Scribbles

  December Due Date: 31/3/23 Genre: TBC I When she woke up the silence was gone, replaced instead by loud pulsing noises. They travelled through the walls and hit her squarely between the eyes. She blinked. One blink at time she though. Each  a deliberate act of manifestation as she wished the sounds away. The same deliberation she had had last night as she had peeled off each item of clothing from her body. First to go was the t-shirt her mother had given her in one of those acts of generosity that her mother was wont to have. The acts were not commonplace, no her everyday acts of were reserved for her grandkids. There was barely ever anything left for the mothers of those children. “Oh, take this.” It wasn’t a request. The Oh delivered in a flat insistence that brooked no argument. Not that she would have said no. That would have led to an argument. An argument she would surely lose. For what could she say? That her mother’s clothes had no place on her body? Or perhaps she w...

Due Date: 3/5/23 Prompt Genre: TBC It has been a long day. I was hoping for a short night. Anna and I have been fighting again, we never seem to stop. She had accused me of not listening. I had accused her of selfishness, of being a liar. Her retort had been that I have the emotional range of a robot. She was wrong. She always was. Not for lack of trying on her part, but Anna was a dirty fighter and an even dirtier human being. When we fought, she did not hold back using everything I had ever shared with her in a cocktail of hurt that brought up every single one of my past traumas. That was my fault. Anna was my best friend and I told her everything. Everything about my family, my friends, work. Once I started I could not stop.  My period started when I turned fifteen, the year I met Anna. She had transferred to our school. Telling everyone that her family had been killed in a car accident. Their Range Rover wrapped around a eucalyptus tree like a macabre piece of origami. She had ...

Due Date: 21/2/23  Beau’s Choice Genre: TBC The story of the dragon began as most stories did, on the lips of my grandfather as he smacked his thin lips, sliding his rather long pink tongue out and into the succulent flesh of the mango. He hadn’t taken his eyes off it. Working his way slowly from the tip to the fattened sides, first he took a large bite to rip it open, then he placed his mouth in a suction and sucked as lustfully and as hard as he could. This worked best with overripe mangoes. It saved him the trouble of having to bite into the mango and making a mess. He had told me when first I had brought him mama’s black dish filled to the brim with the first mangoes of the season. Mangoes were precious to grandfather and me. We would spend a long moment picking just the right one and as we worked through fruit after fruit grandfather would patiently answer my every question, something that would have been impossible anywhere else.  Not in the early morning while he tended...

  14/2/23  The Story of My Childhood  Kim’s choice Genre: Genre Switch  The sun hung loose in the sky, it could have been midday or late afternoon. It was hard to tell when the sun never set. Instead, it dangled in the bright sky, so loose and flimsy that my mother worried it would fall to the earth all of a sudden, leaving us in total darkness. Not that that could ever happen. Not now anyway, Sekuru Jo had long ago secured the sun with, if you cared to listen to him, ‘nothing but his wits and good looks’ or if you listened to my father, tricks and lies, for he had bargained with the sun and won. For 600 days the sun would neither rise, nor set. Instead, it would hang midair, halfway between setting and rising. Mother was one of those people that considered the worst thing and turned it to reality. Take the time she convinced us, Maidei and me. That I had a pair of horns growing out of my chest and proceeded to strap my chest down in layers of white linen. For days a...

  6/2/23 The Story of My Childhood Ari’s pick Genre: Freelance Had I known how naked I would be I would have driven to your house, hurled the door open, and stripped myself of all my clothing. It would not matter how many people were about. I would bare my breasts, my tiger-clawed stomach, and the excesses of my bottom to your world. My worn grey knickers ripped in the places that matter. That is what speaking about my childhood feels like. All my parts are wide open for my examination, then yours.  I should start by saying that my brain refused to cooperate, It occurred to me that to start, truly start I should start at the beginning. Not the night I came mewling into the world into the arms of a girl not yet ready to be a mother, forced to mature by her circumstance. The romance of her situation was dead as she stared into my scowling face, features withered and worn from writhing through her birth canal, barely making it alive into a world I must have asked to see for why e...

  Waiting (Pt. 1) For a long time, we only had the veranda. When the sun rose, we would polish it, and when we were younger, my mother would polish it. She always woke up earlier than my sister and me, and by the time the sun was high in the sky, the veranda would gleam. Dazzling with a silvery glare. We would sit on the edge, drinking tea, having lunch, or watch the neighbours go by. Sometimes we would watch the peddlers sell their wares, " Bhodhoro zai! Bhodhoro puti!" But we were not allowed to sit, but merely perch on the edge, for fear it would undo all of my mother's hard work. I perched on it when I waited for the boy from down the way. The boy with the broad shoulders, tapered waist, and white shining teeth. He lived five, six, seven houses down and made me wait. For a glimpse of him as he came back from school, as he came back home from boarding school, from the university. Made me wait to see him, but most of all to grow up from when I was seven to the day I t...

  Auntie grew up in a far-off communal land, the youngest in her family. Her parents were past their fifties when she was born. Old and past the age of chasing after a newborn and changing napkins. The moment she arrived, her mother passed her on to her older sister, Chido, who was twenty at the time and ready to start her own family.  Save for the occasional drop-ins to breastfeed her child, her mother remained a distant stranger whose sustenance flowed full and rich into Auntie’s eagerly suckling mouth. Auntie was a pitiful looking child always hungry. Hungry for her mother’s milk, for her visits were few and far in between, hungry for a mother she never truly knew. A mother who until the day she died remained a stranger a mother she never knew. At the time of her death, she had been dead to Auntie for a while. She had been dead for twenty-two years exactly.   To Mai Chido, the day Auntie was born was as far as she was concerned, an unburdening. It was not that she did ...

  I grew up a lot. I have memories of growing up. Of marking time as the year I grew up. I grew up in the year I went to high school. I grew up in the year I left that high school for another high school. I grew up when my parents got divorced. I grew up when I found out the reason for my parent’s divorce. I grew up again in the year I truly found out the reason for their divorce. In the year, my father died I grew up. In that year, we marked time. We dreamt of Paris. We dreamt of my driver’s license, my marriage and my career. We had big dreams. The spaces around us were small and limited. On the horizon you could see those that had let go of their dreams. Walking listless and jubilant. Shouting greetings and acknowledgments from sunup to sundown. Crowded around something, always something. A ball, a game of draft, a game of something. Life an endless game that they had lost. A game that started from sunup to sundown. And still, we dreamt, we plotted. I see that now. I didn’...

I think I write about fulfillment a lot, and if not the writing of it. The thinking of it. what does it take to get to the place of happiness? For me and for you? Is it in transient things? A lingering look from a lover. The clutch of a baby’s thumb around your finger. The smell of freshly cut grass on a rainy day. Or is it in the things that stay with you? The feeling of contentment that comes with a good relationship? The ability to raise your hand in a meeting and articulate your thoughts. I have constantly said that I struggle with self-expression and this struggle has led me to a place where I struggle with self-actualisation. What I have never asked myself was the why behind this. I have been seeing a woman. A delightful old woman that reminds me of my grade 3 teacher. A woman whose kindness has stayed with me through the years. Her impression of kindness eases the feeling of wretchedness and unworthiness that followed me as I snaked my way to school. I say snaked becau...

I have long battled with the concept of being understood, of fitting in, of knowing who I was. I don't think I ever quite fit in anywhere. Writing this I fear that perhaps you will see me painting myself as a victim and feel sorry for me. Anger towards me or even saddened, but I grapple with emotion because emotions have long been my friend and foe. They stay close and at the same time so distant. They sit in my throat waiting to burst out. but sometimes, they wait so long I swallow them and hurl them out at the most inopportune time. But they come and they go. Alien and unnoticed. Growing up I was different. A kid in a township, living a double life. Shackled to the dreams of my father and my mother's incessant search for something different. Shuttled to and from private school surrounded by pale glowing skin and golden tresses endless in their length and shedding everywhere. Or so it seemed. A childhood of watching brunettes happily munching at thick braids and endless Sa...

I do not know when I realised my brain was wired this way. Long silences stretched into moments that buzzed with sound. The incessant dripping of the tap. The electric hum of the fridge. Forever growing louder until there was no space left in my brain. Voices whispered in my head. Shadows whizzing in and out of my peripheral vision.  There was someone in here. Someone watching. They didn’t speak. They waited. Waited for me to be alone. For those quiet moments at night when the world slept and my thoughts crept in. my heart rate spiking as I imagined the things within and without. Mama had warned me about the silence and the shadows. Had warned me that they moved when I slept. That they rose and crept closer as I dreamt. I could never see them. Except when I let them. When I let the shadows slip into the consciousness of my dreams. They would cajole. They would coerce, but most of all they would wait . Wait for me to sink deeper into my subconscious wait for me to ...

What is it about my job that has stopped me blogging? I could do all my work in my sleep Unlike what my lanky A’Level Accounting teacher tried to drill into me, practical accounting is not at all that hard. One could even be tempted to say that it’s so repetitive, it is boring. I could do it all in my sleep in the last half of the month I spend the first half justifying my salary. Monitoring systems that run themselves and making sure that people see things in ways that hopefully do not contradict my view of how things should run. I could do it all in my sleep in the last half of the month whilst taking hour long power naps I would justify the nap by saying that I work better when my subconscious is fully engaged in the task at hand. After all me and 80% of the world’s population have our eureka  moments whilst dreaming about fluffy clouds and purple elves. And if this doesn’t work I would point out to him that Einstein did his best work whilst horizon...