Wednesday, February 21, 2018

#258: "Remember the Grass" by Tariro Ndoro

~This story first appeared in Thyini  as “Inevitable.” (2015).
~Selected by Kenneth A. Fleming, assistant editor for fiction

You know it is over when your grandmother comes from the general dealer and confronts you about it. You deny it all because perhaps you weren't just ready to deal with it yet. Your grandmother takes you on the next bus to town anyway and just when you've thanked God that the General Hospital is already closed, a young pharmacist tells your grandma that pregnancy tests can now be bought over the counter.
            She buys five to make sure before dragging you to your uncle's house in the township where dust floods the streets and kids ran around with snot on their faces and no trousers on. Unconcerned men laze around on rundown cars with their shirts off because it is summer, just like Mutare, just like the neighborhood you were uprooted from, while guavas fell from the trees and Rutendo played marakaraka with you until sundown.

Your uncle’s wife is surprised to see you, but when she sees the look on your grandmother’s face she acts like a good daughter in law and silently makes tea. Your grandmother refuses to drink it. Sweat beads down her temples, running from somewhere beneath her doek to the bottom of her neck and there is an eerie silence, like the time you snuck out at night to go dancing and locked your her in the house.
Taking the tests is hard enough with your grandmother and your aunt watching as you intently pee into the cup. Like the old ladies they are, there is a great fuss about following all the instructions to a T. The results don't surprise you – you’ve skipped two periods already. You have to wait for your uncle anyway, so your aunt makes another pot of tea – hot water in a yellow metal kettle with the milk and sugar thrown in it already and chunks of bread with only one slice margerined, just the way you've had it every day for the past two years since coming to live with your grandmother.
When your uncle arrives, the tribunal has to be held via loudspeaker on your grandmother’s solar phone, although not everyone’s opinion is heard because they are all headstrong and all loud and all right. Your grandmother is broken, she looks angry but she's crying. You've never seen her tears.
Every family member has something to say about it all but as always your own mother is silent. Your mother was silent too when you'd been caught talking to your Math teacher after twilight, and when you had failed all your subjects that school year and when you were caught changing the marks on her report card. They decide that your uncle and aunt should escort you to your new home.

The journey back to your grandmother’s is tense. From Rusape town all the way to Gunda turn-off no one speaks to anyone else, all you can do is listen to the vague radio somewhere behind the gossiping mothers and watch as the brown grass flies past you, just like the journey from Mutare, the one you thought had a return date on it but didn’t.
       When you arrive they pack everything you had with you when you came – it all fits into one satchel, and even the satchel was a donation but this isn't the time for details. That is why you went to the grass in the first place; it helped you forget about the rural school you now had to attend. It was light years away from feeding the chickens with their pecking, and the pigs with all their hovelly sounds...

Most of all it helped you to forget gratitude. They always forced you to remember that when you arrived you had nothing but the clothes you wore, that your Aunt Rumbidzai had paid your school fees and that it was Aunt Namato who brought you food every month. You were tired of justifying your existence. You hadn’t planned to stay that long with you grandmother. No one had planned it – except your mother.
       And so it is with your uncle and aunt that you walk the 2 km journey from your grandmother’s home to your new husband’s home. You will go without a price because you sold yourself cheap. You walk past fields that smell of fresh long grass and cow dung, fields in which you had lain as he had loved you. It was in these fields and fields further on that you had sat with him and learnt to forget, the world stopped still when you were here, but now it's catching up with you.
As you hear the njiva sing above you, you think of all the days you had played truant with him – he had quit school long ago so his presence came with intoxicating freedom. Out of the trees hanging low, he would pick hute for you as you sat there in the grass, hiding from busybodies.
The welcoming party is meager, one skinny sister in law suckling her baby, and your lover. Their homestead is peculiar in its lack of livestock. Your uncle and aunt leave after saying the necessary and for the first night you will be joining in his hunger, the hunger that that drove you to steal from your grandmother to feed him, isn’t that what love does? That is why Grandmother had insisted you leave with nothing, so you can see for yourself that he doesn't really love you.
But he does love you. Of course he has not been you first lover; your first lover had been the neighbour. But that was before he wanted to play the game with your baby sister too and that got you into trouble. Love stops where marriage begins. That's what they say. It is that way when finally you live with your man. You struggle for money and give birth to your first child on the side of the road and he dies before you get to hospital. You get pregnant again. You fight over something as crazy as five dollars and you make up, but not before he kicks you in the stomach and you lose that baby. Six months later you're pregnant again.

“Remember the Grass” was inspired by a course in synchronous narrative. One of the readings for the class was “Rooster Pollard Cricket Goose” by Noy Holland which reminded me of rural Zimbabwe and also made me think about narrating a story from the perspective of a character who has been robbed of agency.

Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean writer and an alumnus of the Rhodes University Master of Arts in Creative Writing progamme. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Contrast, Oxford Poetry, AFREADA and Fireside Fiction.

Monday, February 12, 2018

#257: Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~This poem previously appeared in The Cape Rock (2014).

How Is Mom Holding Up?

When they heard the news in December,
Mom did not cancel their summer cruise.
The doctor said three rounds this time, if all goes well.
Besides, they bought insurance.

She hasn’t canceled yoga, either. Tuesdays 9 a.m.
are blocked off from January to June
to breathe deeply in class,
not at the hospital in chemo spouse position.

With no surgery scheduled, no bedside duty,
Mom plans to keep tutoring Wednesdays, too.

She’s already flipping through catalogs,
choosing seeds for the spring garden
unplanted last year in the storm
of a darker diagnosis.

And when I asked why she was gazing
through a frosted bay window
with dreamy gray eyes,
she said she was picturing
Sunday walks at the lake
hand in hand. Each day
growing longer and longer
until twelve hours of sun
and dinner for two on the patio
consumed the fear
of one plate on the kitchen table
and a six o’clock sunset outside.


Thursday, February 8, 2018

#256: "Far-Away Love" by Nahid Rachlin

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor, Fiction

                                    I am standing at this street corner,
                                    Where we used to meet
                                    But is it the same street?
                                    -- a Persian song

            She hesitated but then she agreed to that.