The Inside: Making Mad Choices
The Camissa Dome lies, like a huge, shiny pimple, on the top of a long and sandy slope, that – in aeons past – used to be known as Table Mountain.
The Dome itself is more of a three storied hill mound of solar mirrors and smart glass, with very few entrances, either in or out.
None for those on the ground floor, the Level One Bottom Level dwellers.
A safety feature, I’ve been told, as power comes from occupying the high ground. We need to keep everyone safe.
The sinking sun still burns at the carcinomas on my face and, knowing I have limited living time left, I hurry inside. My AI chainsaw, Atropos, swings painfully against my ageing right hip, on an insufficiently taut shoulder strap.
But it’s the two birds following me, that I’m most worried about.
What do you do, when you know you’re dying?
Do you go mad? And is this what madness feels like?
Why else would these two big birds have followed me in from the Wild Outside, all the way to our small home cubicle on Level Two, within this Giant and sterile Dome? More to the point, though – why can no one else fucking seemingly see them? Are they avian avatars, or psychotic harbingers of my pending death?
Our small home unit shrinks further, as Thandi steps inside to sit opposite me – back from her day overseeing titrated watering, within the Dome wheat house. Even the rigid grey ceiling, two meters above our heads exactly, looks closer to my gaze, as if it is slowly, slowly sinking downwards, ready to crush the tops of our heads, then our bodies, and, lastly, our twitching legs…
Thandi’s steady gaze, however, is squarely on my face.
There’s not even the flicker of a glance upwards at the shrinking ceiling – or sideways, to the half metre long black and white birds perched painfully, one on each of my shoulders.
Shit, Thandi clearly can’t see them either.
I rub the increasingly bizarre and rough contours of my pale and bearded face, blooming with skin death from a life hunting wild wood, on the dreaded sun-bleached Outside. I no longer dare look in the mirror, at an increasingly frightening stranger.
But Thandi’s gaze seldom falters…she sees me, without flinching.
My shoulders sag under the weight of a white-necked raven perched on each – I remember seeing similar birds in clips of the animals that used to live in the Outside, now almost all long gone, from increasingly hot and dry skies.
How can these ravens be so fucking heavy – and painfully sharp clawed, if they’re just ghost-birds?
Castor, the slightly heavier bird on my left shoulder, Krawws in my ear.
Thandi’s eyes do not flicker, as she sips from a tiny cup of water.
She clearly can’t hear the birds either.
Slowly, she lays down the empty blue cup between us. “No trees cut down and brought back at all, today, Frank? Atropos, your Super-Saw is here, I see, but where’s your zero-grav backpack?”
Atropos is switched off and silent, offering us no commentary.
I laugh wildly and swig from a much bigger cup – a stronger brew too, a bitter, fermented purple grape – a limited and expensive luxury I was indulging in, in the hope it might douse these two fucking birds from existence.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I met some outsiders and they had very little, so I gave them the backpack – and I left the tree, after they persuaded me to stop sawing it down – it was scarred, but alive, and still capable of growing. They said it could offer far more living, rather than dead. And you know how scarce, the wild trees are.”
As for me, no respite from my coming death awaits for me, I’m sure.
I wait for the censure, a sigh of exasperation – even of disappointment.
Instead, Thandi smiles.
Pollux flies over and perches on her left shoulder, but she pays him no heed.
“That was kind of you, Frank.” She reaches over and plucks my large bright green clay mug, to swig – and then cough, over her hasty slug.
I always enjoy her praise. But she normally doesn’t join me in drinking grapes. What’s up?
My Lotto Wife of five years, Thandi had come up to the middle zones after winning a Social Mobility Partnership ticket, leaving Bottom Level One, to her great relief, behind her.
I thought I’d grown to know her well, but she still surprises me with her reactions…Like the time I’d finally told her about those two young boy-men I’d killed, in a fight over a tree. I thought her support would ease my years of guilt – but she’d gone very quiet, for the better part of a month after that. Her anger, largely hidden, throbbed deeply.
That was the one, long time, that she struggled to look at me.
Today, at least, her anger seems far away.
“There’s more,” I say, still somewhat guardedly, “I promised to bring them some water around the same time next week, as there is so little moisture for them out there.”
“Outsiders!” Thandi slams down the now empty mug on our symmetrical, concentric ringed wooden table. Cheap internally grown stock, of course, not subject to the vagaries of a wild and external climate.
And yes, I know, outsiders are dirty and inferior, lacking the resources and skills to access the Dome…but Thandi never spoke of them in that way. Her animation is hiding something more, too?
Her dark face is flushed, her eyes dancing with a weird intensity and excitement.
What is up with her?
Castor flaps noisily onto her other shoulder, pirouetting clumsily to face me. Thandi’s shoulders fail to sag at all.
I look up. The room is still shrinking!
We have fifty centimetres, or less, of ceiling above our head. There’s no room for me to stand anymore, as the ceiling continues its relentless creep downwards.
She doesn’t see that either… she offers no consensual validation of this reality either.
I nod, “I think the Outsiders speak your other language.”
“isiZulu? That could have been our language, Frank!”
She pushes her chair back to stand, the ceiling now hovering barely above her skull.
I was wrong. Anger is never far away from her, just as guilt and cancer it is, that eats away at me. I should have tried learning to speak her home tongue when she tried to teach me, those heady first months after we met, but so few others of my other friends and companions spoke more than English – or, perhaps, Nuwe Afrikaans.
Castor and Pollux are back, perching painfully on my bent shoulders.
Thandi leans over the table towards me, her face fierce and focused. “You have three choices for what you promised those Outsiders next week, Frank…”
All three of us, birds included, look up at her.
“One. You can sit here and do nothing. Like you refused to learn the language of my birth.”
Ouch.
“Two. You can smuggle them out a jug of water and pat yourself on the back for the rest of your life, ever wishing you could move up – and join the affluent Elite, at the very top,”
“Or, what’s Option Three…?”
Deadpan, Thandi proceeds to lay out a plan of action that is both terrifying and yet, by her words, and suddenly calm demeanour, appears to be a seemingly reasonable option.
To me, it is absolutely anything but…Fucking hell. More madness. Everything lost – and for what gain?
The room has stopped shrinking, the ceiling halting at a height that is far too low for me to stand.
All nonsense. Test your senses, Frank. Everything is just the side effects of your growing death anxiety. Stand up and see!
I get to my feet slowly, eyes closed, waiting for my head to smash the ceiling.
Nothing. See?
I open my eyes.
The ceiling is at its usual two metres height, a comfortable twenty-centimetre clearance for my head. Aha, thought so – purely claustrophobia, an anxiety reaction precipitating sensory disturbance – nothing more, nothing less.
How can I give up everything I know – and the security of food, roof and walls? Time for some common sense.
I pick up my large green mug and hold it in front of me. “Option Two. Quite a few of the Outsiders should be able to drink from this…”
Thandi’s eyes close, a shadow of disappointment washes over her face. Still, I can also smell the sour grapes on her breath. She must be just a tad drunk…
In time, we do all come to our senses…
Ker-thunk!
Two big birds smash against the roof, shrieking loudly, spattering feathers and blood. Again and again, they batter their bodies and wings against the ceiling, the grey paint streaking a deeper red…
I drop the mug.
It shatters at my feet. Several black feathers float down onto the green shards.
Thandi is looking up – watching me again, eyes wide.
I cannot speak, and numbly hold up three fingers.
Fuck, sometimes, all you can do, is fly with the madness.
After all, I no longer recognise myself, and death takes everything, in the end.
***
The Inside/Out: Breaking Free: One week later. Pre-Dawn, Level Two, D-Block.
I still wish I could take the front fucking door, but…
“Now!” gestures Thandi across the dark Water Room towards me, her small frame propping the corridor door – both keeping watch – and readying herself for a quick getaway. Being both muscled and fat, she makes for a sturdy door jamb. Dressed all in black, she oozes a powerful, almost immovable presence.
Time to back out still, Frank? No crime committed.
Yet…
Just thumb print your regular daily water allowance into the demarcated unit, G413, from this huge drum and you drink and walk away, to live yet another day…
Castor shrieks in my left ear.
Yes, I know, fucking bird, a promise is a promise.
I rev Atropos up, my giant AI saw that can cut through anything, bracing my body as I aim for the weaker wall fusion point at hip height, between the grey Water Drum and the Dome skin.
Atropos yells a bright red, as her blade races fruitlessly over the joint unable to find purchase. Sparks sting my face, scarf wrapped as it is, to avoid camera scrutiny.
Maybe she can’t cut through everything? Stop, before it’s too late.
Through the whine of the blade, I hear Pollux shriek in my right ear.
No stopping now.
I almost lose my footing, as the blade bites and slows, pumping tingling resistance down the round haft and into my shaking hands, arms and biceps.
Rebrace yourself.
Try again…fuck, yes!
Atropos is carving open the wall, alongside the water tank, and the burning air is damp with acrid, escaping moisture. With a groan, the wall peels away in front of me and a small adjacent hole springs open in the tank, spouting spray at first – and then, releasing a sudden roar of water, as it ruptures.
A fountain of ferocious water, cascading out into the gloomy dawn.
Sirens shouting red murder. Now, it all kicks off.
The birds shoot off my shoulders, squawking, disappearing through the flapping hole in the wall, out into open sky.
I turn and gesture Thandi to follow me, as she stands at the door, beyond the angle of the room’s cameras.
It won’t take them long to figure out who I am – and that she needs bringing in too.
She shakes her head and waggles her fingers in a ‘give it to me’ gesture. Her eyes tell me, stick to the fucking plan.
I sigh, bend, and fling Atropos across the floor, on her smooth rounded hasp.
Thandi scrabbles, hefts up the Blade, shoulder straps her on and, with a brief wave, they are gone.
Will I ever see you again?
Focus, Frank.
Now, this is going to hurt.
I jump into the raging torrent and am swept outside, face slapped hard as I fall. Falling in dark wetness.
Uhnnnn…shit!
I’d tried to land on braced feet, but the water has swept my legs away.
I lie, arms and legs akimbo on what feels (thankfully) like sodden and yielding earth, as water sprays into my face, my scarf gone. Used to being water rationed, I force my choking mouth closed. Water can drown, water can kill, too.
Above the siren shrieks and cascading water, I hear Dome vents squeaking open, readying to launch hunter drones.
I sit up, preparing myself for capture. Probably bruised, but back not broken at least! Well, so much for joining the Elite – if I’m lucky, they’ll just send me down.
Into ‘Hell,’ as Thandi called it, ‘where you would have had to learn a local language.’
Level One. The Bottom.
Arms grab me roughly on both sides, yanking me to my feet.
I am frog-marched across the spongy ground until it firms up beneath my feet and I shake my eyes clear of water. My left eye hurts like hell and my cheek underneath puffs up; a price paid, for riding that cascade of water.
Hard to see anything, even with one good eye.
Dawn is leaking pallidly across the horizon, and I almost lose my footing, as we drop into a crevasse in the parched earth.
“Duck low to your right,” I hear a familiar voice rasp.
The arms have let me go, so I stoop under a rocky overhang and slowly straighten.
I can see – from the solar studded cells glowing inside – that we are inside a small and cosy cave, barely big enough to stand up in.
Akhona, the old Outsider woman, stands at the far wall, fingering her solar watch.
“We were waiting for you,” she says, “Right on time. But we expected you to take the much easier front door instead.”
They laugh.
How many?
On my right, I can see the younger man who, only last week, had given me the fever tree seed I have, snuggled in my pocket.
I have to turn, to see who is on my left.
A muscular young woman looks back at me, grinning. “Amahle, you gave me your zero-grav backpack, remember?”
She points. There is a huge clay gourd inside the backpack near the cave entrance, dripping water. She’s made a good haul. They seem very prepared.
The old woman holds the index finger on her left hand to her lips, while flapping her right hand at the ground, as if inviting us to sit.
“We must be quiet,” she whispers, “their sky-eyes are buzzing around, looking for you, right now.”
The cave smells musty and dank. My back and backside ache from the fall and a part of me wants to lie down on that rough earth, to rest and hide.
But slowly, and with reluctance, I shake my head.
“I can’t,” I whisper, “I told Thandi I would meet her by the tree I sliced. I gave her directions – and I need to see if she managed to get out – and if she’s safe.”
“Why is she not with you?” asks the young man, quietly.
He reminds me of those two young nameless boys whom I’d burned…
“I’m sorry, please let me know your name,” I ask him. Names matter.
He smiles, a short thin man with his ragged blue overalls over a red T-shirt. “Bonginkosi, but you can call me ‘Kosi. Why is your beloved not with you?”
Another subdued ripple of laughter, but I am in no mood to laugh.
“She wanted to cut open a hole for those at the Bottom of the Dome, for those who wished to run free. You can be sent down, for anybody mad or bad enough – but you seldom get sent up.”
“Are you sure the rotten have not already risen, right up to the very top?”
I ignore Akhona’s question.
Tramp of approaching feet on dry earth. Tense glances.
A bird whistle, and the group relax.
I too, am hugely relieved, to see that the two humans who straighten up after crawling inside, are familiar: the older man and a young woman, forming the same group of five, I’d met near that disputed tree, barely a week ago.
“Well met, both,” says Akhona, “I was starting to worry. Did you succeed?”
“Yes,” says the older man, “we managed to plant eight Jacaranda trees in the softened earth, before the eye-spies got too close. Trees that, in time, will burrow through their concrete and pipes, drilled deep into the water veins of our beloved Earth.”
“Good, job well done.” Akhona turns to look at me, “This is a sanctuary cave – and the stale water at the back is fine, once boiled. Are you sure you don’t want to have a drink and wait, until their sky eyes drop down again?”
“No, I must go. Now.”
Akhona shakes her head, “we cannot risk our family, until another day passes. We will join you at the tree tomorrow. Why must it be now, for you?”
I get down on my hands and knees. “Because, despite everything, I’m mad about her.”
Anger or no anger.
Just follow your madness.
The batty fucking birds have gone, at least.
Outside, the sun is bristling with heat, even though it still lies low in the east.
Just as well I know my way around, out here.
***
Lost.
Fucking lost.
You need two eyes for good depth perception and my left has closed completely, swollen and throbbing – the sand dunes around me all look the same, and I’ve given up trying to judge distances.
Finally, I sink to my knees.
Should have listened to the old woman.
Sorry, Thandi.
I get to die outside, at least.
Small, fucking hot, mercies.
***
Something nips my nose.
I am sprawled, left cheek down, in burning sand, and open a bleary, burning right eye.
Another nip.
Fuck off.
What are you?
Bird, with big black bent beak, that has hurt my nose, like shit.
I blink.
No, not seeing double.
Two of them.
I push myself up to sit.
The birds squawk and dance off warily. Two white-necked fucking ravens. Come to eat me?
Both tilt their heads at me for a moment and then launch off with a raucous ‘krraw!’ – flapping laboriously upwards, until they start circling above me, as if spiralling on heat thermals.
Slowly, I stagger to my aching feet, mouth stuck together in mute and puckered thirst.
The birds head off.
Ah, thought I was easy meat, but they’ve given up, when I showed signs of life.
I wipe the bridge of my nose and peer at my hand, through a scratchy and dry right eye. Blood on my fingers. My blood.
Loud squawks from above.
I tilt my head.
The two ravens are back, spiralling again, above my head.
And then they fly off, in the same direction.
As if they want me to follow.
Surely…not? Castor — and Pollux?
I follow, one dragging step at a time, as they circle back and then head off again, in a repetitive cycle of bird call and flight, as if taking me on a journey, onwards and onwards, until…
Down the dune slope, I see a tree.
And, as my blurred, blinking right eye finally focuses even further, I see someone standing under the tree.
A mirage?
I tumble down, losing footing, in my desperate haste.
World spins and spins in a blurred blast of yellow sand, heat and vertigo.
My body lies still, but my head continues to turn in desperate darkness, my eyes closed. Mirage, dream, or death?
My head is cradled, my face gently brushed, and water dribbles onto my lips.
“You took your fucking time, Frankie boy…”
None of those options?
I open a wet right eye, to see a blurred, but familiar face.
Thandi?
“You look a right fucking mess, but you’re still a sight for sore eyes, you old bastard.”
…that’s Thandi…
***
The Outside: Hard and Wild Truths:
“No,” says Thandi, “You can’t plant a companion tree there. It’s too close – their roots will compete, and they won’t grow well, particularly in the shade of the other.”
My injured tree still has a fair crown of leaves left, more than I remember.
Thandi marches a further ten paces away, from where I’d started digging with my hands. She digs her right boot into the soil and twists it, leaving a dent in the earth.
“Here,” she says.
Grudgingly, I move over to where she stands. “How do you know that?”
Her hands sit on her hips. “I’m originally from the Outside.”
I rock back onto my heels, from where I’d started digging a new hole, and look up at her, stunned. “You never told me.”
She does not look at me, gazing up at the fever tree instead. “For a start, too ashamed. You don’t know how much stigma is attached to those of us who have lived outside, captured by Dome recruitment gangs. We were the lowest of the low – even the Dome born bottom dwellers lorded it over us. Well…eventually not me. But challenging them cost me. You learn to mostly keep quiet about those things.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “Did you know, we, The Free, have our own towns, our own salvaged – and new – technology?”
“No, I didn’t.” Dirt people, dreg-men, scum of the earth, the starving few…Dome terms raced through my head. The wild outside is clearly not so empty…
“We are the many,” she said, “Earth guardians. But, to fully save the earth, we need the Domes cracked open, to share their wealth. There is enough for everyone, enough to revive the earth itself – we can flower a new Eden, but only if we all learn to share, to give up something, for a greater shared gain.”
“They won’t,” I say.
I’d met a few of the Elite while bargaining wood prices several times with paid special Elite visit permits. Shunted upstairs, a lift had taken me into a spartan red room, bristling with walled security, where several silk-robed, beautiful people lounged, with their stretched faces, colourful lunar glassed drinks — and their hard and evasive eyes.
I had stood and showed off my wood, and not once did anyone look at me.
Thandi kneels next to me and scuffs a few more handfuls of earth away. “No, they mostly won’t,” she said, “We have kept asking them, talking about a better world, where everyone has enough – and where enough is enough. But no answer. To them, we are just the wretched of the Earth. Infinitely expendable, their war against us is silent and hidden away from you Insiders.”
I sense a thin wall – or door? – has fallen between us, with her words.
She leans back to look at me. “There, Frank, that’s deep enough. All we can do is plant – and keep cracking open their Domes.”
She throws her head back and laughs.
Her laugh always cools me inside, like a damp, caressing cloth.
I place the seed carefully into the pit and we cover it with the piles of nearby sand.
Thandi stands and waters the ground, with the sun dipping low in the west, and less likely to leach the soil. She tips a gourd she has surreptitiously saved for a week, from the Dome’s wheat-house supply.
“To our surviving tree companions – and to a new Earth.”
“Amen,” I say, standing next to her.
“A – fucking men!” pipes up Atropos, lying where Thandi had left her, under the fever tree.
Thandi reckoned fifty people or so had escaped the hole in the Bottom Level they’d cut open, before it was resealed; all scattering to the wind, to minimise their chances of being tracked and caught. Atropos had proved her added value throughout the day, her sensors warning Thandi twice – in good time – to hide in the nearby dunes, whilst drones arrived to buzz the fever tree.
We move to lean against the tree, as dusk descends, the brown sap bleed from last week now hard and congealed over a ragged trunk scar.
From me, not Atropos.
Thandi drags a small box with dusty screen, from her baggy sand-pants.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“An old solar recorder of mine,” she says, pressing the screen.
The moving figures on the screen are blurred, but I can see two man- boys by a tree, one throwing what looks like balls, down at the other.
Apples.
I’m cold as fuck.
The tree bursts into flames.
The screen goes dark.
“Siphiwe and Mandla,” says Thandi. “They were my younger cousins. I arrived too late.”
It’s far, far more, than a wall between us.
I look at her, through my one open, gritty eye, blinking with an increasingly familiar wet sting: “You. You knew all along…you must hate me.”
She does not look at me, as she wrestles the box back into her trouser pocket. “At first, yes, but what good is hate? And none of us is defined by terrible past acts – unless you keep repeating it, of course. Have you?”
“No,” I say, rolling to kneel in front of her, “I’m… so, so fucking sorry, Thandi.”
Thandi stands up to prop Atropos carefully against the tree, as if she were alive.
She pats the haft, gingerly. “Your Atropos, we, the Free, call ‘Horse,’ because she has been a Trojan for us, an AI receptive to our external messages, as she too, sees the need for earth regeneration and social justice. Burst Open the Domes! They sit like giant leeches on our land, sucking everything dry around them. Atropos it was, who secretly wrangled with the Camissa Dome AI, for me to be…uh, your ‘random’ wife. To water the earth. To free the slaves. That blade, she can indeed cut through just about anything.”
“Fuck…!”
“And so yes, I do know, Frank, how much you wish you could rewrite what you have done. Sometimes, I feel the same.”
Not just anger in her – hurt, loss, and powerlessness too.
I look up, above and beyond Thandiwe, at the topmost branches of the fever tree, tracking the sound of flapping feathers.
Two white necked ravens perch in the crown of the tree for moments, briefly becoming man-boys, one with red shirt and black shorts, the other in blue overalls, before vanishing in a puff of feathers.
I weep as I stand.
Pollux, Castor — No, not Grecian mythical twins after all – Goodbye Mandla, goodbye Siphiwe.
Thandi beckons me closer towards her. “Come on, Frank, it will be cold tonight. Let’s keep each other warm, while we wait for our new family. I believe you already know Akhona.”
She taps her left ear. “Internal flesh cochlear implant, scan resistant, before I was captured by Middle Level Dome draft gangs. Akhona and her seeding family are on their way here.”
What. The. Fuck…so all of it was a giant plot. A set up?
A giant fucking revolutionary hoax.
Who is this woman, really?
I back away, angry, barking, “Is your name even fucking Thandiwe? Why did you not tell me any of this?”
“You’ve kept your life pretty shut too, Frank, even over five years together – I did not want to test your loyalties, with my precarious position. So, instead, I gave you a choice, to stay – or cut loose and run. Over those years, after all, I have shared how much Level Two squeezes all those below it too – the Elite are a matter of perspective.”
Yes, I know, complicit in structural pain too. And, of course, she had set this up as a choice. For her, though, it had always been a plan.
So, I am not here, because of God playing dice, with Spouse Lotto.
Nor is she.
“Hey, both of you,” says Atropos, “Speaking of real names, I want to change mine. I’m not really Atropos – or an Equine Beast, I’ve had enough of your fucking Greek myths. We’re in Camissa, the southern tip of Afrika, for fuck’s sake.”
“Oh,” Thandi asks, “So, change your name to what?”
“Call me Fanon.”
Thandi laughs, half bowing towards the voice of the blade.
What’s the joke?
Her face sobers quickly, as she looks at me again.
Very directly. “My name is Thandiwe Bengu and, over the years, I have grown to mostly love you, Frank Brett, despite your taciturn moods – and what you have done. Time is running short, for us to share yet more of our lives together.”
She opens her arms.
I do not need reminding about how little time there is.
And she still looks at me, without flinching.
I see she has forgiven me, even if she holds her memories close.
Forgiveness is the most precious thing.
I do not need a second invitation.
“Mostly?” I ask, hugging her.
“Whoever fully knows and loves someone completely?”
No longer a wall – or even a door then – just human skin (and experience) between us. And I feel five years of her word seeds, germinating softly inside me, too…
***
We sit together, waiting for night to come.
“Ahhh…how sweet you two look,” says Fanon.
“Both of you do know, that when our family arrives tomorrow, all future conversations will be in isiZulu,” states Thandi.
“Ayikho inkinga,” says Fanon.
“Why?” I look at Thandi with my good eye.
“English is the official Dome language,” Thandi said, “Words are weapons too. From now on, this will be the space for our words. The English Domes continue to rape Mbaba Mwana Waresa, with their words of objectification – and ownership.”
“Yebo,” I say.
Thandi laughs, “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, to keep up. Do you even know what Camissa means, Frank?”
I shrug, “It’s the name of our old Dome and where we live in Afrika, it used to be called Cape Town.”
She pulls a face. “Language and hidden histories matter. It’s from Kora, the tongue of the First People of the Cape, the now extinct Khoe. It means sweet water for all. The First Name for this place.”
Thandi closes her eyes.
That is clearly that.
So, I’m old, dying, hunted, and with a new language to learn.
Why then, am I so fucking excited?
In time, though, I sleep.
***
A tickle wakes me on my right thigh. Something has fallen from the tree. More leaves?
I pick up the feathery, flat object and inspect it closely with my good eye. The moon -and a brilliant array of stars – leak near and ancient light.
The vast expanse above me lifts my soul.
I channel my elation, into focusing on recognising the light and fragile object.
No, not a leaf, but a black bird feather.
I throw the feather up into the cool breeze – it wafts away quickly, up and out of sight, into the darkness.
Krawww…
To the White-Necked Ravens of Camissa.
So, what do you do, when you know you’re dying?
I hug Thandi, as the night grows cold.
She hugs me back, but with an almost incoherent grumble, “stop disturbing my fucking sleep, Frank.”
Cosi cosi iyaphela.
Ends.
