year-old have done? He had heard someone coughing in the dead of the night. He couldn't have gone out. No, he couldn't have because he thought that it was his father who was coughing. Consider; his father had this one-hell-of-a-bout-of-coughing. When it attacked him it could take eternities to subside, sometimes he would get outside for fresh air. Back then, he couldn't have thought of that cough being odd and unlike his father's, though it was. His father's cough was much longer and deeper. Years later he has come to believe it really was someone else who was coughing. Gossip was of the opinion that it had all been that Uncle's doing, that Uncle who had rejected him but took everything of his father's wealth. How could he have confronted him? That uncle, on the funeral day, had shown a brilliant sequence of on-the-toe Pointe work throughout the day as he directed his funeral. He called it his funeral. Traditionally, it was his funeral. Uncle had executed each hand clasp and embrace with staggering grace and talent. He had made everyone wait on him. Told everyone to have a seat, and that he will be, would be with them in just awhile, as soon as he had finished parting the red sea! Don used to think it was a blooded sea, that the Red sea was a red colour, like blood. After all why would they call it a red sea… if it wasn't for that colour? Only a child breaking in with droll demands still remembers all the curiosities he had to shut away.

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The day of burial of his parents had sulked with midwinter chill. Yet, the following day had brought smacks of thunder, flaunts of lightening and bands of rain that rammed and splattered the doors and windows. The people had stayed inside as they fought over who should have the rest of his parents' properties and wealth that hadn't been burned. A couple of days later, some distant relative took him to Runyararo children's home, in Harare, at the place where little children's broken hearts could be patched and find peace. That was the last he saw of his birth place, the horizons had lost an eternity, trailed blind-ending. He was raised at Runyararo until when he was ten. His worse memories of that time at the orphanage were of the first few months he got beatings from the older kids at this orphanage, of the hard cold beds, and later, of inadequate food as the orphanage struggled to feed them. The orphanage had later on closed. It couldn't have them anymore because it didn't have the monies to raise them up. A lot of people were hardly surviving. Don was adopted by a sick old man in the Budiriro area, in South Western Harare, where he did the rest of his growing up. This foster parent was one of those sorts of old farts who were always inherently abusive. He would tell you to do something, wouldn't want to listen to you commenting or saying anything against it. Yet when things don't go right he would blame you and accuse you of doing something he hadn't told you to do. He was that sort of old farts who would always be shouting, scolding and heaping abusive and derogatory words on others, as if they enjoy seeing them bending to the whimsies of their hate-filled words.

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Even when I was trying all my best, even when I was doing the correct thing; as if I had come to be there in opposition to the dictates of good reasoning, against everyone else's arguments..., in argument with existence! For some time it simply had been easier for Don to believe he really displeased his foster parent. Later, he realized that it was simply his nature, that deep down he might have cared, but had issues on how to show it. Lucky though, Don put up with him during the holidays, which wasn't as bad as having to put up with him permanently. School days, he was at a boarding school, at Chinhoyi high school, in the Mashonaland West province. He had grown up a boy of wounded resignation, seeing his shadow only, but as a little boy, he had assumed his life was the language one learned until the words were no different than their tongue. It still was the language he was learning until the words were no different than his tongue when he met Lillian.

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Chapter 6

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And so it seemed, something had been awake beyond the ridge. Something he hadn't cared enough to see before- something that had him, all along, in its treads. Looking back at all those years, he knew he could see just how wrong he was about many things. Back then, he was simply a stupid child stepping away from his own size, crushing the sound of his own heaven. There are several ways in which different people trample their own heaven. Each one has his own way of doing it. On the way to doing that one could lose his way. What had started out as an honourable thing ends up a despicable thing. Bones had started out well as a rural councillor but had become too big for his shoes, so he had been trampling his own heaven. Through getting headway, politically, by deplorable despicable means, he had been trampling other people's heavens. He had also put a lot of weight on the way, and was ballooning out. As he was coming closer to where Don was with Lillian, on a bench in the park, he looked like he could sort-of fly off, like a balloon. Fortunately for him, he was a heavy earthly bound balloon, walking slowly, almost treading. He was alone on this day. When he was a couple of paces near Don, he cleared his throat, gutturally, in order to draw Don’s attention. Don had already seen him but had been ignoring him as he came. Don continued to studiously ignore him, even when he could feel his husk.

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Lillian was asleep in Don’s arms; she was dozing in the beautiful sun. When Bones realised he was being ignored, he rumbled insidiously, interjecting against the silence of this park, he said. "Don, we have to conclude that other matter. I need some information on our respected leader…, as you are well aware of the presidential election that's just around the corner..." Bones, with the full weight of a ballooning stomach, already being disowned by his size, crushing the sound of other people's heaven, and Don cut him off, sarcastically. "So, it's time we stitch up a few holes on our garment, hey!" He cussed softly and he knew the irony in his replies would evade Bones. Or Bones would think he was doing that not to wake up Lillian from her slumber, or Bones would simply ignore it anyway. A few holes! A person's life! A life of the nation! All that had to be sacrificed in order for Bones to stitch up his own garment, to sound his own heaven, and it was like him. Very true to form, everyone comes second. In so doing, Bones was always busy furthering his nest so that they won't ease him out. He was always as base as the day was long. In his hubristic inner heights, Bones liked to think of people as being manufactured, coming from the factory pristine and being shaped by life, for better for worse. He thought of himself as one of the shapers, the crafters, the predator improving the stock, politically improving the stocks for a larger altruistic goal. He was that goal. Don couldn't have played that kind of dirty poker with him even if Bones were to promise the world to him. He didn't even consider himself a politician, to begin with.

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"I am sure you know I don't have the information you are asking for, Bones." He replied Bones politely, rejecting the insinuations in his statement, that he knew there was such information. Even though Don knew Bones knew his involvement in the situation, he couldn't have given out such information. "Come on Don, haven't we been some good friends. I expect you are the only person who can help me with the information I want." Like hell! And, Bones couldn't let it go, but continued pushing, pulling him into his heaven. "You know what Don, after the election, which I would have won with your help, I would be helpful to you too. I would like to offer you the security portfolio..." He left that statement, the promise, hanging attractively. Yet for all its attraction, it was rank rotten madness at its unprecedented showing. And then, without even waiting for Don’s replies, Bones started on his way away. Don couldn't have asked his departing frame whether Satan had ever given anyone a foothold in his kingdom. Being core leader to the Devil was better than to Bones because with the devil one knows where one stands. With Bones, he would promise a heaven yet it would be in a hell's despite. The heaven won't hold form when one enters it. It's hellish like the devil's hell yet he had promised better things. "How in hell's ice cold hotness could I ever be a Minister?" That suggestion smacked of something, of someone gone maniac. Don thought as he stared at the departing frame of Bones. It showed a depraved mind at work. But he couldn't have told him that, though, he could only have replied Bones apologetically,

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regrettably, as if he was kicking himself where it hurts most for the lost chance of being a minister. Later, Bones had phoned him, a couple more times looking for the information, and at another time he had wrote a dark threatening note. The note was brought over to Don by Mosquito. It seemed Bones was getting insufferable and desperate with every new day. Desperation can get to be very destructive if one gets to the brink. On another day, it was a Monday, late afternoon. Don was with Lillian in the park again. They were relaxing under a patchy blue southern sky. Lillian was wearing a flowery blouse with pink accents, green vines carving in repeating patterns and a deep purple skirt. She looked so beautiful- like a blooming flower. The sun lanced this southern sky softly and flotillas of clouds scooned the edges of the sky. Now and then he could slip away from work to spend some couple of hours with Lillian, mostly at his place or in the park. They were also making arrangements to their wedding which was to be by the start of the month of December. It was early the month of November. It was their first time. He didn't want it to go pear shaped. They had to be sure of what they were doing. They were discussing on whom to invite and Don was so set against the wedding becoming a public feature. He had a few work friends to invite; Johns, Laura, and the Doctor. Lillian had her family, relatives, friends and colleagues. The number was getting too large for his liking. They were pleasantly arguing about this when, from out of the blue, Bones barged into their conversation, as if he was more welcome.

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"Don, don't forget to invite me, too." He was shocked. Bones usually was a grim man, hard as jerked buffalo meat but he was so casual, almost groaning, whistling, roaring and booing casually… He stood there; smiling invitingly, like a beautiful savage animal, waiting..., with hands folded into his trousers pockets, unhurried. His colossal idiocy growing on his roars, boors, whistles, growls. How and why, on God's beautiful green earth, does this psychopath have the audacity to ask for an invitation? Why, in heaven's name, should he just barge into other people's private conversation? Talking of one's right to privacy then you are as good as talking of his right to know your very privacy. He just couldn't say a single word to Bones. This time Bones was with Mosquito and Pig. These two, Mosquito and Pig, had stayed a bit of some distance away, but within hearing range. These were not really their names, but they were known by those names by a lot of people. Mosquito, sticky thing like a mosquito, had a biting punch like that of the mosquito, and could fell giants with his malaria infested stink. Pig was always dirty, and smelly of marijuana smoke. The two looked on, bored. Their jobs were not to threaten Don, but to do much more than that. Power talk, or play talk, was the sole work of Bones, and he got into it as he said. "You know what Don, you are making me desperate. It's not a good thing for you to be doing that, you know that." His voice rolling through like a train, his mind seemed incarnated in his beard which bobbed whenever he spoke. Bountiful and greying, it couldn't totally cover up callow cheeks and eyes left over from a younger era. "But what good could he, of all the people, know? What constitute good to him? Was being a thorn in the flesh of others

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good?" Don could only ask himself, as he bunched and released his fists. The look in Bones wrecked more in him than the speeches. Bones was now looking at Lillian as if he was saying, with his eyes. "You know what babe, we might really get something nicer and cosier going on between us, maybe in another time and place when we will be alone." Then, a white smile hacked through Bones' hairy mouth. The eyes Don threw at Bones were so sharp that he felt them cut right through Bones' eyes, right down to where his throat met his chest. Bones momentarily closed the smile only to re-open it again, sarcastically. He was rowed. He wanted to kick Bones. He felt like pounding Bones into smithereens. Bones was a rot, and he was so hot. Lillian knowing how he felt, what he was about to do, reined him in. "Please don’t, Don." "Why not?" Don thundered. He had always been a stubborn Billy-goat so he wasn't going to let it go that easy. "Please!" Lillian smiled at him and held him with her summer's stained smile of hope. Lillian was always committed to changing his mood, choosing the sweet face for this occasion; with a matching voice, she squeezed his hand in an assuring and dissuading way. "Please, Don?" They could really have palled around some with Bones if Lillian wasn't there. But now, he couldn't help cooling down, particularly, he didn't want to lose his temper, especially not to Bones. He looked at Bones, watching him the way one would watch a black snake moving through the grass. And then, in a

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slurring sarcastically dangerous voice, with a sullen glance, a glare in his displaced eyes, Bones threatened. "You have a good girl there Don and I don't love seeing anything horrible happening to her, you know." Bones' voice had changed; there was dark sunlight in it. His tone indicated that Lillian deserved something, not only some form of punishment but something horrible. Don couldn't explode so he bottled his response because he was living so close. He also knew he could come back after he had thought about things, so he pretended a dignified expression. Bones strode away unconcerned of Don’s smouldering anger, with those two bastards, Mosquito and Pig. Don’s discord with Bones shaped the rest of that Monday afternoon for him into yet another that he wanted to plunk into the garbage bag and be put out on the roadsides for the Tuesday pick up. Recently, Bones was being seen with those two bad lots, a lot many times. Those two, Mosquito and Pig, knew how to screw a person and Don recognised those two operating in the realms of the godhood, and like red troops they danced an orgy, leaving behind the dead. He knew them well; what's more, he had crossed upon them a couple of times. At one time he had pinned them in connection with the murder of the then Defence minister but everything had been hushed down. Before the case was heard at the courts they had been released scotch free as if they hadn't done anything to warrant the arrest in the first place, and a reprimand for Don was the cherish to garnish the top. Another time he had came across them beating a certain guy at the Pub. All of a sudden they stopped, and gave him this cynical smile as if they were saying.

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"Hey man, it's too bad you are up against us." And Don glimpsed something, half remembered it, a word of warning sat on their cynical smiles, without structure or meaning. They were dangerous animals: he could have fallen into their shadows and be torn into limb by limb. He had learned better to avoid some battles, so he left them alone. When they realised that he shied away from a fight, they snickered at him, provokingly. And then, they had strolled off like two male dogs that are infinitely happy they have finally attracted the attention of a bitchy she-dog. He left them alone but he wasn't through with them, yet. Now, everything was getting out of hand. Bones had openly threatened his girlfriend and the reason why Bones was now threatening him publicly was because he had failed privately. Don couldn't have reported him to his superiors because if his superiors came to know that some information had leaked even though nothing of that sort could have happened. That such information in the wrong hands was dangerous, in fact, Bones knowing that there was such information was enough to do him in. If Bones became aware of the location of the women he would terrify her enough into disclosing all the details of her illicit affair with a married man. That man being the President; he would be done there and then. Peace and harmony would have gone and then in would come anarchy, maniacism, corruption and every form of thuggery and infringement of people's rights. He must not know anything, not from him. Don had rushed everything the day that woman who had had that affair with the president, started threatening the President

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with a disclosure. He went to her rented house in Borrowdale, Harare's exclusively rich northern suburb, and struck a deal with her. She was to receive 5 million dollars if she accepted being hidden where no one else knew of. He also changed her name, as well. She had to say not even a single word about the affair. How Bones came to know of it was and still remained a mystery. As he was boarding his flight to the Netherlands with that woman, Don was surprised to see Bones there at the airport with his two friends. Bones, with a stomach as big and as round as he still remembered of it, that day it looked like an over-inflated balloon, approached Don to within some few paces and just watched him on. He hadn't zipped his jacket for it couldn't have fitted around him anyway. Mosquito was there too, sticky-thin like some twerp in his late teens, had bright red suspenders. He pulled at them like they were horse's reins. Don thought Mosquito should be saying, "giddy up, now." Pig was also there too, stinky smelly, was of a muscular built, always drugging a marijuana cigarette; one would almost think his mouth was a permanent fire place. The three men had serious eyes, laced with devilment, and they regarded Don with a question mark. That way they became aware of his involvement. He could have tried another way out or he could have boarded a late afternoon flight. Bones couldn't have been suspicious. Yet, he had succeeded in doing a dump act on Bones. He disembarked from his flight in London and took another one to Johannesburg. From there onwards Don and the woman made their way to Mozambique by road. Bones still thought she was in the Netherlands. He was sure Bones had combed for her in the Dutch land..., searching.

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He knew he still had those few days, weeks, months maybe, maybe until the elections were well over in three months time to find a lasting solution to Bones' threat. He had to buy time. He had to play around with time. He had to play around with Bones until he had discovered a way to solve that nag, once and for all. He had become a threat to Don’s happiness, too. That's why he had to go before he lost everything that he cared for deeply again. Even on those days when the Bones would come threatening Don, Lillian wasn't afraid of the Bones. She would show Don that there was always that un-fearful natural innocence in her. That she seemed like the lake at the park, especially when it was so serene at dawn, no rushing, no running, just a constant. She had so much faith in humanity! Her faith in humanity was as complete as a child's faith in life. Faith in other people was her greatest virtue. I have always seen belief from her on things that I disbelieved, heavily. Wonderment was the sole day's wonder with him. She was the type of person who gives the feeling that there was so much good in some people when others have little or nothing to show; and that these people are always good even in situations where their very safety is under threat. She would sometimes tease his seriousness with a, "why young Don?" She would baby him, "It can't be as bad as that, babe." Sometimes, he wished he could have run into her like two drops of tears that have ran into each other and dissolve all those nagging unbelieving "Thomases" that he always had in things. There were those days in his life when he felt a preternatural urge to go the very bad way and felt the whole world should simply do likewise: he is blue- a deep compulsive sky blue. He

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just felt like doing that very thing that he always wanted to do but couldn't have done just because it was incredibly irresponsible for him to be doing that. He just felt like taking the green colour out of the rainbow's colours. Dapple this sky blue feeling in him with this rainbow green colour into a lighter and finer shed and mood. He felt down and low... The world didn't appear the way he wanted it to appear. Rather it clung on things he loved most in a disgustingly brilliant yellow-urine, peori shed. Those moods were not foreign to Don, in actual fact he was a moody-one. When its darkest parts enveloped him he got so alone, so far away, like the stars. It's as if he was walking on top of the clouds in his quest to reach the unfathomable dimensions of his imaginations. Nothing reached him. He also didn't seem to reach anything yet he felt so satisfied, so engrossed, and so closer to being him than ever. He was not able to share it. There was no space for anyone else no matter how closer they were to him. Those moods got between them now and then yet Lillian never complained, talked or sort of suggested something or another on how badly he was behaving. It was that understanding that always booted the hell out of him. It left him with a lot of questions on his palette than answers to colour them some. He always failed to grasp how she had come to know so much about him, about how he felt, and treated him the very way he wanted to be treated. Interminably, Lillian seemed to possess and vibrate, as far, unusual confidence, unrestrained affections and warmy intimacy, and was the embodiment of a divine piety, chastity, and goodness. Did Don understand this girl, apparently not? Did he

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love her? Don had come to love Lillian more than he could ever loved, indeed, she was now a necessity bestowed with unbelievable trusty. In that year and half they had come to know of each other she had become the bloom of his private garden, flowery like their back garden. Like the votive soft tenderness of a rose- she excited his mind, heart and senses. Brimming with energy like the radiance of the geranium; she encouraged an unguarded display of motivation, vitality, passion and spontaneity. With the coolness of the quiet glow of a nicotiana; she eased his sorrows and inspired a sense of freedom. And with the pure pinkness and white serenity of the rhododendron, she prompted co-operation and brought harmony and balance into his life.

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Chapter 7

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And, in that flowery garden, in the back of their flat, Azealous and Bougainvillea were blooming scarlet, orange and pink? Not to be outdone in this joyous celebration, a couple of fruit trees, the orange and mango trees, in the middle of this back garden, were choreographing dancing and nodding in a bounty of energy. The scent of jacaranda mobbed the air, as the wind excelled in tantrumatic behaviour. Bones had been sitting and standing restlessly for hours, sitting, pacing, and lying across two or three hard oak chairs, waiting, waiting, and waiting… for Lillian. Some other times he thought he could be better off somewhere like at a shrine or church where waiting might feel like it meant something spiritual. He would open creaking stiff shutters, sprouting flowers drowsy in the bracing windy air. The window panes were drunk with light. Sometimes he breathed on the window pane, and then he would wipe the huff off the smeared window-glass with his fingertips. Then the phone rang! It was the thing he had been waiting for. When he answered it, Bones' voice bombed the receiver straightaway, with a simple statement. "Do you hear me Don, it's over now?" It was a quite, casual, matter-of-fact voice as if Bones was stating future weather predictions, as if he was saying it was going to be a dark cloudy windy day. It was a windy day, with some drifting cloud groups in the skies. "What was over now?" He couldn't help asking himself, "Was he just stating facts as such?"

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Stating facts! A cold day, a hard day and maybe more... Maybe the two were simply galloping towards a summer war. The few symptoms of such a war: misplaced; carefully misplaced... placed in adding to, ironically, a feeling of displacement inside him. The sky above was a traffic jam, slopping to the west with cloud banks. One cloud bank was stilling, one was travelling like panic across the western sky. And the western sky was sometimes accelerating then braking, like a found moment. To the north, the northern skies was with intermittent light, platinum white and to the east the skies sloped, one corner seemed slashed by the act of vermilion. Don was sited by the window on an oak chair he had dragged there. "What wind was that, high in the jacaranda trees, a sound as of lamentation?" That wind, a strong easterly wind, was fraying and slashing apart the hulking giants of the jacaranda trees that were a perimeter around the fence boundary of their flat. These jacaranda trees were creating lyrics into the wind, the wind seemed to be wailing the bad times in, un-solving the wind's waves, gun-metal waves into perfect rows ahead, sounding, deepsounding, like guttural Germanic low-brow vernacular's vowels. There was definitely something deep and secretly awake in this blustery wind, like the sound that begun to rumble through Don with Bones' statement that everything was over between them. Behind that wind, so also fear was hiding, sniffing at Don but the fear still obeyed him. "What is over now, Bones?" Don asked Bones in a terrified, submerged voice. He asked Bones that question in a voice now aware, as if for the first time, that all this perpetuity in his statement could never really be reined in but rather that he might

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as well wait and wonder or bellow aloud like a ghastly butchered emptiness. He said, "What is over now, Bones", did I really say it? He said that in a voice aware that he might as well hope for the best but that he could only do that at his absolute mortal mortality. The world around him simply seemed darker now, and confused, its outlines harder to define. "We are done with everything and, Don...," He was so slow, as if he was sipping into the sweetness of every of his words, Don couldn't help musing. "Yes" He could only breathe the reply, now quiet with trepidation of what was really over with Bones. Already, he could feel some tiny-icy spasms of fear bolting his intestines into an intricate inter-twinning of cooked spongy spaghetti. And an inner wind was dispassionately stirring this soft sponge round and about into a cold cauldron of ambitionless leap and fall. This cold cauldron was prompting things, things like feeling uniquely aware of movements of scrawny parasitic bugs in his bowels, things like being aware of his bone marrows being chewed endlessly into hollow worlds of encyclical hopes and obliterated ambitions. And…, Bones was still speaking. "…we have a present for you, Don. Walk down through your road and turn left into the park; you know the place I am talking of. Please get there and you will find it." His words seemed round with satisfaction, but Bones' usual humour, its cutting edge abrasive, like a serrated tip of a dinner knife stayed. "I am so glad I have been so thoughtful as not to forget giving you a Christmas present. You are bound to like this one, hell-a-lot and anyway, happy Christmas, Don." It was Bones, still with that confrontational sense of humour!

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And that vague uneasiness he had all along began to crystallize into something. That day he had woken up with an unfamiliar burning hollowness in his heart. It had been the limp that he had carried with him from the time he awoke, throughout the whole morning and afternoon and it was evening. Don’s heart started pounding furiously but he didn't dare say the thing that was in his heart all along, the thing that he knew Bones had been talking of. "But a Christmas present… That's unbelievable!" Everything seemed to be unbelievable; a present from that savage beast, of all the people, just thinking of it, a Christmas' present from Bones and what could that present be? He asked himself, no answers forthcoming. He had been thinking of spending a quite two-some Christmas holiday, especially after their overly publicised wedding. He needed time to get used to their vastly changing type of life that they now had. He wanted it to be one Christmas holiday that he wouldn't especially forget in the coming years. Lillian had gone out to buy him a present. She said she wanted it to be a surprise gift and that he would like it very much. What was that other present? He couldn't help feeling something had gone awry. Why would Bones, of all the people, be giving me a present? Why would he leave it at the park? He knew that park as of always beautiful days, and it had taken time for this place to mark itself as a rule. In the park, Don and Lillian would mostly be sited on the concrete bench, sighting some branch of the Mukuvisi River. The sun making it morphs into different colours. This branch of the Mukuvisi River was a frail line parting the greens, running through the park, edges heavy with traps. It emptied into a lake at

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the southern tip of the park. Here and there, there were sombre enclaves of the darkest greens, pliable balsam, and prickly no nonsense spruce clothing the edges of this river. The river' symbolic run a little bit faint in the spring time; as the spring's air carry the calls of the hooded warbler and ovenbird. But now, he asked himself, "What is at the park that he wants me to see, a present?" Why would he now shy away from an opportunity to nag me some more? Bones I knew couldn't have let go such a God-blessed opportunity, because to him, such opportunities have always come once in a life-time. He had always been equal to them and their challenges. "Why was he avoiding me now, what present was at the park?" He kept asking himself as he kept the receiver on the ears, even though Bones had since cut the call. "Deep down, naturally, I am the suspicious, intuitive sort!" He told himself, and continued with this one man conversation. "And for as long as I have functioned around this double consciousness I have also attempted to locate and surround myself with a feeling of connection to what I produce." He knew his life and job had taught him to be that; to be anticipative of things not really going the way they should go or the way he wanted them to go. To have that sixth instinctive sense; a gut feeling, a trace of the chameleon's blood... It might have been just that small mote of unsatisfaction with an assured thing or a belief in things having another unexplored edge. It could be that feeling that makes one to start having questions, doubts and sometimes forebodings of disquiet. It had always been to his deepest conviction that nothing ever comes out in its wholeness. He had always been equal to their limiting aspects.

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He started really getting worked up; overwhelmed, asking himself where Lillian might be for she had gone out a good seven hours. She should have been back but why he should have worried, he didn't know. Maybe she was at one or two of her friends' places or at her family's place or maybe she might be giving out Christmas gifts and had forgotten to tell him she would be late in. He assured himself. He could suggest this and that to assure himself..., all the maybes that he could think of; yet there was that feeling. Could he really therefore attempt this difficult task of conceiving a vivid picture of the feeling with which he was now almost acquainted with? Here is the picture. It seemed like he was at an island in the middle of the vast Atlantic. Was it the majestic Pacific Ocean? He didn't know, but he was there in the middle of this ocean of water. He was the Ben Gunn of the Treasure Island. He was waiting rescuing, was he? But the ocean's waters were rising. It was this foreboding feeling that he had about the ocean's rising waters as he still sat on the chair, holding the receiver. In his mind this was happening. It was possible due to maybe, global warming and moreover, it was raining some real hard on this island. It was raining hard on top of him. At one point he looked for and camped at the highest point on this island but the waters were still rising. They had basically covered all the low lying parts of this island. In another week the highland that he had as shelter from the rising water was nearly covered but he still had some few more days to spare. He told himself, "I am sheltered at the furthest part of the tallest tree." This chair he had been sitting on top of was now tall, a very tall tree of this island. Days that there were to

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spare, the waters were rising, there were at his breast level…,and, of-course, he couldn't really have thought of swimming across this vast swirling metamorphosis until he reached safety because it was unquestionably out of context here. This was the picture of the feeling that was raging in him as he sat on the chair, holding onto the receiver. Needless to say, it was an aptly irreversible conclusion, in effect; there was no talking your way out of it. Don smacked the receiver back into its handle. He left the doors of their flat apartment unlocked and rushed, run, sprinted… for the park. It was this feeling in him that he had to get there as soon as possible. He was flying on his way to the park. He was tripping, he was running hard, it was not even running that he felt he was doing. He didn't even feel himself running. He couldn't flag for a taxi to take him to the park, no. He was faster than a car, he had to keep in motion, running. He had to keep sprinting or he would be drowned down by the waters of that Atlantic Ocean surrounding him. He just couldn't stop. He knew Lillian was waiting for him there, there at the park. He simply had to be where she was.

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Chapter 8

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"Why though -those darks- are they blood, those broken flowers, and grass?" He was still tripling, falling, running… as fast as he deeps into the park. The bench right across him; and a bit of some distance, was the unmistakable greens of Lillian's clothing and shape. Even though it was darkening with the evening's deep dusk, there was no doubt in his mind. That, the earthquake was exploding in the region of his heart, lungs, and stomach. It kept rising and trembling through all his limbs, eyes, toes and fingers. He had found her, he had found Bones' present. He felt the cold ache seize his heart with the tidal pull of the years' inevitable aches as he stood transfixed, stopped. He didn't even know which part of Lillian he first saw. "Is it the head that is detached from the rest of the body or the rest of her carcass?" He didn't know the answer only what it was reminding him of. This image reminded him of a chicken that had been cut into two parts, now awaiting the removal of feathers and the dissection of the insides. He looked up to the skies, looking for, searching for answers, a sign. The sky was now frayed by several darker cloud groups, and the birds up very tall park trees looked like stains, dark stains, like splotches of imperfection, quivering down the trees, clicking their beaks. These birds are still trying to find courage to fly down from their high attitude to have a feeding on the abundant food down their elevated world. After all, it was always a feeding world. When he looked at her again he felt his own body neighs out to her, he felt something changing inside him that could never be unchanged again. A thought settles down in his mind, I would never

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be the same again without knowing why, and of course, he was still breathing, his breathe soloing life into some beat. He couldn't speak, he couldn't even whisper, he had found her behind their favourite concrete and cement bench. Her, lying so naturally as if she belongs there with eyes shut wide-open and a face as innocent as if nothing is the matter! She was ruined but silent as if death was nothing more than a yawn, a blink, death knocked hard on Don. Seeing Lillian dead made him realise death was a small space similar to the space underneath the concrete bench and how it had always been fear, not lack of strength, why he hadn't fought back all those years. He didn't collapse, rather he told himself, in fact he didn't tell himself, but he just couldn't collapse because Lillian was talking to him. She seemed to be saying to him. "Hey, Don, if you don't want to turn in that's fine with me but I am turning in. I am waiting for you." Waiting for me, hey! "Which part of you is waiting for me, Lillian?" He asked her. She seemed not to even be seeing the deep wide chasm that now separated them. He couldn't cross over, for it needed filling up and it wasn't raining. He couldn't even join those two parts together to make Lillian whole again. He also knew if he were to step away, there between him and Lillian would be that welltrodden path with the same cracks that neither the two was willing to stand on. So he held her where she slept, where the rest of her body lied ruined as his eyes surveys her cut head a few paces off. Lillian's eyes were wide awake as if she had to be quick enough to take a snapshot of the trees around the bench, and the

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lawn-covered grounds. Are the trees about to flirt away? Her beautiful full lips were forced open, settled into some expression she wouldn't like if she was to wake up. Lillian's thoughts were imbued and her senses trimmed the scenes in coded messages like the words trapped on her mouth. In her mouth was still stuffed a handkerchief so she couldn't have made a lot of noise to attract any passers-by. Her clothes were torn and her undergarments were in tatters. That fat pomp had raped Lillian and after satisfying himself he had sliced her throat. The ground around the bench was now composed of Lillian's blood, their footfalls of a year now untraceable, wiped out in the cruel floods of Lillian's blood. Don felt like the soil, blooded and this blooded soil became the knife that he took with him from the scene. The unprettiest part of the scene turned out to be his focal point and his mind just became blocks of mind and blooded earth, locking in the details, missing nothing, forming a desecrated physicality of being. He didn't cry, he was never the weeping type, crying, he was told by his foster parent, was for a woman and a man must not cry. He just sat there and took her hand which kept falling down to the ground when he left it. It was cold and lifeless- feeling for each nerveless finger- her hands felt like fish in his hands. Don just sat there thinking of how it must have felt to have another man touch her, rape her, kill her, take things from her. He just sat there and stored her scent, her heat, turned on the pain and anger machine, and filled his hour glass... This anger and pain had no title but it still surrounded him and corralled his thoughts. He needed to know its name. This anger, pain's bigger

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sister, told him his name was their ending relationship. He just sat there and tuned on the new hour of his life to take effect without effort for wicked had stolen his soul through this robbery and comatose him inside himself. He doesn't remember well what followed. He was just a walking shadow, a robot, doing things expected of him, things unexpected by him. Someone must have come-by, and they helped him in reporting the case to the police, or it was actually him who phoned the police. He doesn't know. The police came. They asked a lot of questions. Most of them, even though he knew the answers he couldn't offer them. He only replied to a few of their routine questions but couldn't tell them whom he suspected of such a deed. The unknown had to remain unknown, forever. And as the crowds increased those men in uniform were pushing the crowds away, backwards from their yellow tape, while flashing lights throbbed and swarmed around them like angry wasps. The reporters were there too, walking by with microphones and cameras, selling news as if it were cheese and bread. This machine of the press sprung into action producing a mammoth sized pile of newsprint, headlines, churnings and photos that would become a treasured irregularity in the future. "Humanity has no business in the bedrooms of someone's suffering. Even the birds up the trees are now still, almost frozen against the darkening night sky." He told this prying humanity, that even the birds knew how to treat someone in time of suffering. Rather better than humans who were all over the place! The sad realisation in him was that he had killed her like he killed his parents, and that we always kill everyone that we love. That

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the cowards do that with a smile and the brave ones with a sword. He knew he could fall both sides of this coin for it was because of him that Bones had killed Lillian. He had allowed for both with a smile and a sword. The guilt of which, smothered him. It overwhelmed Don.

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Chapter 9

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The police showed up again, early morning on the burial day. The fat one and the sticky-thin tall one who was there at the park when Lillian was being taken to the coroners place so an autopsy can be done to determine the cause of her death. Don didn't even bother to really grasp their names. He knew them according to the above descriptions. He didn't even care they had to be part of the equation, even the coroner wasn't important to him. Was there doubt as to the cause of Lillian's death? It was the fat one who had been such a pain-ass and it was obvious from his arrogant disposition that he was still thinking he could grind some answers from Don by being rude and insufferable. Don couldn't help noticing that he was still rude as he asked him to accompany them to beyond hearing range of all the other people. He didn't even say the words. He just nodded at Don, and nodded towards the far left of the yard of the resting parlour house. Don didn't even bother to say hello to them. They had found him sited on a small bench near Lillian's casket which was under the tent on top of a makeshift Alter. They were waiting for the Priest who was on his way to do a requiem Mass for Lillian. When they were beyond hearing range the fat detective tore a page from his notebook and started to write down things on it as if whatever he was writing was not good enough to stay in his notebook. Don knew it was just some gibberish that this police detective was writing down. It was also obvious that he was trying to psyche him out. Then he said, abruptly.

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"Who do you think could have killed your wife, Mr Muchadura?" And Don answered him, bored; he was really bored with that fat detective. "I have already told you several times that I don't know…, sir" He held back a bit on the sir part of the answer. He said that at the last moment, dragging it out from inside, so full of sarcasm? "Then, you will be the next one!" Don shrugged his shoulders as if he cared little about that and bite into his lower lip, folded his arms across his broad chest and just stared at the policeman, uninterestedly. "Haven't you heard anything, seen anything, don't you know something that could help us, Mr Muchadura?" He tried to be nice, but Don knew deep down he wasn't a nice person, and what he was trying to achieve with this visit of niceness. "No, nothing, I told you I don't know anything." "Are you sure?" Don nodded his head. "Nobody you know..., somebody who felt threatened, someone you crossed, someone who wanted to revenge for something.., or maybe your wife's lover?" His voice leered as he said that last part of the question and became slippery. "Be careful detective, my wife is not a scarlet woman." Don sassed dangerously. He was already angry with this fat police dog for insinuating bad things about Lillian. "How do you know?" He provoked more. "Fuck you!" "I said how do you know?" He repeated the question, unconcerned of Don’s anger.

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"Fuck you detective! Fuck you! Fuck you!" He hissed rhythmically. He was stopped from provoking him more by that silent, sticky thin partner of his whom all along was quite, as the Inspector hissed loudly. "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" He held Don back as he made for the detective. He wanted to beat the crap out of that detective. When he had calmed down a little he told them there were wasting his time. He told them they should be out there looking for evidence and the culprit, not wasting time quizzing him as they were doing. The sticky thin one replied him as matter-offact. "You are a suspect Mr Muchadura, so you have to try to cooperate with us as much as you can. I am sorry, sir, for what happened to you and for your loss but you really have to try to cooperate with us, as best as you can so that we can be able to bring the culprit to book." "But, haven't I told you that I don't know anything and tell me something inspector, why do you think I could have killed my wife?" "I never said you killed your wife, I just said we are considering you as a suspect, Mr. Muchadura." "You are crazy!" The thin police inspector shrugged his shoulders, unconcerned about his misunderstanding of what he really meant by all that. Don wasn't misunderstanding it at all, really. What boggled him was why the Inspector was thinking he could have killed his wife, that was crazy to him? And then he asked Don.

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"Are you sure sir, that there is nothing you are hiding from us, something you would like to tell us." He seemed to sense there was more to this issue than Don was letting out, but of course, Don couldn't tell him anything more. "No, there is nothing. I have answered that question several times, Inspector!" "Nothing?" "Nothing!" "Did your wife have enemies that you knew of?" "None that I knew of, inspector." "Ok then, we will continue looking for more answers. We are still considering you a suspect, Mr. Muchadura. If you know anything, or hear something, please let us know, anything so that we can be able to bring to book the culprit." "I will let you know anything new, Inspector." "Right?" Don nodded in acknowledgement. The inspector started on his way, but the fat detective stayed a little while. He was smoking some cheap cigarette and he was also smirking at Don, not believing a single word he had heard, and still wanting to provoke him more. Don just ignored him but his smell of cigarettes, stale coffee and beer. His senior asked after him. So, the smelly policeman left but after he had made some disgusted-with-you-sort-of-smirk at Don. Don couldn't have responded to that. He just stared at him as if he was staring at a disgusting insect that was in his cup of milk. Those two officers left for their car which was parked outside the gates to this resting parlour house.

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Later-on, several days later, they tried everything, some of the ways threatening to force Don to disclose some more information. But what those Cops didn't know was that he cared little what they could have done to punish Bones, he didn't even mind people who thought he had done it. He had also seen a lot of hot accusing faces throughout the funeral. He wasn't living anymore and what difference could that have made had he reported Bones to the police? His lot had made a mockery of the law a helluva lot of times. They always bribed their way out of the noose and it seemed the whole world was not equal to the Bones of this world. No one felt it as his obligation to see to it that the Bones got what they really deserved. If Don had reported Bones this time around; maybe they could have nailed Bones but it could have been at explosive costs. For starters; just thinking of twenty, forty, thousands of witnesses, subpoenas, voluntary testimonies, grievances, hurts, so many deep wounds, so many glancing contacts, affidavits, prosecutors, the defence council, clerks, scrutiners, the great empty chair of (in)justice, gave him the shivers. Maybe, Bones could altogether have avoided the chop and be given a life-inprison sentence, which wasn't what he wanted him to get. The three of them had to die, and then after that, he could count his cards. What brought this vomit of the back of his mind was this sense of feeling impotent in the face of Bones' irksome impunity. He wanted to play it all the way, funny; it was now a beautiful game, and yet, that sense of guilt raked even deeper. The only way he knew how to deal with that guilty was to have something absorb his mind, and so, in the meanwhile, he could only be part

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of the funeral, and nothing more. The previous night he had spent the whole night with others mourning her, singing songs for her, creating a community, a funeral.

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Chapter 10

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Instead of spending a twosome Christmas holiday as Don had always wanted to do, the 25th was a sad Christmas holiday. It rather was a hurtful lone affair. Sure, it was on the twenty fifth of December night when they spent the night singing songs for Lillian, asking that she be received into the eternal place. They believed silence for the dead was a disgrace and that they had to make sounds for Lillian. However vibrant their singing was, they were all unhappy. In order to deal with this unhappiness, some people danced, some people guzzled the beers in this night, and some people would sing songs that they might fill the gap where Lillian had occupied in their lives by singing. Even though he was sometimes singing along and dancing to some of these songs, deep down in his heart, he knew, he had to do something else Lillian couldn't have done had she been alive to fill the gap that was now inside him. And this void inside his stomach pit was a dam, or the lake at the park; it was so huge, opening out by collapsing into itself, like a Well. Some of Lillian's relatives came from the rural areas in another long journey inside a month for they had been to their wedding the start of that month. Everyone came to pay their last respects and everyone seemed to feel sorry for him. In order to help him deal with the pain, one would suggest this and another suggested that he should cry if he felt like doing that. They said it was a good thing to do because it drained out the dross, removes the pain and washes away the anger, and yet, he didn't feel any of the above. Crying couldn't have brought her back from the dead.

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Why, all he just wanted was Lillian to come back from the dead. He wanted her so she could hold him tenderly in her arms again until the wind had toned down her knife-drawn smile in the park. Try he had tried but he couldn't seem to fold that image back to the way it was before he saw it. He couldn't get back into his mind her normal smile which was always the soft curve of a piano man's smile, so immense as to provoke its mirror image! He wanted her love. He wanted her assurance. He wanted her in his arms. He wanted to have the hope of her when he woke up the morrow day, yet he had to believe it; that Lillian wasn't there anymore. Like a child who could find answers to hard life's questions that could boggle adult minds, without even knowing what the answers meant, he had to find some ways to believe it, that she wasn't there anymore. He had to believe it, that since the first day he met her in that coffee place in Leopold Takawira Street, that he had been dreaming, and that even though they were tens more coffees in this coffee house, tens of teas, the white spreads; glasses, knives, forks and spoons; those cutleries always glistening as if they had been carved out from glaciers, that it really hadn’t happened. He had to believe it was a lie that they were wrinkled old man in black loose garments sitting on the long counter in this coffee house, chattering and gesticulating gibberish. Yet, all this was evidence she had happened in his life. That there were also tens of dates in the movie houses, incalculable meals in the restaurants, and yet he had to accept it, that she never really had been here but only that it had been a terrifying dream that he had held onto for far too-long. And now, that the dream was thawing away.

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He also knew that in the night they were spending sleepless singing for Lillian, he had to believe it; that it was just a winter's phantasm when they would ascent to the plateau of a small hill in this park, and they would spread out under the wide blue skies and see beyond the park, far into the dry land covered by thorny scrubs and outcropping of rocks balancing, one on top of another in the far Epworth squatter settlement. Those balancing rocks were like light brown shadows of enormous prehistoric beasts rising out of the land that far. The land colours saturated as the land transfixed by winter light diffusing through the cloud groups, and yet, some clouds were so lovely- lovely clouds one would sleep through, silver reel on silver reel of celluloid lives traced across their eyelids. Now since it was almost midsummer, that he had to let go of that winter dream in which they had huddled together with Lillian for warmth, taking whatever courage in their always being together, accurately tuning themselves to the pinging in each other's chest. In the morning, at about three, sleep stole him for some couple of hours and when he woke up, at around five, a lot of people had woken up, as well. Nobody had told anyone they were sleeping the previous night. It just happened, one to oneself, until there was no one left singing. That's what happened on the funeral night. He realised, it was a purple dawn that he faced, the sky promised; it would be a clear day. In this morning, on the twenty sixth, the first thing that struck Don as he woke up was that the sun would rise the same way. But it felt like it would be earth's sinking. That's what we really have to call it, he thought. After all, the sun doesn't move, and its people who move. He wondered about how far he had moved

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for the two hours he was asleep, and he realized he hadn't moved a step for he was still at the same place he went to sleep on. The world couldn't have moved for Lillian was still dead because if the world had moved Lillian could have moved from being dead to being alive now. He had to witness again as they lowered the body of someone he loved into the grave. It smothered him, it engulfed him: It was like that twenty-four years before. It seemed he simply hadn't moved a step for the last twenty four years. The Love that he thought he had found with Lillian was futile. Love was always so insecure. Some couple of years before, he had argued with Johns about love or sex on Johns' side, or Johns belief that he had touched on love when all that it was, was only sex. Don thought it was only sex before he met Lillian, and when he met Lillian he had also come to realise that it maybe was love Johns was talking of that day. "Don, love is all that we want in life." Want, need, which one? But instead, he asked Johns, "What is love, Johns?" It's an eternal question, so it still begged some answers. He couldn't resist asking it. "I think I have touched on it with the girl I have been dating, Don." Touch, feel, have.., can we really, ever, do that or it's always about sex? He couldn't help musing. He had always thought it was all about sex, so he asked Johns about that. "You mean sex, don't you, friend?" "No, I mean the emotions, the feelings, Don." And that's dangerous! Don’s mind whispered to him, quietly.

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"Emotions are a bad idea, and love is impossible, Johns." So set was Don, on his convictions about love that it was a dangerous thing. "Hey, you haven't met her, Don. When you meet her you would know what I am talking of." Don couldn't even agree with that observation. Do you meet a thing or it meets you for you to know about it? Did his parents meet the fire, or it met them, he knew he couldn't even ask his parents that question anymore because they were since dead. He could only ask Johns about this love he was alluding to. "Johns, how about when all that you know, all your life, has been one botched love leading to the next one. Junked, destroyed and totalled on the lanes you have travelled in. Sometimes, turning against you, is all of your love, stalling you from getting out of those lanes. How about when every love you have had has always become an unreliable narrator, Johns? You still think someday I would find the love you are talking of, don't you, Johns?" "Yes, take heart man; you will have your day." He couldn't have argued more with Johns because he thought Johns was just adapting some other means of expression to whatever he wanted to believe to as love or even emotionally accelerating things or even doing both. Yet, this day Johns had talked of had turned out to be another botched love again. Love was always like clouds that form in the skies with so much promise for the rains only for them to swiftly vanish away without a droplet falling. It seemed love was a ditch one digs somewhere in the badlands, and fall in. It sprung up like flowers but withered away like a fleeting shadow. Don realised how love

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was like a sky he would never fly to, addled by broken wings. How love was like the line of the asymptote which approaches the straight X or Y mathematical axis line directly, and then by incisive miraculous whimsicalities, bends and approaches less directly as it gets nearer and nearer, till it almost touches it but never really do so. And then the line becomes increasingly so obvious that it would never touch the axis lines in all its lifetime. What was love? Could a line really have a lifetime? How love, even to hold it, even to think one can hold it, was all too wrong. He also realised how love was really like the Upas tree. This was how George Stevens created it into life and space. "There is a poison tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country for twelve or fourteen miles around the place of its growth. It is called in the Malayan language Bohon upas, with the juice of it the most poisonous arrows are prepared, and to gain this the condemned criminals are sent to the tree with proper directions both to get the juice and to secure themselves from the malignant exhalations of the tree; and they are pardoned if they bring back a certain quantity of the poison." He was now the Upas tree or even the criminal sent out to get the juice of this tree. What was love? That we make so much of! That we boast of and then it is not there in the morning? And a little bit later, in this morning, there were also pilgrimages, kneelings, offerings and crossings in the requiem mass for Lillian. Not to forget the police! Later, after the funeral Mass for Lillian, in the afternoons, they were making their peregrination to the graves for the burial of Lillian. They were sited under the Mubvaropa (Blood) tree. He

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had been taking this Mubvaropa tree to be the Upas tree of Stevens. Nothing in this afternoon could stop the magpies, winged things, rumbling in the woods, talking trash, squawking their ugly talk like a bunch of drunkards passing down the early morning streets of a ghetto township. It was on the twenty sixth that they were making this peregrination to the graves, at about two in the afternoon, and the graveplace, Warren hills cemetery was on the other side of the city, just outside Harare city centre. From where they stayed, in the Avenues area, to the east side of the city, the cemetery was some bit of distances to the west side of the city, so they were using the funeral home's hearse. A couple hundreds of metres from the grave place's entrance, that's where they were, resting under the Blood tree. It was now slightly after half two and they had been silent. It was half an hour of silence, they believed, under this blood tree, it was where the long departed would be waiting for the newly departed. This moment of silence would allow those long departed little noise as they searched for the newly departed spirit, so that they could accept it and proceed with it to the eternal place. For this half an hour of silence all that Don was thinking of was how love was so insecure like the warm indecisive raindrops that they were sampling as they waited silently under this Mubvaropa tree. For some hours, in the morning, they had been some clouds, here and there and now, it seemed the clouds had parted enough to let midsummer sun tease out quick dripping drops. They were sited in a taut line into Harare's mid-summer showers, their hands shimmering on the legs of rain, leaking from this remembered sky. It was raining something else, but water, he thought, and he was hoping, these needling showers would somehow replenish all

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the tears that have been wept. But the warm raindrops were mingling with the tears on people's faces and together they were flowing away. Some other people were silent for different reasons; some were waiting for God to do his own stocktaking. He also wanted to believe this time of silence under this Blood tree would take the shadows cast by Lillian but as he kept looking at her casket it still had those shadows. Huge shadows that seemed to touch the sky and the funny thing was he had been the only one who had been seeing those shadows. Even at the Resting parlour house, in the morning, even the previous night when they did spent the whole night singing songs for Lillian. No one else was seeing those shadows. Don was also wishing that this half hour of silence could take these shadows away the way love takes things away from people, especially the things that they have really wanted to hold onto. The faces that would be greeting Lillian on the other side were now just so many strangers and from all the nooks and crannies of the earth there was silence and the earth seemed to be mourning her. As they proceeded with their peregrination, the streets and roads were now shining, washed clean by those showers of rain and, the air a bit crispy, clearer as water ice, he seemed to sense the world growing tired. He couldn't help returning back to his obsessions on love. What was love? It was a question that still begged answers for him, from him, in him. Maybe from somewhere else! After all, people have talked of the roses, they have stood before love's presence and they have tasted the juice of the Upas tree. Even the poet Erasmus Darwin couldn't help but appropriate it, further.

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What was love? Here was the Belsen as to Erasmus's Upas tree after-tastes. "The vapour of the tree produces numbness and spasms of the limbs, and if anyone stands under it bareheaded, he loses his hair; and if a drop falls on him violent inflammation ensures. Birds which sit on the branches a short time drop down dead, and can even with difficulty fly over it, and not only no vegetables grow under it, but the ground is barren a stone cast around." What was love? What was love that had extinguished her? What was love? What was love that was now sending her to the graves?

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Chapter 11

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They arrived at the graveplace at about three, at three, the self dispossessed hour; at three o’clock, they visited the lost hour, that hour that undresses self into itself. They were still some voices rising up, some people were singing, some people were speaking, trying to shape reality into ideas, trying to transform the world of words and songs into the reality that faced them. Don knew that in this quite place songs will always be sung, voices will always be heard. The leaves on the vibrant fig tree expressed a surest green. On this Fig tree, to the left of the graveyard, the brain-fever bird was doing twelve-ton scales on its own electronic harmonium. Its songs felt like they were meant for this youthful cadaver that they were now circling and they were a line of shrouded faces circling her, no mist of breathe, every face at the grave place was staring askance at her face, in its intense rehearsal of its own doubt. Some were even afraid that her immortalness would reach out and uncoil around them. The big green meat flies were also making songs of their own with their engine voices as they hissed around this mangled body. Sometimes these meat flies were also circling, haphazardly, this young cadaver. They rocked themselves and the land rocked them, thus they rocked the land, and the songs were slower. The blackness in Don’s heart was dripping on a soundless keyboard, creating a harmonium he could only feel but never heard. His brain's lymphatic nodes were bubbling to this piano's keys, dripping clenching ivory whips.

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The air around the graveyard was dark even if it was still late afternoon of a summer day, beaten too thick and it had the smell and feel of something being pressed through Don’s nostrils and throat forcefully. The feelings inside him were haunting the skin of light, clear and real. As he made his way in the circled queue of those seeing Lillian's face for the last time, circling her casket and, having a last glimpse of her, he was thinking of what he would experience when his eyes see her face again. He knew he had already entered the world of what-ifs, and the in-betweens. Is she still alive, serving time? And, he was also thinking. Will I say a special prayer? He tried to break-free mentally. He told himself he had to face her with absence of doubt. And then, he saw her face which he knew was detached from the rest of the body but had been set in such a way as to make it appear whole, as if a string of some sort had been used to connect those discarded parts. He was amazed by how she did it, creating such perfect wholeness within her decapitated body as if she still was a whole umber shell. Now, her eyes seemed open and her eyes, dark, fear unaware, backlit with hope for him, surveyed him with years she wanted for herself. He did not want to think that she had raged and raged as they were slicing her head, raging against the dying of her light! "What if she could still feel the pain....?" He didn't want to think that he had always been a soldier of misfortune, that every life and every death is really nonnegotiable. He really wanted something, he wanted to have something that he could hold, something that he could own to himself.

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And yet, his mind confronting this actuality met its own match- there was nothing to really grasp there, that there was nothing perhaps beyond hearing and seeing or even the omission of these things. Is she in the half way house of words, songs, thoughts? There is none to ask, and yet he couldn't stop his mind from returning back to her reflection skewed in scarlet blood, her neck cut by a knife like a chicken, blood spotting her lemon green dress, her creamy white shoes, her sage green handbag. And because he circled her casket like everyone else was doing that doesn't mean that he knew what he was doing. When they finished goodbyes, and when he had swallowed his quite goodbyes in his heart they sang songs for her again. He sang along to the sounds that still lied deep within him, to the sounds that he knew would never restrict him again. Some people sang songs to console themselves; he sang the same songs to control. Some people sang songs to release, to please, too intense and strange to add to his discomfort; he just sang along to these stone-skipping songs, defeating his hallucinations. His face would jerk into life, here and there, when an untuned note echoed off their creaky notes. And the breezy wind was lifting those hymns to lurch and swoop all over the grave place. Tiny tufts of invalid clouds left over by those small clicks of rain that had shivered on their way to the graveyards were like the minister who seemed so lonely -so far away- as they were both ministering an unheard sermon. The minister was not speaking from the heart about mend and glory but was using a scripted speech that had nothing to do with Lillian. The late afternoon twilight exposed the sky's godless blue, such blue was shouting in the skies.

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The breezy wind was playing with the dropped decaying leaves of the fig tree's disrobings like a child playing alone and every restless leaf was a restless soul, hustled and bustled in the wind and, the wind was scattering slowly the leaves around and about to the westerly direction. Scattering the smell of death around the grave place since this westerly breezy wind was scented sickly sweet with the miasma of Lillian and her grave tidings. The five or so crows, on top of the nearby shrub of pucker trees to the east taunted and squawked their own supposed twenty-one gun salute. Their sharp notes surfed the wind; they had a feel for rhythm and an ear for sound repetition. One of the crows flew away as if something out there called it. Its shadow staining sunbright heads below with something darker, a smell of something primal, something naked, raw…, a wail of unbelieving loss, and Don kept following its flight in the skies. It kept calling out and the other four crows followed through. He didn't know where they were herding towards, maybe there were herding to another grave place; to do another of their gun salutes. When he had lost those crows into the expanding skies, he looked down from the sky, and saw that the grave men were lowering Lillian into the grave. He thought he hadn't seen well, and then he looked again. Yes, they were lowering Lillian's casket down into the grave. When he saw her being lowered down into the grave that's when he really started to think that all along that he hadn't been dreaming, it really was happening. He had lost her to the dust just like he had lost his parents twenty four years before. When his

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parents died, he didn't know what to do. He was a child, and he supposed, he couldn't have done anything, really. He hadn't cried when his foster parent died in his last year at the University for he just didn't have tears for him! He wasn't going to cry now. He might have turned out a weeping male wreck if he started on it. To be private in a public place was rare self possession, he psyched himself. He had also been given to think that it was better to harden into granite than to soften into powder but he wished for the ground on which he stood to just open up and let him inside it and then cover him from this loss. Someone outside the grave lifted up a stone whilst someone inside the grave signalled, caught the stone and lowered it into the grave to layer it on top of the casket of Lillian, to protect her from the soil, from instant decay. Lillian's casket was deeper inside a smaller grave hole inside the bigger grave hole, so this stone was layered on the ledge that separated these two parts of the grave, and then the soil would come on top of this layer of stones. The stone spawned silence as the children and women started to leave this grave place, leaving the men to burry Lillian! Don could not only know those boulders of stones as stones, he also could tell them as sadness. He wished the grave they had lowered Lillian into could have demanded for him, by refusing to be filled up by the soil. He knew he could have entered it, happily. No! The grave started to play hide and seek with him only that he never found out anything from it. The grave started laughing deviously at him as they were filling it up with the dark grey clay soils by lengthening.

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Even when they were filling it up, it lengthened, lengthened by the spirit puddles of those damp cloths of rain that had drizzled on their way to the graveyards, over an hour before. The grave continued lengthening; lengthened by the spirits that had been hidden by the Priest's ecclesiastical pomp and the singer's circumstantial songs. The grave's laughter lengthened, all around this grave place and, it lengthened from the people's muted groans, their silent cries and even by the silence now at this grave place. It didn't even stop laughing, lengthening in laughter, as the noise of the soil, as it was hitting the bottoms of her grave and the grave-men's silent talk and signals. The grave kept lengthening; it lengthened, as the heaviness of the earth in midsummer, thick as cake and the wind kicked up, swirling brute facts back and forth across this grave place. The grave started making fun at him. He felt it starting to mock him, it started challenging him. It said, and it's only him who heard it. "I have triumphed over you man by taking Lillian away from you and leaving you with nothing, what do you really have now?" In another moment it said, nonchalantly. "There is no need for me to hurry up my closure, stupid; did you think you deserved anything, really, fool!" It said to him that it was now like the trees around this grave place, that it was here to live forever, and that even at that, trees were exceptional people, not like humans, not like him. They lose their leaves without such a fuss, they stay at the same place all their lives, do not ask for anything, any favours, and never bothered anyone. They just accepted what was there for the taking.

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"But the sun isn't waiting for you, fool." Then it cackled in laughter as the evening started hugging the trees by staring out between the shivers of leaves. And with the long lines of images haunting the late afternoon hours, these afternoon hours became a glimmering filament waving at the sun. The tall sprawling Mopani trees, the three poplar trees hunched like three old men and the hulk of the baobab tree some distances from the grave place, to the western side, started to yield a schema: consuming a role, in dancing with the fading daylight, he realised that he could never really cover the grave's challenging laughter and stare. When he realised the grave they had lowered Lillian into could never convince him that she was really dead he left this grave place, all alone, for the small forest nearby. He knew that deep down his heart he had not encased Lillian in the soils. She hadn't crumbled into dust, that he still hadn't buried her. He had refused to bury her by leaving this grave-place for the forest. It was all a lie; there had been no corpse but two dissected parts that seemed like were of Lillian. There had been no coffin, not even a grave that he could see and his million whys had no goodbyes, no answers? They hadn't been any farewell; they had been no song, no sermon, no flower, and no departing hour under the Mubvaropa tree. To which he could even pile on top of these, his own unshed tears, corroding the bottoms of his eye sockets with their want to be let out. But he couldn't let them out, even though they were killing him, destroying his eyesight. The Lillian that he loved was still touching his shoulder like the westerly wind, so there was no need to cry for her when she was still that alive in the wind, when she was still calling his name, when they were still expecting their first son together. Lillian was

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still dreaming with him, even as he was traversing this small forest, he still felt the laughter of his first son echoing in the voices in his heart. He refused to accept he had attended a funeral and he told himself he could never end this chapter. I know I have to rehearse at forgetting so as to let her go! He walked and walked until he was lost in this small forest. Thinking he should retrace his footsteps, but he hadn't left any footmarks to follow back out of this forest, so he started wondering up and down the dales of this forest and gaze about, unseeing; plodding the little ways off the old logging road, runaway thoughts blaring in his head like a stuck car horn. These unleashed thoughts were cropping powerlessly over the treed forest. In the seeded speckle of light the night was glowing with pinpricks of misunderstanding, the lightness of the dark pressed him against the land so he couldn't really fly with the wind. Marram grass was whispering, calling him with a discourse of the saints- he was seeing this grass flattening in loops like two dogs running fast. One shrill note set black crowned night herons loose from the Mango trees, a murder of wings silencing the amassing whispering sounds of Marram grass. The only other sound he heard was that of the dried listless leaves, alive to every stirring of the wind; the wind garlanding wordlessness around his throat, it really was only the wind that he could measure himself by. By the time he found his way through all the countrified roads of this small forest, to the graveplace again, it was dark, yet it wasn't that dark, though, because the sky had three moons. One was a dark halo, the halo that was inside him and the other

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one was the colour of milk, a creamy milky colour. The third one was orangey-red, a thirsty orangey-red, but all the three moons were shinning a faint trail of light as the moons were moving with him, even as he was plodding the forest. Sometimes the moons were a black halo, sometimes milky, sometimes orangey-red, sometimes so small and, he was always trying to catch up with these three moons; grim, ungraceful, gargantuan things. When he returned back to the graveplace he knew he had returned for a certain purpose. He hadn't really been lost all the time he was plodding in the small forest; he had been on his way to this graveplace. The forest acted as a place one could go to be alone but that it had also become a place he had gone to be alone in a certain way as something was reinforced when he was in that forest. He had become like Orpheus who risked going into the underworld to retrieve the woman he loved. And like Orpheus, though he still didn't know the answers, he had gone to the forest to figure out the answers; for the answers he knew now were not the answers, he had already eaten through these answers. Unlike Orpheus, he should have gone there to learn the questions. Now he had returned back to the graveplace to do exactly that. Returning back to this grave place was now the most interesting thing he had ever done in his life. He would now face the grave with a sure truth, and the truth was; he was imagining lifting her back out of this page of the earth that had encased her. It was ridiculous to still be thinking Lillian could be negotiated for over and through the soil, yet that’s exactly what he had returned back to do. The late evening birds, sorrowful birds, woefully sad singers, had retreated into the night's receding darkness. They had given

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up on him with their commentary and chatter, slapping time, a staccato riff on a darkening sky beat. Listening intently to their voices he heard dissonance, of a doubtful drummer, and it didn't help him some because it couldn't shift the effect of this undesirable that was inside him into indecipherable. Two Owls entered the proceedings, an cello inspired orchestra apologising for not sensing death all along, hanging their thoughts on the moon's nook. In their music they created a bluesy note, a darker bluesy note expanding, deepening the other evening birds' song- the owls' thudding hoot of angry blood demanding for vengeance, rumbling, "It never rains for you", "what are you going to do," "it never rains for you," "blood for blood," "it never rains for you," "what are going to do?". The music was there in the songs but the words were lost to the wind, except for the rhythms. "It never rains for you", "what are you going to do," "it never rains for you," "blood for …." He came to the lower side of Lillian's grave and sat down by his haunches. The night had made nest in the hallow of her grave and her killed scent had been killed by the miasmas of the packed grave. This hallow curve of the grave was speechless. He touched the soil of Lillian's grave with his two hands in order to really be sure that the grave was there. The mound was there. He remembered it had been a monumental effort that had rolled that grave up. And now her grave was a blonde expanse pock-marked with giblets like hail on the landscape and this fresh mound was casting eerie shadows pockmarked by the shadows of the halo moon. It was obvious that she had left the land blank and that, she had scribbled on it.

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.

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Don didn't want to think that someday a tree would grow on top of Lillian's grave or something else like weeds or roses, perhaps, and these- feeding on her love; getting all the nourishment from Lillian's body that was now being denied to him. I must create ancient Mexican premature and miscarried bebes into clay look-alikes using Lillian's grave soils for ritual returning, he thought. Ceramic and ash Lillians to hold in his hands, not to bury in the graves as had happened to Lillian. Or he could have buried her with a small painted alabaster stature like the ancient Egyptians did. In fact he could have created two of these and, he would have kept one for himself. This ushtabi would help her doing work in the afterlife, so also for him in this life and they would have a lot of time together, he thought. Now he was alone, he knew he would be alone for the rest of his life, maybe he would be buried with a mouse as ancient bachelors were buried with in Zimbabwe, for accompaniment in afterlife. His own body was a warehouse of pain and he wished the tears could be made to flow from his eyes to make a sea so that this grave could be touched and be swept away from existence by the tears. He couldn't help asking his wife and child where they were now. "Where are your skulls, what is my sin?" He groaned the question without real words coming out. And Lillian seemed to shine through the grave like a brilliant wreckage of his broken dreams, smiling at him, the planet whose gravity he now orbited, tugging at his shores, telling him that. "Life doesn't owe its serenity to such impatience. You are broken, Don; you have to go for repairs, home." These tread tides of sentences nearly drawn in words that even ancestors

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couldn't speak, telling him that the pain's real home was not to be there with her but to be with the living; that he had to let her go so that she could find rest where she was. He accepted her admonishments and advice. And so, he left for the sanctuary of the living. He returned home with the gun that he had been carrying on him for days. He hadn't buried the gun with Lillian for this gun was more than an ushtabi, a mouse, or an ash Lillian for Don. It represented the hunger and hurt that stayed inside him. He will never give it back. His face was etched with a new darkness, he was so exhausted for he had been buried with someone. The sky above was painted a purplish night blue, and as he left the grave place the insane light of those moth-eaten half moons were throwing shadows on the grave, bleaching the grave, leaving it ancient, softer, flatter, bluing in the dusk. And a general purpling was on the western skies as the fading amber light of the moons send him homebound. It was still on the twenty sixth, late evening; that these moons were now sending him homebound.

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Chapter 12

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It was on the twenty sixth that they buried her. Did I lay her to rest too or it was Lillian who didn't want to rest? In this swallowing day Don thought, he wasn't sure she wanted him anymore. It's him who wanted her. The tensions of such a hectic day didn't relax its grip on him as he settled into home's embrace. When the mourners returned home from the graveyards a lot of people left for their places and they were just a few non-family people left by the time Don found his way home from the grave yard. Some of these people were still advising him to forget about her, some wishing him the very best that life could offer him, some were wishing God could give him strength enough to carry on. Later, after a constrained supper in the Dining Room, Lillian's grandfather took him out into the garden and talked with him. They sat in the back garden of his flat, and it was now night. "I know you are going through a lot of pain Don, and I know it's not easy to get past something like that, son, but you have to let go somehow?" He said that as they settled into thick straw garden chairs, and Don asked him. "Would it stop hurting this bad, Grandpa?" "It might never really stop hurting but you can learn to live with it and eventually it won't hurt that bad. Grief, Don, is marking a place inside you and naming it a lake. It is bitter and shallow and there is dark assurance with the passage of time." Grandpa was an old strong man for his 80 plus years. Nobody was really sure how old he was for the time he was born, registration of black people wasn't official, especially in the wild

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wilderness of Honde valley where he was born. When registration became open to blacks his parents had to estimate his age, which was always put behind some few years. Long back then the parents or guardians usually estimated on their children's birth dates by using events like the year when the locust drifted from the north, or by using devastating draught years as the basis, and it was always difficult, or sometimes prudent to figure out or accept which draught, and which drift of the locusts from the north years after. And thus, there were always rough estimates to birth days as people took birth certificates when they were old people. But for the official 83 years he had he looked good going, he had a great head on the still great body, and Don knew he had to use that great head to find some answers, so he asked him. "But, how can I be able to let it go, Grandpa?" He was not really sure how to go about it all. "You have to learn to forgive him who did this to you, Don, especially to forgive yourself in others for the wounds, slights, angers, storms and fears and believe there is a reachable shore on the horizons and move towards that shore. There are always holes inside us like the fisherman's nets, and days when we notice them we have to try to live with them because without the holes they won't be any fish coming out of the nets, Don. Someday it will be better, son." His voice echoed the strength of words that confronted death. He himself had confronted death several times; for, of his eight children only Lillian's father was still alive, and not only for that, he had dealt with the death of his wife, two years before that.

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"But how can I be able to do that Grandpa when I am now living beyond all the lines I have known all my life. How can I do that without a family, without a past? No future is conceivable, Grandpa." Don really wanted to know how he had carried on with that kind of loss, how he, himself, had carried on with the loss of his parents. He was little when it happened, he didn't even know how he had copied with that. He only knew that he was here, maybe he wanted grandpa to put that into words that he could understand, that he would know, maybe. "You know what, son?" Grandpa took a heavy breath, and later continued. His voice was still brave, for the loss. "When I lost your grandmother two years ago I was so afraid of living alone, speculating on what might have been, what might never be. It is human nature to feel this way when we leave a moment, but you should know, son, that the end of a tune is not the end of the line and that in life you have to script better lines." He stopped again, as if he was trying to put into order, line, structure, his next words and thoughts, and then he continued. "The rest you will discover when you are living between the lines of your scripted actions. You should also know that beyond these lines there is a life too that you can embrace and make it yours. Age treats such terrors with a pinch of salt, son." Grandpa's words bending the world and lives with words, verses, the way spoon benders bend metals with their minds. This time Don became silent as he tried to digest grandpa's words. He also tried to weave them into the fabric of his life, into what he was going through. The day's faded light had folded in, night had swallowed it all but a bare light from the back windows which was still shading light into the garden.

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"Don, the evening hours are as they wish. You can't change the evening hours to be morning hours, son, and like us; once we are here, they are no transfers, refunds, or returns. It's a life packaged tight with all that we don't know and it would never be complete without its missing pieces and as you grow older all that you will remember are the photographers not the photographs. Letting things slip through your mind is the only way you can keep sane sometimes, son." He patted Don on the shoulder back and squeezed him and told him that he was getting inside to rest his ageing bones. He told Don that he should turn inside too since it was getting chilly. Don said he wanted some more alone time outside, so Grandpa nodded his head and left for the warmth of the insides. As Don tried to turn grandpa's words into something understandable he found out that they were not making sense. He discovered that he loved Lillian so bad. He loved her was shocked loose from him too late having lost its art when no words could ever be enough to describe how he was feeling. That guilty; that he had caused her death, that waste of never being able to know her better, like his parents, overwhelmed him. He just felt wedged in grief's well, just gutted. He was staggered at how much it hurts. He knew if he was to turn his head around he would see Lillian's littered body on that bench. And thoughts of her bled through his mind, his heart felt like it could implode, leaping as if it was about to leap out of his chest. The chilly breeze was the quickening air of his grief, a new wind itself, the gust that spun into a tornado. He felt this chilly breeze settling on his bones.

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When he looked up at the sky he discovered the gaze of those three moons had slipped into the western horizons. Under a disarray of stars, under the grey-purple overhang of the skies, the western horizon's tip had stood in the way of the moons, swallowing them in. Don left the back garden, he turned inside where he knew the leafy-brown floors would warm him and the heat from the fire place would warm the wood of the chairs and table to a deeper gold. The following morning, he still wanted her and the hunger was a terrifying one. He wanted Lillian or nothing else. He wanted Lillian back with him so that he could play top-chef to her again, cut an onion's root, pinch the brown skin, peel, chop, weep, scrape... He wanted Lillian back so that he could cook trout with fennel and lemon for her again. "I would have to use foil parcel to lock in the flavours and moisture this time. I would make parcels of double layers of foil, large enough for the whole fish, place the layers of lemon and fennel bulb slices inside each parcel and then season the whole trout with onion, cumin, salt and pepper and stuff it with the remaining lemon and fennel slices. I would then top every fish with a dollop of butter, close the parcels and place them over medium coals for fifteen minutes. When ready, I would serve this with her favourite steamed rice and we would enjoy this meal together again, sometimes picking up rice-husks from fish so delicious and sour." But now, whilst he knew he was eating breakfast alone, the light of what might have been was paired with him, a translucent arm tossed across his shoulder, mesmerising him. This light couldn't be trusted; it even gave his sandwich a ruddy intensity,

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almost as if he could use this light to scan Lillian's convenience for this silence. He wanted Lillian back so that they could toss hail's balls at each other again, do swing together, and chase each other in the park. And then sometimes float into shadows of tall trees and lose September's sun whilst chasing each other. The flickering of the red-cockaded woodpecker's tongue, looking for insects on the tree's back, even on former tree trunks that have long ago forgotten going to heaven and now crisscross each other waiting for their own Christ, and the swallows skimming over the ground, titling at speed, carving the blue air of this odd warmth of a spring day. The day that is full of echoes, with the tortoiseshell butterflies brightening up the surroundings. Each of these forays into the park was different, yet the same, coalescing in their imaginations into one walk, one "meta-walk." He wanted Lillian back so that they could take a break together in the park again and listen to what the raven has to say when the sky was about to go blank. So that they would sit just awhile on the banks of the river, on fragrances of vernal dew and watch how the hands of every shadow pulsed through the calm waters of the river. The neon water waiting, sparkling in the fading sun's light, a log floating on the rippling spine of the water's back there speckled with the there-not-there of light and shadows, a time piece harvesting the water's meadows. The water trickling through the roots as if to whisper, yes, yes, we hear you, yes, yes, we hear you. And on other summer days, when it would have rained, the stream's water splashing against the crest of the high ridge where they would be sited on, on tufts of verdant river grass surrounded by patches of helichysum and chrysanthemums

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nearby, adding a floral scent to this earthy mix. The soft cool waves of the river opening them and delivering them, and two blackbirds building a nest, carrying bits of straw and the late evening frogs baying for action, clicking their tongues like assassins. A little further the crickets starting a chorus in the faroff trees, the crickets' song is an earth noel travelling through the forest showing them what is holy in this life was noticing them. He wanted Lillian back so that the heat of her groin and belly could ease into his tense spine and her long fingers could feel into his life, untying the knots in his strings. Lillian's eyes dancing like wet stars, pregnant with possibility and her lips and teeth gleaming; candid, comforting, electric, dazzling with generous sensuality. The curvature of her breasts blithely pressing the place before her, and some other days he would cop a feel. For those were days they would feed on each other's lips, tongues and eyes until they knew every mole, every hair, and every freckle on each other's face. He wanted Lillian back so that her soft lips could whisper sweet sweetness and underground secret rites. Her hazel eyes, all the confusing brown that they see and clear up for him could open his heart and body to discover foreign coasts of warmthcreating sweet chaos in him. He wanted Lillian back so that they might luxuriate together in a tub full of hot, scented water, soaking away all those years of constant ache before they met. That they might pretend they were back in the womb, floating together like twins in a private lake of flowers. He wanted Lillian back so that she could sing to him the song of love, creating music that chased away shadows in his heart. He

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wanted her back so that they might relish simple things together; things considered mundane, things like thrusting hands in a sink, soaking their hands in a sink full of hot soppy water and then fold them in large towels. Things like smelling the smell of sunshine and the pine trees in the park after it had rained, things like pulling weeds in their vegetable garden, pursuing little, lovefilled tasks together. Every precious moment, a creative outlet, each tasting like freedom! Charity begins in the bedroom, he wanted Lillian back, in their bedroom, so that they might have kids together, and see their home full of children, grandchildren... He wanted her back so that she could tend this wound in him as she would have done to her children in life, quenching their fevered wounds and pains. He wanted Lillian back so that they could thrill together watching their son growing up and excelling at whatever would be his chosen sport after years of practice and dedication. Pushing his legs and lungs to their limits to the thunderous chorus of approval, that son's face humbling the stars, four loyal (royal) eyes watching over each dash between the distances. And at the winner's podium, hugging him, young manling! The depth of fatherhood's promise through the soul of his child; he would never hold back on that son of his. Every pail of pissy diapers, every toy, every cry, every smile, every first crawl, every first walk, every fight with his Mom, every word, every worry, every of which, paternity understood and developed by the dramas of love, the spoils of a life, would be a routine that would get better as they polished it. He wanted Lillian back so that she could now baby-sit their buried son. He wanted Lillian back with their son so that they

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could be able to do all the undo-ables which he could not now do alone. He still had pipe dreams stored up for his son and he wanted that son back so that he could be the first one to teach him how to paint. "I have been thinking of how I could actually cut this tennis ball in half, make a hole in the middle and slip the paint brush through the hole, Lillian." "What would you do with that, Don?" They were painting their flat together. It was over a year after they had met, and a couple of months before the wedding, they had discovered Lillian was pregnant and they had set the date for the wedding. The paint was dripping from their brushes and dribbling through their hands, spotting their clothes, even their hairs and they were taking a break in their not-yet-painted bedroom. They were going through the preparation stuff for their child, making some fun and sweet conversations about some of those things. And when he saw the tennis ball that's when that inspiration hit home. He thought their son could do without the tennis ball, in fact that they could buy him another later, or even at that, a football or soft ball. He thought painting was one thing that he didn't want their son to do without. How could his son do without brush strokes, drips, colours that sing, reeling in further revelations? How could his son do without painting clouds in his mind matching the worlds he had glimpsed? Small brushes giving a smooth finish unremarked by gesture- an underworld of cold wet shadows and echoes- working the colours into a wet form, and then, the white canvass assuming a brilliant surface as the light foremost in his mind suffused the landscape- a still moment shaper in focus than the

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canvass would show, radiating through these leaden clouds. He was trying to talk Lillian into these ideas and she was in the dark as to what he was alluding to. "You know, babe; I want our son to be such a great painter, so I thought I could teach him how to use this tennis ball. It would catch all the tendril dribbles of paint that would otherwise run down his hands. You wouldn't have to go to trouble trying to clean his clothes, you know." Lillian found the colours as she bubbled sweetly. "Hey, I think it's a cool idea, how about we could sort of try it out when we start painting again so that we could perfect the idea before you start teaching the kid, babe?" Lillian, like a school girl; she was so full of life and amusement. "Yes, I think we can do that." Don couldn't shy away from the enthusiasm, as well. "Yeah, Mr Picasso, let's do it!" She pecked him on the cheek. That was his discoverer's trophy! And they couldn't help giggling foolishly at each other as if they had made one hell of a great discovery. He wanted Lillian back so that they could do all that together, he wanted her back so that he could be able to kiss her goodbye now, lovingly sending her and his son away to the Creator. He wanted Lillian back so that she could help him with the fairytale stories. Lillian had promised him she would be there to tell their son Flemish, Portuguese, San, Aesop and even Hans Christian Anderson tales. "How about Grimm brother's stories?" He asked her. "Yes, they are invited, too." She agreed to these favourites of his.

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"We will immerse this boy of ours into different cultures?" "Yes, we will do that, Don." Then she said something like wanting the child to learn the language he had already started learning in her belly from them. "What language is that, Lillian?" He couldn't help asking Lillian and she said something like. "Don, do you know that when we talk to our son the way we have been doing, in the womb, or read to him, we will be sending thoughts, telling the child of the bigger picture, that is, the most important aspect of life is connectedness?" "Do you think the child would be hearing us?" He quizzed her, unbelief eating hard at him. "Of course, babe!" She smiled her sun bright smile and continued, "I read somewhere that when a child is born and when he cries his first cry would take the distinctive tone of the language he has been learning in the womb." Jokingly, he said. "You mean since we have been talking to our child in Shona so his first cry would be a rising even-toned melody contour cry, do you mean that, Lillian?" "Yes, and had we been using Germany then the child would have a falling, deep-toned melody contour cry, Don?" He stared at her quizzically, still wondering what the heck she really meant by all that talk. He was still thinking that she was just pulling his legs but when she hadn't exploded into one of her uproarious laughs, the laughs she always had whenever she thought she had done a dump act on him, but remained serious, he realised she was serious all long. And so, he asked her. "What language have we been teaching our child, Lillian?"

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"It is the language of love, Don." Just that! The language of love? "The language of love, huh?" He asked, still incredulous. "Yes, the language of love, Don." And now he wanted Lillian back so that she could help him in teaching that child of theirs the language of love. So that when he touches a tree or holds a flower something inside him would click. He would know that he was a part of the whole, a part of everything. He won't be likely to abuse the land, other people or even himself because he would have realised that his activities would affect so many other people. He wanted Lillian back so that she could kiss his cracked lips, touch his hungered body, and wash his dry face. He wanted her there, teasing him into places he had never been before. The bend of all those years standing straight and the memories waxed and waned in those thoughts. All his thinking tenses were now in the past, can't be, and might have beens. Memory is an unkind beast; there is so much supposition to fill the gaps. The morrow day, two days after her burial, he visited the deep sky blue lake like a pilgrimage, to watch the waves, to ask her and, to tell her that he kept his promise. He found a new order of reality, in the air, on the water, in the lake. Everywhere he turned there was something new, chaotic, uncontained and overflowing. Out toward the lake's edges new footprints vanished as they were formed. Nearer to the shore, the round grey pebbles were as familiar as they had always been. The lake's low waves looked very active and purposeful like a sea bound river would look misplaced, and further in, touches of luminous white froth made a patchwork quilt on the lake's

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surface. Not a single cloud was caressing the line above the horizon. The area was covered by mist that ambled aimlessly like a little child who had forgotten to return home from play. He was watching the shore as the waves went by, taking in the details, taking in the notes without knowing, taking, but not changing anything. Not removing or altering anything in any way. After he was gone, after the mist had gone, everything will be as it was which made him wonder what she had taken from him. The lake, Lillian: since the time they had been together. Yet what he felt was the tag of the minute hand stretching the length of the waves in this lake, and light playing hide-and-seek with him and the blue shadows of the mist sliding and swelling in this swallowing of the horizons. He would rather time were the sky, a blue sky, endlessness and he tried to see so far but the thicks of the mist were across his head, gumming his eyes, their causal curtains tight on every blink. The lake's waves seemed angry with him, drenching him in irksome moisture and the waves would beat him up with moisture which he knew would thin to mist, a wisp, a whisper shifting, drifting away into nothingness. He thought he had heard the sound of a baby crying in the wave's sounds and the diagonal shadows across the face of the waves took their place behind his son's voice. He knew he must look harder, listen closely for any voices, sudden, children's, his son's, and he heard it; it said something to him, but he could not understand what it was saying. Maybe his son sinking with the lake's waves, throwing laughter out of the waves or it must have been his own voice. He also felt the light fighting tight to outfall the mist.

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All that he had, in him, was the memory of her. He tried to talk, really just saying things at the husk his wife used to inhabit. It seemed he was talking to himself. He wanted to smell her next to him, not to feel some invisible wind that he couldn't even see or touch.

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Chapter 13

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On the fourth day after Lillian's burial his in-laws left, but not after they had suggested that he could join them for a couple of months. "You can come and stay with us, son, at least for a couple of months. You could use a shoulder to cry on." Lillian's mother offered. A pretty woman, big eyes, soft mouth, she was now all sad crying brown eyes, and Lillian's father concurred. "Yes, you can come with us, son." Don knew they really meant well but he didn't think he was ready for company. "I will be fine here, Father, and thank you Mother but, I think I need to be alone for a little while." He refused their offer. They understood that he was going through the motions and that he didn't think these kind overtures were little family dramas to keep him feel liked but were genuine feelings that they felt for him. They even suggested that they could leave behind one of Lillian's younger sisters so she could be around when he needed help. Don also refused this, as it was, she could have got bored being alone with him and besides all that she was not Lillian. Were they to suggest that they were going to bring Lillian back from the dead he could have accepted their offers- only Lillian! With no parents of his own, he had no one to guide him into the mourning dark jackets. On the funeral day, he had been wearing a blue jacket that he never did like and a pair of blue trousers, gallivanting. He thought he was too blue, too wrong for a funeral. He had no one who had led him to the funeral home where Lillian was embalmed and to the graveyards where she was

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buried, and now with no family of his own, he had no one to help him make her pass onto the next world and help himself to get past all that. With a family of his own, he could have donned the blackest blazers, lighted the incense, knelt before the rusted Celtic cross in their bedroom and whispered the mantra of her name... Lillian! Lillian! Lillian! His body shouting, begging to ache, even in places he couldn't even fathom owning, he needed to hold her. He needed her so that she could guide him through all the tribulations he was facing. He needed to cast into Lillian, latch onto her, lock onto her, root this ache in his heart into her, to grab with all of his hands, with all that was in him for that seed of theirs that he had logged into her, root his need into her... He wanted to live in a phantasmagoria world. He didn't want it on his own! When paying his last respects, he now knew, he had begged her never to leave him, to strengthen him when he would be emotionally wrought. She had to be with him for she once promised him that. He wished those words, that promise, had the power to do what they said, he thinks, words could have word her alive, again. In the first place, she didn't even have to die! She didn't have to get lost fast on the edges of her own words, into the grave. But they dug a six-foot hole for her, spade by spade they turned the soil out and then the last shovel of soil returned back into the grave, creating a mental iteration of reality, as of series, or set, by her dying and that had served as an extended epitaph on her grave.

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Not even imagination could help him now as imagination was no place to tie up the boat on in the middle of this ocean of nonentity in which he was swimming in, especially when a storm of days was building over the horizons. And the backdrop of the storm is a wrecked garden.... Trees uprooted and portions of the earth washed away creating an entirely new landscape ravened by gapping craters, fallen trees and branches, torn roots, grass, flowers, leaves…, some branches living, others livid, crushed, dying, already anticipating browning. The trees in this garden are in the sad midst of calcification. Thus the garden had been blown aside by a wind storm that uprooted one history and threw down the fine hookings of another, it would be one-hell-of-a-mess, to clear that up. Seeds could be planted, certainly and might bear fruit later. On his first day alone, he couldn't help feeling that what he used to believe to as their home wasn't theirs as such, not even his alone. The rooms were now shadowed and the furniture and utensils within were dark touched, too, as the rooms now spoke another language without the traces of words or thoughts. This language spoken by these rooms bouncing off like the barking dogs, the language was full of emptiness that he couldn't root onto and this emptiness was a constant reminder of what wasn't there anymore. He would walk into the sitting room, sit on the larger sofa and gaze at the blank television screen. He would watch it for some minutes, its hungry face beckoning for engagement. He would switch it on. It sneezed a bit as if clearing its throat and then the colours would come through. It was some old musical, a sentimental story, a love story. He sat there watching it, dazed, as

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a glamorous couple declared their love for each other through a romantic duet. The highs of a buxom black lady's soprano voice and a thin white man's tenor voice jellying together but it didn't change his mood. It was the same stupid story, belief; that they would always be together, forever. It was naïve, soapy and silly so he switched it off and simply stared at the blank television screen. It was engaging to stare at the blank screen because it made him drift into himself. Some other days he browsed through a book, and wondered why someone else's story would be accepted as viable escape from his own story, and some other days, he tried to arrange the furniture, in feng shu spirit. He was thinking through this he could rearrange things inside him if the rooms could have stayed as they were after he had re-arranged the furniture, maybe he might have made inroads on the spirit of his son. Another time he would lift the furniture again, creating personally inspired lines; lines he thought could help him pry the meanings of his day to day life. It was difficult to interact with the furniture after this rearrangement, without getting touched by their shadows. Sometimes he was almost sure the furniture was watching him, stabbing alive the ache inside him with their stares, keeping him troubled. Sometimes he would look at the main door believing she was coming back through that door. Visions of extended arms and two bodies locked and a cruise up her pearl river were easier to hope for. When he would have been seated on the same spot for some time, he would have been thinking of her, seeing her coming back for him, he could almost hear her footsteps and feel her tug as the dowser's rod bends to the source below. The

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tapering, tingles of her thumb heel, he looked forward to opening the door to Lillian, anticipating a change in the way the wind had been bleeding through the keyhole, bleeding his nights blank. His heart thudded with anticipation; it could melt metals, and steal thunder from the clouds. These footsteps have to be hers, really, and when he couldn't help it any longer he looked at the main door. Hope watered by waiting, natured by watching for her overwhelmed him, and a light seemed to happen on the sweet girl caught in his mind but in his liquid mind death's drag seemed to turn to a quite on her footsteps. When he looked again at the door, there was no one, just no one! Leaving him remote from the actions she couldn't clarify by her absence, leaving fragrant silences and faint light sogged in mugginess, leaving him alone as he tried to own her death, leaving him with internal time passage and a lonely clarinet. Leaving me, leaving me, leaving me… "No one is there for you", would say the clarinet in his purring brains. That recurring nightmare of their still-born child would come again and the loneliness inside him seemed to be wearing the musk of his child, the stubborn child he had not held in his arms. And yet, he had heard her footsteps, he could still feel her eyes, face so vivid, full of pity upon him, urging him to let go his tight hold on this chequered tide and allow the painful waters to roll out. This became a plausible moment in time that was quickly interrupted by the abrupt sounds of keys rattling and the steel doors slamming and footsteps going away, each distant thud now more dramatic than the last! Like a bewildered ghost she dispersed away, paled and tip toed, lip-tight out of his dreams.

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Her footsteps were replaced by the footsteps of someone he couldn't hear her footsteps. The silence of these new footsteps stretched on, infinite as the graves at the graveyards where they had encased Lillian, stealing; out of the house, out of his dreams, fearfully as though to dodge a summons. The silence of her absent footsteps stretched on, like untarnished tombs of old unfinished pain inside him. He was mesmerised by the mad footwork behind the closed door that seemed to be dancing his longing for contact. He felt he was sited on the loom, unravelling the fading decimal of his life, the hot summer night begging for rain. Sometimes, he got to wanting her that his head hummed and whined like the siren, the mad siren of his inexhaustible melancholies, numbing loneliness, and unfulfilled need. Sometimes he would face her pictures on the walls and he would wonder if she was happy where she was now as the still frame photos showed. He would see his visions forming her from those photos, taking pieces from his head, forming in front of him like the words. On very rare occasions; he felt like he could sort this wrecked garden into some semblance of order... In his mind, he would find what could be cleared in this garden. And then he planted new trees, new grass grew, primroses, violets and blue-bells were in riotous flowery. Azealous opening up to the sun but have the new growth filled the spaces, so well? Have all these greens and flowery been an attempt to tame the chaos, too? He would get to thinking of her; the thinking purging his mind's notes out of their structure like contemplating ruthlessly the misery of the entire human race as if by this show it could

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have guaranteed her back to him. And even though he had known all along that nothing was ever guaranteed in life, he couldn't help pretending that those feet that have been pounding the floors were pounding the floors for him, and yet, in actual fact, they were pounding for their own songs within them. They were pounding for their own music, like the cat that could never fetch anything except for crap sequined elf slippers. He would get so mucked up and felt so dislocated from everything. He would rather he could go some frontier else and never be a part of this paradise-lost-again existence.

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Chapter 14

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The next eight days he kept inside waiting for Lillian to return. The next eight or so days he stayed inside, did the maths, tapping the numbers into an emotional calculator, trying to reach for some formulaic conclusions. The next eight days and nights were days in which nights screamed upwind the way stars lose their valid phantoms. He survived on a meagre diet of horizon off the windows, asking for the sky, hodden grey some days, to unravel morning, to set free the imprisoned sun, to strike bargains with the sun. The sky, greypinked some other days, in the arc of a glow; and some other days, chain-link grey- were like broken promises marrying pain and deep sighs. He passed himself several times as he was going out to go back, going up to go down, going from home just to get home. He was a forgotten road coming from nowhere. At least he still had the clock on the walls to tell him it was bed time. In those eight days, he survived by attrition, emptying out his heart and laying it bare on the table as he dealt with too much psychic traffic and thus his mind became a rain-fed river, a broken barometer, an industrial diamond lost in the cargo. Maybe, he should have left for another place or even go abroad, forgetting or remembering who he was or who Lillian was to him but he stayed home. Yet, he knew, he couldn't stay inside forever, a guardian of rooms, the purpose of his existence! No! There were no guides for him, none at all home and all his enquiries were coming back unanswered. He discovered that she

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wasn't coming back, that he had to trust anything else, but a new day. And this new day, every tomorrow morning was like today, was uncovering the emptiness, the fear of aloneness, of life and life waning. That tomorrow's world was squatting snarling, teeth bared in savage hiss of blood and conflict, waking him back everyday to the reality of his life behind those concrete walls. Only for him to rudely discover that he was always alone, everywhere he looked, on everything: dark, dark, dark…, until another morning had its say. He discovered he had been turning into a malevolently distorted zombie, parleying with Existence, God, Life, himself- in these frigid rooms, full of hatred. Maybe he had been like that since the day he saw Lillian lying behind that small bush in the park? He discovered that this desire, this grief, this anger, this pain that he had been holding onto in its own heat had now turned into spite. When we desire anger, pain and grief as love and that when such slight hope of finding that love faded, then nothing would remain. And that when we hand tie these barbs of grief into soft strands in our hearts we will as well be twisting these strands tightly until our hearts were bleeding. And the sad thing is we would strangely admire our handwork at that, unable to understand, or express our loneliness. Grief, guilty, in that spot that was so raw and open, that felt like the skin was coming off, weighed heavy on him like an eternity ring of habit settling on a good address, a wife, children, home and dusted down acquaintances. He had to come back to some kind of reality. How about starting by opening up her shopping bag? Don remembered

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Lillian had promised him something for the past Christmas holiday. He went to find her handbag in the drawers. It was there tucked clean from the blood. Someone had cleaned off Lillian's blood. He opened it with bathed breathe. In her bag were a few of Lillian's own things that helped him search through a winter long of memories, discarding endless nothing-like-her-things and a bran-new gold watch. It was her special gift to him. The one she had gone to buy him when she was murdered by Bones. He couldn't help visualising seeing Lillian presenting it to him with that serene infectious smile. He knew she wanted to enjoy the wonder that would come across his face as he opened that gift. But now, her image in his mind had a scowl against time looting the seasons. Underneath, below the bag was this card- it was one of her own and not like those colourful ones but simple, like her; infringed with purplish red roses. Very simple roses and inside the card were these few words "I always will be yours" Just those five words and nothing else! Her pen running dry, that was her last method and now he missed her stroking a pen. Always being mine; what had become of that promise? Maybe Browning was correct when he caused these words. "Nay blame grief that’s fickle Time that proves a traitor. Chance, chance, all that purpose warps. Death who spares to thrust the sickle, Laid love low, through flower which later, Shroud the corpse! "

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Maybe, he felt, he had to blame grief, maybe time, maybe death, maybe God, maybe himself… MAN: Him, Himself, Don, maybe the human condition, the condition of humans, conditioned to failure. Maybe he had to disagree with Browning. He had come to believe in things always being the same and never expected things to change and he himself, being alone again and that one day, he could be facing all these things alone, all thorns and thistles of life, all alone, and of course, he couldn't have thought of anything being different... and that's expectation in us. Now, he was feeling the pain and anger and who wouldn't have had given that they had lost their loved ones. For the first time in his life he felt how painful it was to miss to be missed. He felt how painful and foolish it can be to surrender hopes of ever getting closer to the names and shapes that one has depended on to live. Suffering is contractive, unintelligible, maddening, strange… Since his anger had been arrested for the past eight days it now reared its ugly head up in fury, backward crested within him. The storm within him was fiercer yet soaring, swelling and roaring like a released cauldron's swirl, it was a frenzied beast. Every resistance within him was swept into an instant void, he felt beset, besieged, deadlocked, sandwiched in grief, anger and guilty. All these were surging eddies and cesspools of resistance emptying into madness, into a madness that no longer was containable. These dark energies were exerting an enormous force in his universe, bringing back the forgotten past of twenty four years ago, jazzing up the anger all the more. There was only one missing mass to make it complete. Dare we call this missing

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mass, spiritual? But, who is to say Eve's apple wasn't a nettle seed, an aloe seed, or even lemon? Twenty four years before, his home now miles away in the eastern highlands where he was born, and the heart heavy as lead; he was all alone on this lonesome road: Walking, as if walking in the hard rain, the hard raindrops beating the road just as loud as young lovers kissing, he now had nowhere else to go. His parents: Long dead parents, their souls fished out, their legs buckled and spent, were buried under the dirt. Maybe it could have been fair had he gone to bed with them that night, he couldn't be facing all this alone! He knew of a fate worse than death that couldn't allow him to die with his parents getting involved in his destiny, it was a fate that would wake up on the doorstep of death. The smack of this competent fate had a lot to show him, that fate wanted him to face everything in this world alone. Maybe that's why he refused to share bed with his parents that night. That's why, all of a sudden, he wanted to own his own place and slept in that kitchen where he always feared being alone in at night. And yet that night, he wanted to be alone, to be at his own, to grow up, breaking out of his parents' clutches at the treacle age of six and that's what he did. He seemed to have grown up, however, as he opened his eyes to see, everybody was dead, but only him. They had died and left him alone in such a terrifying world, and he had to grope around, sometimes holding onto small ledges, never bigger ones for that matter! He couldn't help holding onto them and one of them was the orphanage, and in between, he had come to believe that it would always be there.

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Small ledge that it was, four years it was, the ledge all of a sudden vanished. Leaving him in total darkness, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to hold onto; always falling this way that way, swirling, like the dark beginnings of a terrifyingly awesome dream, in Harare, after the orphanage, the road had been a lonesome one, but still peopled. The road was as much inhabited as was his mind, and all of which resembled the other when they could act kindly towards the other. He did hold onto that road of aloneness for far too long. He couldn't move a step and if ever he did move it appeared as if he hadn't taken such a step, he was still there where he was when he woke up suddenly in that night, he couldn't breathe in the heat, in the smoke that enclosed him, in that smoky trancelike dream. Visionary though, not so far away; the smoke seemed to lighten and he started to move toward that point. He had been moving and choking from the smoke when it started hotting up all the more and then flames started erupting from all around him, circling him in. The heat was too unbearable and breathing was of the suffocating and choking kind. When he had been thinking he was passing out, suddenly he woke up, and surprising though, it was so hot and smoky! He could hear faint cries emanating from his parents' hut so he went out to find out… What he saw and felt that day: he just felt something in his chest giving way like a hand releasing a pigeon into air. His gut seemed like it was sinking, like an echo after a fall, it was his Mom and Dad, being held in their moaning by the fire's chilling breath. Radiant gas was steaming like a jet of vision out through the doorway and through this small doorway, he observed the

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process of dissolving into ash, his parents covered in flames and gas of smoke. The smoke rose and rose with surcease. He could also hear the burning in the form of a low bass-note, and the almost noticeable smell of the flesh burning, the meat frying, roasting, strong in his nose and a little later, he could see the wing-like flames billowing, a lava of flames out of the margins of their bodies. Then their disintegrated skeletons, what's left of them were two burned bodies now unrecognisable that had survived temperatures of above five hundred degrees Celsius. Hip joints, four pairs of forceps, a femur, an ulna, a scapula, a patella, pebbles of metatarsals, pebbles of metatarsals, the skulls glowing in the heat of the burning. Those skulls, still recognisably human skulls, were still burning to a jaundiced yellow-blue, an aura between lilac and or cornflower. These bestial pieces that couldn't fill a plastic bag, tortured by their passion and love of each other and then the two plastics lying on the grounds, both of bits and pieces of his parents' leftovers, salvaged from the fire, now arranged perfectly in an impossible syncopation. The silence between them was a wet blanket, it was as if the end of life was really about shedding one's identity along with the physical form that holds it. The memory of it all! He had came to hate any kind of burning, even lights in a room he slept in had to be put out before he could go to sleep. It represented to him, uncannily, steady flames separated from smoke. He would wake up in the middle of the night, his heart thudding violently, if he leaves the lights on.

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Chapter 15

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Those were the "train of events", and train of events that they had been and now, it was time to scale, tape dance and skate all the way to the final point; for very soon it was going to be over. Since yesterday morning when he received that telephone call from Bones, Bones had phoned again today, in the afternoons. The precise timing of the second call, the telephone's ring and its mix levels were essential to the mood of the moment. Now, he had a few hours to complete such a daunting task. Bones said he wanted to meet at the park, he said he wanted to give him Compensation monies for the loss he had incurred in Lillian as if it was worth any amounts of dollars to the loss. Don haggled with Bones on the amount. Bones wanted to give him half a million but Don said, "No", he needed a million or nothing else. They haggled on the amount until Bones succumbed to Don’s greedy. Bones accepted it was a fair buy. He also told Bones that it was a fair amount for Lillian's life. So, it seemed, Bones had evidently decided to make money the only coin of his moral calculations. Don had agreed to that. He had fooled Bones into believing that he regretted the killing of Mosquito, that he didn't want more blood to be spilled between them. But their truce, whether agreed to or shared, was in itself, the greatest evil. Inside, Don was seething and frothing with indomitable anger and black rage over Bones' god-gullible compromised suggestions... That nag just couldn't believe it when I would be telling him that to dust he returns this very day.

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At night, Don left for the park earlier on, at around nine and he arrived at their rendezvous an hour before engagement time. At the park, he could only hear the rustling of dry leaves and the whistling of grass as the wind murmured softly what was about to transpire this very night. Sadly though, there were no other ears to hear it save for his only for he had elected to be there earlieron in order to be ahead of the start of things. He also wanted to plant himself at a vantage and intimidating position. The truth here was, and if it had to be faced, and it really had to be faced; Bones didn't want to give him stop-your-game or close-yourmouth-monies. He wanted to silence him permanently, and that's the real uncorrupted truth! Giving him money was too convenient to Bones. He wasn't going to be foolish, he wasn't going to fall for Bones' trap. For Don, it was now like playing the game of chess, whereby, before one makes any move, he had to first of all know the likely moves his enemy would also make and their consequences. He needed to know whether his move would play Bones off or not, out of the game. He would look at where his leg will be standing when it comes down. Do I have to wait? Do I have to lead? Am I to follow behind Bones' lead? Am I going to keep to the stand-stilling position? Am I not wasting chance and opportunity with my stand-stilling position? All these questions fired some more unanswerable questions, on and on, on his mind, circularly with ever insistent increasing strength. He looped of all loopholes, he comes up with an Achilles' plan in strength, and his nerves are now fired up, raw and expectant.

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He stations himself behind a shoulder-high boulder of rock which was slightly infested, around it, with tall trees. Lucky though, they didn't bare his line of sight. The bench was visible from where he was and so he waited for Pig to show up. Pig would be ahead of Bones. What would one do when they are satisfied they have diligently completed their primary tasks? His thoughts started wondering to the future he had hoped for, to the other loves waiting for him in this world. He dreamt wonderingly yet awake; about the start; a new life after he had killed off this pain and Bones. He did allow one image of that future to linger on the unrippled surface of his brains. But the truth was: he should have known that when the pain waned, every day would be one long Monday. Meanwhile, he heard a loud rustling sound behind the small bush to the west of where he was hidden and it was proceeding to where he was stationed. The night was dark as summer nights always were, rendering it to be absolutely difficult to discern whose form it was which was coming a bit far ahead. He could hear the music the person was making. He was whistling softly, it was musical but he didn't know the song. He could just tell from the sound because it was so deep and full of life, like, the Nile River or something. Maybe, subconsciously, this person had entered into song to let Don know he was around. Pig, who didn't want to smoke one of those marijuana cigarettes! And a little later, and it was roughly twenty past ten, a heavy gaunt figure loomed into his focus. He didn't need specs to know whose form it was. Meanwhile he was scanning the area around the bench, maybe in order to be sure that Don hadn't been ahead

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of him. And then, after some few minutes or so, Pig whistled three times in a row, paused for some seconds. When he was whistling he looked like he was putting his mouth around some kind of invisible mouthpiece, like a clarinet or something. And then, he whistled three more times, a little louder and waited. He was not more than ten metres from where Don was stationed, but Don was blocked from Pig's view by the boulder of rock which was, fortunately for Don, divided by a crack in the middle. It made it easier for him to see Pig. Lucky still, Pig didn't have any suspicions about his whereabouts; especially that he was so near him. All that he had was advantage over Pig now, and yet, he didn't want to lure him off-guard, not yet. Pig's problem was he believed that Don was, at most, interested in Bones, and that he was an inconsequential creature, incapable of creating much interest. And yet, in actual fact, Don was interested in him first of all, and Bones would come later. Don reasoned, "I have to extinguish his threat before I tackle Bones." Three minutes after the last whistle Bones bustled in a rush from behind the small bush ahead of the bench. And then he started behaving like someone who was searching for a pin in a bucket-full of grounded meal flour, as if he feared being jumped at from the bare lawn covered ground surrounding the bench or as if he was seeing some white ghost of Lillian's coming for a little tat-a-tat with him. He would take a step forward and then wait, listening intently and then he would turn his head to focus at where the two were. After a minute or so, he would take a step backwards and another forward, and then waited. When he was satisfied his guard was at their agreed position and that there was no potential threat coming from Don, he

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slouched slowly behind the bench so that whoever was to come from the main gate wouldn't see him. Meanwhile, his guard, Pig, was now enjoying puffing at his usual marijuana cigar, obviously satisfied with his groundwork and waiting for Don, too. Don waited too. Don ran across his mind the white and black notes of what he was going to do, on the chess board in his mind. He was back on the chess board, looking at likely moves when his opponent was waiting for and analysing the moves he was likely to make. He felt he had to wait a bit until maybe when he had decided it was time to make his first move and they were waiting too, Bones and Pig. He visualises seeing his hand closing around the Horse, and instantly, his opponent' eyes are now focused on his hand... maybe with surprise. Maybe with fear because he never thought there was such a move. Was it complacency as such, on Bones' side? Don makes his L and rests his Horse in a position protective of his King, and as well terminal to Bones' king. Have I killed the game off? What is the behaviour of my opponent? Has Bones given up? Is there a way out of the mess for him? Can Bones turn the tables? Likely moves, likely questions, too! But Don waited. He questioned himself some more, and he answered himself; until about a dozen of minutes before eleven. A dozen of minutes before eleven, the whole park is silent, and the night is darker and tries to shine, it tries to remember, about the daylight since waned and fails to do so. Meanwhile Don’s first move comes underway. Out of his trousers' pocket comes this friendly lovely metallic object, silvery, cold, useful, fitted with a very strong silencing device. He fishes it out of his

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pocket, with deliberate casualness, as if he is fishing out a few worthless coins won after a boring betting game. And then he has it fitted nicely in his right palm with his forefinger enringing the trigger hammer and the muzzle of the gun is pointing at Pig's temple. Pig is starring at the gun without seeing it. His forefinger starts moving backwards and within a fraction of a second, he has the bullet burning through bones and flesh. He doesn't hear the report of this bullet that he has fired into his confused and weary brain, smacking right into his solar plexus. But Pig starts sliding down, in an uncanny prelude to an orgiastic collapse onto the ground. Pig's eyes are bulging wide open as if they could almost pop out of their sockets with surprise. Don has fired only one bullet but it feels to him as if he has not stopped firing the bullets on the collapsing Pig, and Pig seems to be a piece full of bullets; and Don can't even dodge the bullets, for they have his name written on them. He has short changed Pig out of his life unlike Mosquito who four days before, if he had guts enough, he could have disposed him off. Mosquito was just outside his favourite Outing place, in uptown Harare and Don had that metallic friend when he approached Mosquito. He had used that metallic friend only to scare Mosquito out of any move that could have disposed him off. He pushed Mosquito onto the driver's seat of his car and told him to drive them to his place. It was already a greying evening, so they didn't create any interest from the pass-byes as they drove to his place; the constant grey of the roads seemed as if they were consorting with instants of time. They arrived at Don’s place without any problem from Mosquito. He tied Mosquito's hands to his back. And then they had waited for night and the night

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surely came and saw them at the park, the park that still remembered how it had stolen Lillian from him! He had looked into Mosquito's eyes, and realised that this man was so afraid, this Don in Mosquito's eyes, but no one else knew, not even Don. Mosquito's shirt was peppered with bullets of water. His breathing was urgent, mouthy, and panicky. Don had no business in reassuring Mosquito, he was wordless and his mouth was dry as heat jumped out of the corners of his mouth when he opened it. Mosquito gasped a bit and sucked in like a baby to moisten his mouth. Don had the knife dancing in his right hand and he was brandishing this silver knife like a brand new heart. Thinking to himself; he might as well cut himself as contorted sorrows still twitching through hardly visible healing inside shook him but he stopped in time to sew his heart and mind's cracked shards. The anger inside stood though, leaking, infernal, stinky and dangerous... Mosquito had uttered all the squeaks he could have had but Pig hadn't uttered even a yell. Pig had died, taking a bulletstoned-soul to whatever-heavens, taking a blood-whatevermessage-of-thuggery to whatever-hell, or heaven? And then Don is moving off to his side. He takes out of Pig's trousers pockets the revolver and shiny-sharp knife and another minute, he is moving off the opposite direction to which Bones waited. He is overwhelmed in the rage that comes after one's feedings; somewhat still hungry with anger. The touch of the night's wind on his back is an old friend saying well done, and he is riding homely on this neighbourly wind.

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At eleven on the dot he is back at the park through the main gates, and he is back for instant justice long since denied to him. The rage inside him is burning to seize and crash the pain out and the more he pines to crash this pain out the more the void inside him transcends the entrails of his hollow endeavours. He has no pity, he is grinding with dark matter to the proportion of the depth with which this rage intruded inside him. This rage inside is now a hurricane, an ancient glacier crumbling, accelerating, scattering into billions of pieces roused by the raw dark energy locked in every of those billion pieces. Hurling with a roar of thunder and this raw dark energy, this anger inside these pieces is cutting him into pieces, leaving him bleeding through his veins and smallest capillaries- bleeding in that corner where he once connected to this organism that was once him. The raw dark energy is no longer a wave, but a wall of water, a flood like a circling maelstrom broiling over the bream, and his heart is blind with fury of void and chaos. Has anyone ever wanted something such that they feel lifeless when they don't have it? Have they ever wanted something to the extent that it becomes an obsession when they don't have it? Have they ever wanted something to the extent of the faith with which we all believe in and give allegiance to the almighty? It is a strange, yet also, a beautiful kind of wanting? He wanted to hold Bones in his arms, hug him, feel him, like we all hold objects we dearly love, like we hold young tots with love but he loathed him. He so loathed Bones yet the smile he would give him, so assuring, but if one is to delve deeper into the smile's many faceted layers, it rather would be cold, silent and dead if death really is that silent, cold and dead.

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When he has Bones in his hands, he wants to dissect Bones into pieces; pieces like these small tiny innumerable pieces he knew his being is now really all about. These pieces would amount to the anger that he behoves for Bones. He wants to hear Bones crying until hopelessness, he has to play around his mind upon a thousand variations of the pain he wants Bones to go through. He wants to enjoy his last faint cries like we all enjoy our favourite songs especially when they are coming in the voices that we like. He wants Bones’ last faint cry to take over the form of a sudden and delirious encompassing of his still crimson bright hurt and scour it until a clean slate has been left glowing on its place. He is on a deadly and vicious position, hounding menacingly Bones' King with his two marauding Bishops, a Queen and a Castle. It is a matter of time before Bones bows out and waits with surrendered hands for easy pickings. "Will it be the Bishop, the Castle, or my Queen, that I am going to use to disarm Bones?" He could even afford the luxury of choosing which to move to attack Bones' King. He didn't even need to protect his own King, Bones didn't have anything to attack him with. He is courteous as he approaches the bench though, for he doesn't want to give Bones cause enough for alarm. When he arrives at the bench he does spent some minutes looking around as if he is not so sure that Bones is behind the bench and that, Bones' guard is now in his own world, though understandably, this fat pomp didn't know about that, yet. The curiosity that seems to kill inside seeks that place behind the concrete bench. He comes to the bench and he could see Bones lying low behind

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the bench. He sits down on the bench and in a conversational voice, he says. "Come out of your cover, Bones." Of which Bones ignores him. Maybe he is still thinking that I am just bluffing him. But, in that same voice again, he says. "You are behind the bench, Bones." And then, he adds. "We shouldn't be wasting time in these stupid formalities, I'm sure you know that, Bones, don't you know that?" Bones comes up from behind the bench. He is inwardly shaking with fear, outwardly though, he maintains a brave face. Don gives Bones a piece of a paper and a pen and tells him, in that same conversational voice. "I want you to confess of the killing of Lillian." Bones howls with laughter, laughing uproariously in a harsh crackling voice, his triumphant laughter over Don’s obvious greenness. The laughter makes Don think of a herd of wild horses. Not how the herd of wild horses would sound, but more how it might look away over the horizon. Bones laughs as though someone else has said something too true to be fun. Bones' laughter rises and becomes almost hysterical, and then, instantly, he is as silent as the silence of small birds that have been touched by the shadow of a hawk. It makes Don grimace nervously. And then Don starts laughing, too, of all things; he feels he has to laugh. Nursing a glass of guilty, just for the laughter, laughing his brash-red conceit, so he laughs for feeling all the more confused, disturbed. Bones' insane laughter has poisoned his brain and now Bones' laughter is now black smoke in his thoughts. He laughs at this, at Bones' way of showing horror. There are many ways of showing horror.

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There is the Belsen or horror of the mind; the Belsen of fact, the Belsen to destroy, prevent and ponder upon, the Belsen of exhibition and peepshows. There is also the Belsen of laughter. Don laughs all the more; it is so unbelievably funny for him to discover that Bones is still thinking he is only trying to whistle him off his high-horse-attitude. It is so comical for him to realise Bones is still thinking that he has some cover from his guard, Pig. And yet he knows this final attempt at greatness by Bones is just a show, because, although Bones might be good, Bones was too fraudulent to be that great. In order to prove him wrong he takes out of his trousers' pocket the revolver and knife which he had taken from Pig, and still tell him, in that conversational voice, and rather impishly. "These are all yours with warmest sincerity from your friend but first of all you have to write down the confessions, Bones." Don flicks these words out of his mouth from one side to another side, like unwanted food. He has Bones this time, he knows it as every form of stubbornness sips out from Bones. And like a small child before a spanking-with-rod-punishment, also thinking that there is no pitting for leaders' powers against lordly designs, Bones asks Don, meekly. "What happened to my guard, Don?" Of which he knows the answers, his question, Don thought, as a gift, is mine to unpack. But I don't want to unpack it for him. "Maybe he is trying to shoot the moon by distracting me with questions and observations." Yet, the Bones' voice is as dark as the graveyard's soils where they buried Lillian. Bones is now closer to tears, his mien all grief and pity as he contemplates what that means to him. It is the first time Bones is brought to this low and Don could almost feel sorry for Bones,

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but deep down he knows that if Bones is given a string to hold onto, he could use it to his greatest advantage and strike out with all the raw force in his grasp. In Bones, Don had found a creature that loved the architecture of death, has had brief touches with life but an intense love for death. He doesn't have to rule Bones entirely out of the game, yet. He can only do that when he has had Bones into bits and pieces. When Bones realises the futility of his situation he starts writing down the finer details to what had transpired between them, and meanwhile, Don is standing behind Bones so that he could be able to read what Bones is writing, and as well, keep guard over him. It is most likely that Bones still has a pistol on him. It takes Bones about twenty minutes to write down what had entirely transpired between them with his signature nicely ruling off those horrible things. After which Don commands Bones to surrender his pistol before he surrenders the document and the pay-off monies, and to show Bones that he is deadly serious, and knowing that he might make a move to do him away, he rests on his head, heavily, the muzzle of that metallic shinny friend. Just on top of his ears and command him in a steely deadly voice. "I will blow your brains to kingdom-come if you try anything silly, Bones." He has now turned himself into a sinuous ridge of high pressure and play Bones like a shuttlecock. Bones' eyes are bloodshot, somewhere between scared and crazy. What move could Bones have made? He was now looking terribly frightened, yet accepting of his fate. A part of Don says. Let him go, he doesn't deserve to die through your hands. But he knows he can't allow this throb of strength, of hope, he can't

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even allow himself the cushion of memory. Of-course, he is surprised by this visit of automatic guilty. He is surprised by this stir of a social conscience in the form of marbles but the hunger inside him drives him on. His mind can't really give shelter to this yawp of doubt. When he got the pistol with the confessions which were all enclosed together with a million dollars in the briefcase, he embarks on his last calling of this night.

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Chapter 16

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Suppose someone has been tasked to slaughter a goat for the coming festival day, the morrow day. Obviously he has two hands, and the rest is imaginary. The task like so many other tasks is simple, but not the choice, and yet, the person knows that the best thing to do would be to just grit their teeth and take the plunge. They take their sharpest knife, cut down some leaves to cover the ground where they are going to slaughter this goat on. It already is tied by the throat so they lead it to the slaughter place and then they have it on its back, legs pointing upwards, tied securely, horns boring into the soil. They have their hand descending onto its small tender throat, the knife slicing, gliding in... The blade is delivered, and delivered, and delivered… they can't even let the pain inside them drown in the goat's burning air before they gut it whole like they are gutting a pumpkin. The gullet falls free, the viscera rolls, the neck is slit, split, the head slips, twists and plops at their feet. They are in the ninth ward, a super dome, a pleasure dome, they are seeing body pieces floating around in blood like bloated angels in saran wrap. But they think to themselves, "So this is what it means to kill? What is the sky thinking, why are we humans below?" The leaves covered ground is so full of blood; this gushed blood is covering the leaves red, even their clothes. It is a bloody alchemy that oozes around, lasciviously blending into a messy, bloated bloody world. That smell of slick warm blood- its slightly bitter coppery sick odour and, it gets closer and closer, an insane

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tingle on the skin, the human-hot heat heaving out of the wound. Are they smiling as they do this? Is it satisfying? They remove the goat's skin, another moment there are cutting off its legs and then they work on the insides of its stomach bag. The juicy flesh and pulp of blood has made their fingers too slippery for such work of cutting the goat into pieces. Raw meat scatter all over the leaves covered ground, not to forget the frightful dish of offal-olid olio of orts..., even though it's not yet cooked. The thinking of which whacks their mouth with saliva. Everything is now out in the open! Talking of bareness, barrenness…, one gets this kind of emptiness as if they are suffering from the haemorrhage of the soul. This is one feeling that lives, crawls, creeps and tickles with the stubbornness of lice in the subconscious part of the brains, and at times, or in the long run, it dissolves into the whole making, rendering it to be the absolute feeling. One wanted peace after everything, isn't it? They have climbed that hill; the one they thought was the last one and they are now on top of it..., what do they see ahead? Can they start enjoying themselves behind that hill? Can they be their old-self again? Have they really travelled that far to the south? Are they in this nightmare that happens only to them? Do they also know that it is too late to walk back into everyday life? And that, after a long hunger, there is always ecstatic eating! Do they have peace? Peace that is not heavy silence but quiet with the quietness of little sounds, of the birds, of the breeze. So much for ambition in such narrow limits! How can man achieve anything, really? It is like playing a game of bubble-dice in the bowl of a curvy hewed-off moon. Our very achievements rise up into the blue

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ether like the dice and testify against us and guilty become the basis of our masochistic, alienated being. Men open up their mouths and jeer at us, at our very achievements, "You are a killer, you are wicked, you are mad!" Even though we cry out? "We had been wronged." We get no response, no sympathy, no understanding because our hands are dirtied with blood. It is the shadow of darkness that is inside us that is crying: no peace, no response, and no rest. It says; only hate, discord, discontent; no dreams, no love, no patience. We are some lost identity or the pieces of it that sits on the sides of the road where we lived. Some of these pieces are besides all the other highways that have been ours in other lives and other years. We are a stranger pregnant with the otherness... It is this other feeling for Don doesn’t want to rest. He abhors resting, he wants to keep moving, and he can't even stand the eerie harrowing sounds arousing from the wilderness of his very heart. It is this feeling that has grown in the space that's there in him; a place that's neither remainder nor promise but carried on things that were old, on things that have lined up along his path. It is this feeling that smells like an unknown dormant town with no people characters but just colours of the lost. Oddments of that bitter, bitter longer ago, resurfacing again. These oddments rhymes inside him, are like ever-including strange clamours of some distant drums: drums that someone else is beating with reckless deviant passion. And in so doing, the music being made by these drums is bestowing bright libertine shadows into the inner landscapes of his life, making his inner landscape vibrate endlessly with noisy lunacy into an altogether

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new different measure. Mourning and shrieking..., the drums mourning and shrieking. The voice sounds in these shadows are voices of zombies or doppelgangers straight out of the coffins. Sometimes the shadows seem to rhyme like banshees with their night-blighting caterwauls over immutable death. The shadows' chests are open fields of sounds, the sounds of night birds in the distances, talking... or Lillian's shrieking as she is being raped and her muffled heart wrecking cries as she got sliced..., like pieces of bacon, off her beautiful face. Or setting into their routine of overnight flight, the green awns that have turned into a war torn zone in the dark skies, and the noise that they are making! His parents' horrible mind-bending cries as they got roasted in that fire into strange sights of half-burned ashylogs. The fire's crackling sounds and the smell of burning flesh and meat, wafting into his senses again; teasing him, tantalising him, invoking within him a devastating hunger to ravage. Again and again..., the hunger is so hot and dry like an arid desert landscape. Mosquito's gurgling like a chicken as he makes a farewell to this beautiful void, an excuse for life, known.., metaphorically living.., as life. He also knows that it wasn't a covert killing as such but a small war of some sort as every death contains the slaughter of us all. He can't even talk of Pig's short-lived surprise as his predicament was announced by his metallic friend and then, the terrible, terrible, agony drenched screams of Bones. Bones' unparallel wails of terror! Bones looks around with wide, wildly rolling eyes. Kicking and twisting, with sheen of raw energy that arches right there in

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naked air, begging "please don't kill me," "don't kill me", "please don't kill me." These are the words that have the force to shock but they do not shock Don. To Don, Bones seems to be saying, "don't Lillian me," "don't Mosquito me," "don't Pig me"...., nouns becoming verbs, as Bones cries like Boudica's shrieking chocks, refusing to submit to Don, his Rome. Which Braille of stars does the blind hand holding the knife reads across the ceiling of the sky? Has he really drunk a beakerfull of the old south? Deep down Don just needed to be loved to deepen his voice enough until it boomed and shouted and screamed as loudly so that he couldn't hear the death cries of all those that he now called enemies; his parents, Lillian, Mosquito, Pig, Bones, himself. With tremendous fury of the will to survive and for a moment, Bones breaks free, tries to bolt away but stops in his first stroke. He feels so dizzy, nauseous and sickly. Only his wide eyes stare above that mirthless grin implanted on his stubborn face and the rest of his face is blank. He raises his hand to the gaping wound on the throat in order to rein in the flow of blood... as he is still mumbling to himself for what could pass for speaking in tongues, like Moses, his voice is in his face. Blood is splattering all over his frame and Don’s too. The bench is laking in blood again, reflecting into prisms, a dark Christ bleeding firmament. A small wind works the leaves; it explains the leaves... And when Bones touches his gutted throat, a look of sheer hatred, tinged with terror glistens on his black face. Don still has the knife in his hands, dripping with blood; hypnotised sort of into some kind of frenzy-free existence by the

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beautiful intonations of Bones' plaintive, twisting and compelling cries. The cries that are drifting into his awareness are like the wistfulness that all this were ended. He knows it but do not understand why Bones still has the things that he wants. He doesn't even know what it is that he wants from Bones, but it is something that was stolen from him by the killing of Lillian, the burning to ashes of his parents, the killings of Mosquito and Pig, and worse still, by the slaying of Bones! And all the noises that they were making that seem to have surrounded him, making him feel as if he has absented himself from himself. He starts whispering, then whistling like Pig, craving the sounds he is making. Incredibly, whilst Bones is still on his feat, he raises his eyes; see Don’s eyes, as if for the first time and as primordial elements linking through fingers of time, life spurts out of his eyes. It is like a sudden drop of a thousand stars and seems to fall, in that entire terrible explosion, in the black membranes of his brains, onto his feet, and Don, for his life, begins to sway unconsciously to the rhymes of his whistles like a demented Baboon swaying and wailing at the sight of blood. The blood seems to have a tune of its own, the tune of fragmented music of a broken flute playing on top of that small lake in the park. Don is Bones; he seems to be breathing the impossible air of two human landscapes at once, like when imagination has met its destroyer: death and life. And there seem very little difference between death and life here, one seems to mimic the other, as when time and space has merged into thought, and thought has mutated into silent action.

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And then, the slower and slower, quieter and quieter gurgling wails, Bones whispers again and again, still pushing and shoving all the way up to being alive, so softly, "please don't kill me," "don't kill me," "please don't kill me." The words that disturbs the night! He rattles air out through pursed lips like a horse, and with eyes now locked on the ground ahead of Don, the fall backwards..., slowly, so slowly, so very slowly. And then, his last faint sighs..., "please don't kill me…" Death is proud, needy, commanding respect, shrouding a paralysed cadaverous body like a prized possession. Not that he is stopped crying..., he is still crying. "Please don't kill me," "don't kill me," "please don't kill me." Don blinks a bit to push away the crying, but still, Bones' cries mob him. They are all of them crying and he is the only one who is hearing their cries for they are crying inside his heart. The noise swells into a raging sibilant mass like the flooded Zambezi River as it sweeps him away, the black flood waters of Zambezi River reverberating with doubt and fear. He is swept on and on as animal tracks becomes streets and streets. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? One question asked and asked and asked… Darkness snacks up on him as he waves at these killing fields of the park, the past swirling and swirling within this unusual cauldron circle of his being. Its echoes are trapped as sibilance in the tunnel that has brought him crash landing into this lost domain of ritual and trauma. He is a casual walker among those moaning and whining carcasses blinded by the almost empty streets. Their voices are little feathers whirling

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around him seeking moisture that seem long gone from the streets. In the streets, Harare burns itself to a brightness kidnapped by light here and light there. Harare, of empty streets that are under the spell of the night, where the drone song of a single car in the far off motorways would climb up to the sky once in a while to bloat the carcasses' moans. But, after the car has gone, the carcases' whines and moans could be heard downwind Harare like slightly unsettling piles of dried minnows. There is no question of getting rid of them for it is a firmly rooted underworld. Do I see light from the coming morning or am I still dreaming? Or it's the night itself that is dreaming.... Maybe there are Cab drivers, who could take him to the heart of the city, but he doesn't flag for them. He doesn't even take the subways and romanticise this feeling of being alone. He is wrapped in clear black air, evolving night-deeper into what the night still holds, the night leading him onto streets and streets. He keeps walking, the yellow sometimes willing to pull him on to oncoming traffic, he would concentrate, forcing himself into pin point energy. In this moment of full fear he knows lays a gallon of calm he didn't know of all along. Houses, business and high rise buildings, jutting out into the dark passageways of the streets, are now crowding the roads as he approaches the city centre, lacking in rhythm or pattern, or personality. There are doors marked shortcuts, doors left open, causing draughts of warmth and shards of shadows. These are doors that he suspects he wasn't really supposed to take, and of these doors, the doors nobody guards, the doors the night folds in.

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It is the still of the night but where does he thinks he is going? The night streets slowly changes and are now filled with randomness. One door halts him, and Ads above the windows whispers, "eat me, drink me, buy me, buy me please," growing bigger, growing smaller. He is trying to focus on the white and yellow shapes on the walls to blot out the noise, trying to remember why he turned right here, right here into this destroyed road instead of to the left. The city's afternoon smell of car exhaust, concrete, burnt sugar, scaffolding, cooking oil still lingers in the night air. He should be enjoying peace of mind, experiencing the new start and new loves, but he is in utter distress. He is trembling wreckage- a motley lot, endlessly gazing into a beckoning void and his soft clay feet and hands are feeling, gripping, trying..., tranquillising. What can he call as his own? That poet Browning again, and would he suffice and say? "All theirs none yours but the glamour! Theirs each low word that won me Soft look that found me love's and left What else but you - the tears and clamour That's your very own! Undone me Ghost bereft!" It is his mind that has always been just ahead of him, two paces in front; now it has taken a long curve, and is following behind. His memory is shot through; he can't even remember if he is dead or not. It's not his body that matters anymore; it's his mind he is waiting for as it takes the long curve. He keeps moving on; he is almost there.

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There ahead of him, is the making of his destination. It is a building, am I in for repairs? Lillian told him, at the grave place, that he had to go home for repairs. The taxi rank near, at the Charge Office Bus Stop, is peopled a bit, by night beggars, thieves, vagabonds. He is not afraid; he is going to find water to quench off this horrible nothingness. So heavily burdened after carrying such a freight of dreams on this journey between worlds, weighed down by nightmares, he knocks in, he gets in, he says. "I have come to surrender myself for the killing of Bones and his two friends." Deep down in his heart he also wishes their deaths could make him as ready to move on as he had looked forward to. His mind wishes it could be cleansed and washed of things that he had left behind. In the places where he feels there should have been things, there is nothing, but blackness, a dry emptiness. He focuses his eyes. He is at the police station! It's obvious he didn't come to say he is sorry. The police station is not the centre of anything, or anywhere. He is just hallucinating, but how can he explain the blood that is all over his frame and the knife still dripping blood in his hands, a briefcase. He carries a briefcase, a toe-tag of after-life... but why is he at the police station...? This act of questioning loosens the stray bits of his mind. His brain, every sense jailed tightly behind the fine bars of his nerve endings, is now a galaxy of space debris and long dead desires. Even a bad movie has an ending!

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literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with over 20 books published. He writes in English and Shona. His work has appeared in over 400 journals and anthologies from over 27 countries, translated into Spanish, French and German. Find his books here:http://www.africanbookscollective.com/ authors-editors/tendai-rinos-mwanaka.

Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd Chitungwiza Zimbabwe

Mwanaka, Rinos. A Dark Energy, Mwanaka Media and Publishing Pvt Limited, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a publisher, editor, mentor, thinker,



Straddling literary genres this novel explores themes related to family, love, politics, life and existence. It is the story of a man pushed to breaking point and how that, inevitably, impacts society.

A Dark Energy

Don is the only child of a happy family full of love, but it does not last. At 6 years old Don’s parents are burned in a fire through arson, and suspects his father’s brother is the culprit. As the family fights over his father’s wealth nobody wants anything to do with Don, particularly the Uncle whom he suspects of arson and ends up taking most of his father’s wealth. After a difficult upbringing in orphanages and an abusive old man Don starts working at the C.I.O (Central Investigations Organisation), Zimbabwe’s security intelligence organisation, as an agent. Despite this apparent success Don never deals with the existential dilemmas he has as a result of his childhood. He becomes a loner, he doesn’t believe in love, marriage, or happiness until he meets Lilian. Soon after he is called into the president’s office to cover up an extramarital affair. When a political rival of the president, the corrupt defence minister, ‘bones’ gets wind of the cover up and unsuccessfully tries to blackmail Don something terrible happens and Don becomes thrown back into the darkness.

A Dark Energy

Tendai Rinos Mwanaka