Elsewhere Boy
By Martins Deep
fiction | 7 min read
_________
in memoriam of leaf
It's the helplessness in a silent fall, for me. It's how the wind still insists on a dance. A leaf pirouettes briefly to land at the foot of a sister tree. A leaf falling is recruitment in the cause of a wildfire. The hallowed branch on which an owl lulled the world to sleep has turned into ash. You'll listen closely to the crackling of fire, and hear the opposite of a psalm. The consequence is smoke. This moment, I am realizing a forest spirit has only lured me here to gnash my ivory teeth. Upper set, flint; lower set, steel ripe with heat and friction. How unfair of nature to pretend to be glorious in a flower, only to withdraw its colours for the weird pleasure of watching it wither.
Every flower I kissed in summer was the last before my return with a digital camera. It might be that they were blighted by my poisoned lips sore from kissing Madonna's feet where supplicants weep herbicide. Perhaps, somewhere in the organelle of a plant, there is a self-destruct program. Perhaps.
_________
For me, it's the helplessness in sleep. The way eyelids are suddenly ladened the weight of the world. It is how a body at rest is against its wish. Father's desire was to stay awake long enough to hear me sleep-talk— voice tuned like a viola played underwater. At my bedside, I found him numb and stiff and cold— my frame shivering in the heart of a darkness only born when the last breath kills lamplight.
Using a telescope, I stare hard into space, tracing spots left by dead stars into the face of his God. Led by solitude under this vastness of a cerulean sky, I watch God misread my lips, peeping shyly from a speck of cloud. But I am not that poor boy begging for resurrection. I am not. Ageing is father's slow rebirth. It aches that God will be innocent again in all the hymns I'll sing at the funeral— in that very place water returns as dust.
North Gate, 2019
I take off my face mask to breathe. It's been hours. The air is sweet with its distinct tastelessness. Unfiltered. The dead must miss breathing. Perhaps, like dolphins, they swim up to the surface where no one can see them, to drink air, and return to the deep. Breathing: how we swallow all the beauty in the horizon. All the colors too distant, too grand to stain a palette knife. How what you cannot reach fills your insides ‘till you're a cathedral echoing hallelujahs.
As I stand by the roadside to cross, a boy runs to me with an open packet. There is just one facemask left in it. Through his chapped lips, he says something in Hausa. He's pointing at the facemask crumpled in my hand. They're old, he says. In other words, if I must filter air near the sweetness of the one I just drank, it must be with a clean one. But I have saved the exact amount on me for something else. I walk pass him with a straight face mirroring the chores awaiting me in my apartment.
I rubberneck dozens of tired faces on the rusty background of my school entrance. It is one landscape of pilgrims carrying millstones in their schoolbags. They'll be done with the day's routine only to gather enough rest to be milked again. Put this scene on repeat, and only clothes will change. Their shoes will not. Say, they are hooves of donkeys. Say, their pace is hurried by nameless things that carry whips behind them.
Vehicles trail the tarred road before me. Their movement is slower this time. This is unlike other hours they run on jet engines. The atmosphere chokes with noise, impatience, smoke. The imagery in my head is a procession of ants carrying, to their nest, a dead roach on my rug. The one I swatted against the wall with a textbook that has become my pillow. I begin to hear words. They say there's a fatal accident ahead. I hear the casualty is losing so much blood for the sky not to be red with it. An ambulance sirens pass me with a mockery colder than all I'll ever write to make sense of this.
I cross the road, walking through spaces between cars. Here, I begin to feel my lungs choke on the sigh of a famished road. I want to retch, cry, purge my windpipes. I want to unbreathe the very air I savoured seconds ago. I feel sick in my lungs. Sick from drinking the last breath of a boy. A boy I'd recognize in an obituary pasted on the forehead of a face he drew his after.
Elsewhere Boy [ii]
Here, what has sworn to be the death of you would whisper your name through the syrinx of a thrush. Sweetly, you'd hear your name again and again. Not knowing it filtered between two sets of teeth gnashing to gnaw you into pulp. Forgetting how to stuff your ears, you'll begin to sleepwalk towards a playground cloaking a landmine. When warning signs go blank, know this: you have been enchanted. How else to know, if not how you speed pass the signposts pointing you away from an early grave. It'll be too late to realize the underbrush swaying in the evening breeze was only a choreography of your throes.
___________
Before my mother's husband passed, he kept dreaming of going by a foggy road. I wanted to ask him why he couldn't slam the brakes. Wanted to know the teeth this thickset workhorse crashed against to be this shaken as he shared his nightmare. I would watch him beam, unforgettably. Even now, as I remember it, it spreads warmth on my face. You know, I'd always smelt a deathwish in his breastpocket; one hell of a secret revealed by hiding. I might be assuming, though. Truth is, I want a fate where I wouldn't have to fight for a life that fights for no one. Just sleep, poor boy. Sleep without the promise of resurrection morning. Life, in whatever world, isn't worth living twice. All I am making of this life is to be worth mourning. These days, like my Dad, I shave to cut a pimple to see if I've swallowed enough rainbows to bleed a multicolored fluid. You won't find it unbelievable the way I hold the shaving stick, like my chi's parched tongue is stretched along its edges.
One Saturday morning, a hawk swooped in on Dad. He was alone on his bed. Mum had gone to glean a rice field. It was not difficult for his carpenter friend to convert the wooden frame of his bed into a bier. The crucifix hanging beside him must've quit playing scarecrow. Nothing to shoo death's emissary away. I imagine the hands of the effigy as a paddle to oar him on across chartless waters. Mum says, three days, and he'll wake up in my body. A minute's silence in advance for my demise.
__________
Time warps, and it is exactly five months without writing home. Atop my pen is a millstone. The only easy thing to write is a suicide note I'll roll grass in to take a smoke, as I worship the moon. I changed my postal address to cut correspondence between a golden here and a leaden there. I live in another apartment with mice skittering out my ears into their holes with the shards of my broken dreams. The imagery tells you how vacant I've become. I swear, you'll yell in my face, and hear your voice reverberate back into your mouth. You will literally know what it means to swallow one's words.
It's been five f*cking months, and I don't feel up to spilling words that must be misread to understand. We are actually pretending I am overseas. I am writing from jail. I mean, the bars that are not my ribs. Imagine home writes me back, and the paper floats down from nowhere to my feet on a busy street. To ask for money they say, "How is work, American boy?", "Mama is sick". And it is no lie. She's actually sick from waiting for a proof I'm doing well abroad. It's your third year in America. You should do something. Wire Dollars! All in undertones.
____________
I sit in a corner, coughing out time capsules onto paper. They've been buried in my chest for ages. From my tear sample in the laboratory, the diagnosis say it's nostalgia. A disease I do not know how long it'll take to end me. I'd love if it kills me before my mother goes the way of vapour. This is the only prayer in which my faith is the size of a mustard seed. We are still pretending. I am somewhere. Imprisoned. For selling hard drugs, maybe. My fingers begin to shake, and my cell mates leave me a few twigs and a lighter. They leave me, alone to a voice echoing epitaphs for all the flowers my color blind eyes will only see to sketch with charcoal on the walls. Imagine my homesickness as the cause of my death, after an autopsy carried out on my corpse. Not solitude, not lust, not want. Just an irrational longing for a warzone I escaped.
_____________
We can stop pretending now. I'm back to this madhouse of hungry, frustrated men. You can tell this protest is staged: A chessboard of pawns. The elites have been bored. Its an obsessive game they play. Don't ask me why it's not an Olympic game. I swear, this country scalds my tongue each time I call it home. The only promise she keeps is the promise to take one's life. Like every have not, she's promised to take mine, too. It's why I quit googling self harm. I walk the streets courting bullets by staying out of crime. It's that easy.
Mum is alive and well. Remember, we've stopped pretending. In the confession booth, I tell the priest she's the only reason I fail to catch the kisses blown from the smoky mouth of firearms. And all, because she bends her creaky knees to mutter prayers for me. So, you'd be guessing right to say I'll be here a little longer. Picture me as a schoolboy building sandcastles just so his bully can trample it down. Put this scene on repeat.
Mum has been really concerned about my well-being. She says I'm losing weight. I tell her I am fasting. She'll never know I'm only starving myself to fit into a paper ferry on the TV set. Using my umbilical cord, even Apollyon can't bind me to this pit.
