He started by mansplaining that manslaughter had nothing to do with gender. By taking a gander at genderized vocabulary, one could see where the confusion arose. It rose. The world never rises or sinks to any occasion. People do that.
Now folded, like a love letter or a secret or something that really shouldn’t bend that way but does out of necessity. He felt the weight of all past experience in that crate. It did not comfortably fit two people. It now fitted two people and their stories. Cramped.
The basic fact was “I have to kill some people,” he continued to explain. She asked for no continuation or continuity or anything that linear and predictable. But he kept on giving her things. In that dark cramped space. He kept filling it up with gifts.
Who is worthy of life? Who is deserving of death? Why is it often the powerful but not the wise who put answer to these questions? Judgement requires no just a steady one. An educated hand. We want ancient cuts and callouses on those hands. If you will judge you should know a few things about axes, hammers, ploughs and scorching sun. Look, we need them formed by coldest winter nights without a proper blanket. We need fingernails that know how to scrape the bottom of the pot. Judgement is not light and should not be thrown lightly by the dainty and privileged.
“Look, it’s nothing personal. Some people have to go.” He says that he prays before the target is revealed to him. There are people with embedded evil that must be expunged by letting blood.
“When you bleed, seek salvation.” That is incomplete. The sentence and perhaps the thinking behind that blade of words. Not everyone is privy to salvation. He thinks he is an arm, you see. This not bodily disassociation. It’s an elevated association. When they say things about higher powers and speaking to The Almighty, you should worry.
She should be terrified. But if he is so assured of his duty, she would have been dead already. Instead, their breath and the words that sail on the current thereof. Those things fill their little box. The boat rocks. Real boats,rock. And stable boats aren’t at sea. There’s wisdom here but you eyes aren’t the only part that needs to see.
“Once I had to kill a man who harboured ideas so vile I could rot a tooth just by uttering them.” At this he pauses. Then continues a retelling. This man he had led out to the back of a Burger King and exposed his innards to the starry night. The mood bled. The moon bled red in what could only be described as a visual rhyme. The morning that came felt like it needed a ‘u’ in itself to carry the weight of the darkness’s transgressions.
“Another guy was a serial wife-beater. Yes, he wore vests all the time.” According to this tale, his last girlfriend had suffered her second miscarriage under the fists of a man who claimed to love her but Black Label brought all the hate home. One night he didn’t come home.
If there were too many good people doing good things, he’d kill them too, he says. She holds onto his left arm, not his killing arm, for warmth. The ride has been long but is likely to be longer. This intimacy is like a lean-to tent. Built out of necessity. Her needs are simple, as are anyone’s in their situation. Warmth. Food. Survival by any other name. He says that he is ensuring our survival. This wooden crate between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth is but a means to an end. A necessary roughness.
When he gets out of here he will continue to ply his trade. A woman who worked for the DTI (which sounds like some kind of venereal disease) had once stolen a million Rands from the Pads for Our Girls project. He says that he really was grateful for killing her. And she was so old she didn’t even bleed anymore. You know, down there. So he had found a poetry in is method. For her there would be no sanguinary dance. For her, bloodless death was deserved. So he served her to a cylindrical tank of sewage. He dunked her in slowly so she could feel the filth oozing into her Prada boots. Then her Chanel stockings, up to her Victoria’s Secret panties. By the time he’d dunked her to the neck, he felt like he was assassinating a runway in Paris.
One kill had taken him as far as France. There he had bumbled through the social awkwardness that any stranger in a strange land suffers, more or less. He was on the more. Had he been a man of rash. A man of impulse. A man of uncontrol. He might have lost all cool and slain more than he needed to slay. But he trusted his right arm. It spoke the truth. And killed all signs of deceit. Lies cracked under his thumb. His index accused unerringly and his fist knew when and where to fly. He didn’t need faith. He had physical assurance.
He tried to explain this to her.
Khaya Creates
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