This story traces a foreign national who comes in the country pretending to be a pastor while abusing young boys. It is a story about homophobia.

————

Sam’s helpless body lies on a burning pyre, a heap of sweltering petrol-doused tyres, logs, two litres bottles, and plastic rubbles beneath his back. White sparks float in his vision but the mercy of unconsciousness doesn’t come. Not even the mercy of an abrupt death comes to save him from the torment. His throat is hoarse from screaming. When he squeals fire billows out of his smouldering lips. My name emigrates from his lips like the soul of a withering flower. Shame and fear enter me like greed gnawing the defiled conscience of a corrupt politician. To allow the image of his burning body to escape me, I close my eyes. I press my thumbs hard on the eardrums to root out the trauma his yells cause me. A silent prayer also feels like watering my pains with the decay of my spiritual septic wounds. But my lips taste of his name, the smell of his burning flesh invades my nostrils. Although hiding in my mother’s room, I feel like the smoke strung my eyes. I can see his kind eyes get gnawed by the fire. His warm smile, his voice, his sweet skin, his songs melt away with the blaze. Blisters burble across his skin and entire swaths of flesh peels away, revealing raw tissue underneath. When Sam’s body jolts, a tall giant man prods it back to the flame with a long stick and screams:

“Go back you cockroach.”

Prodding Sam’s body with a rod reminds him of his childhood when he used to insert objects in his anus. When he was young, he would snatch girls’ panties and runaway. He became antisocial and was known as an aggressive child with few friends. They used to call him ‘Smelly Simon’ because he cared so little of his own hygiene. At the age of four, he and a girl the same age compared their genitalia; this triggered a deep interest in him that he should have been born female. Another irked man throws rubbles of concrete at him.

The crowd screams,

“Ayee ayeee, ayeee, burn this shit down. Go to hell,” as Sam’s body drowns in the fire. They throw stones; some prod him with sticks and cheer as the body falls back to the pyre. A soliloquy tune plays in my head:

He is drowning, no he is waving,

He is waving, no he is drowning,

He is drowning, no he is waving.

But reality is that Sam is drowning in the pyre without anyone to help him.

The pain is relentless, the agony never ending. Sam’s hands reel in the air like a drunken man drowning in a pond. His sweltering body melts and becomes one with the raging blaze. He pleads for death, but it never comes. He reaches out with his good hand, trying to drag his body from the fire, but the bed of melting plastic and tyres crush and collapse under his weight, burying him, dragging him deeper into the womb of the blaze. His yellowish skin tone disappears into the strong tincture of the purple smoke.

The tall, muscular man with a hideous scar below his left eye prods Sam’s body again and shouts,

“Who is your partner, huh?” my heart suffocates me. But Sam fails to answer because he mouth is filled with a raging blaze. His skeleton dances a waltz as he tries to run for mercy.

Irked Mmampho pelts him with stones and also screams, as in response to the man’s probe,

“We want him too prophet. Our children can’t grow in a society of gays. They’ll grow up to be like these ditabane,” she is referring to her only child, a boy she named Mpho.

“I have had more than six miscarriages. More than six,” she says slowly with a disheartening emphasis.

“Can you imagine that pain? Now I can’t lose my only son to this gay bullshit,” she asserts.

The chubby woman wipes sweat gathering on her forehead with the loose corner of her floral blouse and continues, while adjusting her church badge,

“Today I cast the first stone. These things are the unnatural face of god. Why can’t god save us from these aliens and just turn them into a pillar of salt.”

I cover my mouth with my hands, quell tears from falling. Then my eyes follow the cloud of purple smoke to the sky. There I see Sam; through the haze of the smoke I catch a glimpse of him. His honeyed yellow gaudy skin shines brighter than the darkness of the purple cloud. His smile is stretched even wider like the gaudy wings of a butterfly. Sam is now a butterfly flying home where human beings take the shape of water, where they flow into everything and anything; surely he will come back to me as rain drops, as the songs that are gifted in the throats of nightingales. He will be the wind that composes music when it meets and hug tree leaves. He will come back as the ignored verses of love in the bible. He will come back as love because he is being killed for saying the word love, for loving. His smile shines brighter than the anger of the irked crowd. My muscles jolt, I quench the fire of fear stuck on my throat with a glass of wine. Then run to kitchen where I sit on the floor with my limbs tangled and wonder while sobbing,

Will God ever forgive us for what we have done to his children? Then it dawns on me that God has left this village long ago.

***

Prophet Noel’s Diesel Jeans are badly smeared with soot. He folds the sleeves of his Polo shirt recklessly up to the elbows. When he thumps across the shiny veranda floor of his two-roomed rented house with his brown Bishop shoes, his kids run to hide in a mud-toilet.

He yanks the facecloth dangling on his neck and wipes out jewels of sweat on his forehead, the rough furrows on his brow catch drops of sweat,

“Nsovu,” he shouts.

The kid runs to the house like a chicken rushing for fowls feed spread evenly on the ground,

“Daddy!” She replies.

“Come. Where are you? Come now. Where is my food?”

When she gets closer to him, she kneels and speaks while rubbing the tips of her little fingers with her thumb.

“Daddy I didn’t cook, there is bread. I spent the rest of the day at the spaza-shop.”

“I told you I don’t like bread Nsovu. I have repeated myself a thousand times but you don’t fucking listen,” the furrows on his brow tighten, his eyes are like ice in fire, his lips flap like a ventilator as though they will break away from his face and fly.

Nsovu hunkers down like a snared monkey, covers her tiny head with her hands while screaming,

“Sorry daddy, it won’t happen again,” she is shaking and her panties are wet.

Prophet Noel yanks a tablecloth, pushes the table out of his way and advances towards her. He unbuckles his belt,

“You don’t listen you motherfucking bitch,” he yells as he lifts up the folded belt and brings it down with a destructive whip. The belt cuts her soggy skin like a sharp razor. Tiny drops of blood fly like spittle escaping the mouth of a reckless gossipmonger. She tries to run away but he grabs her by the left hand and lifts her on the air like a skinned piglet.

“Ndlovu please don’t kill my daughter,” Nsovu’s mother yells from her bedroom. She rolls over to the edge of the bed and falls on the floor. And then drags her body to the kitchen. When she gets there, she grabs Prophet Noel by the leg and begs him.

“Please Ndlovu, calm down. I beg of you my husband. Don’t hurt my kid, please baba,” like a blind woman crying before Jesus’s feet for sight, her tears soak the nose of his Bishop shoe. The dust that settled there earlier on leaves it like the warm aroma of coffee escaping the confines of a mug. She sees it escape through the tinge of light that penetrates through the window. She wishes to take the form of dust and, under the auspice of the light, fly away and escape through the window. Escape and go back home where man is made of water, ashes and dust, home where everyone is equal.

“Please let go off her. I am begging you baba, rather kill me and let her live.”

“Baba—,” he kicks her on the mouth, her lips tear and blood spills.

“Don’t interfere when I discipline my child. This is my fucking child!”

“Papa no, Maaaaaama!” Nsovu cries.

“All you did bitch was to carry her. That doesn’t make you any better. You fail to discipline her. She must understand that when her father says something his words must be kept in a kraal, she must heed my lessons,” he says as he unzips his trousers and kneels next to Nsovu. He wrenches her panties out like a famished chimpanzee snatching a banana from the hands of a terrified kid. The mother presses her face against the squeaky clean floor hoping its coldness soothes her. She wants this sharp disturbing image to abruptly disappear; this is how she always survives. It’s her coping mechanism. She then blocks her ears with the tips of her fingers.

The silence is thicker and sips in the house, slowly, like used oil dripping into an ants’ hole. The splosh sound as he pushes back and forth and the pummels of his abrasive balls as they hit against the poor child’s bums punctuates the dark dead silence. He moans and yells, softly, like a wild mad dog that has just tasted the sweetness of fresh blood. Prophet Noel withdraws his penis like a rusty needle withdrawn from a septic wound. It plops out like a wine cock removed with force. He wipes it out with his facecloth before he zips his trouser.

“You don’t even bleed anymore,” he says then clomps out of the house like an uncivilized visitor. He walks like a vulture that has just broken the soggy bones of a chick and eats it alive.

Nsovu’s brother comes back from his father’s pig farm. He finds his sister sitting at the corner of the kitchen, her knees up and her elbows curled around them. She buries her head between her thighs, her panties, emblazoned with cartoons, lies on the floor. It has blood smudge on it. Nsovu wiped herself with it before she flung it across the floor and continue crying.

He drops an empty bucket, kneels before his mother like a sobbing child sitting next to her mother’s charred body in a warzone. And then he helps her up.

“Oh mama, not again. This time he will kill you. He crippled you. Now this!” he says while grabbing his mother by the armpits and lifts her up. He carries her on his shoulder and puts her back on a wheelchair.

“I am sorry mama,” he fixes her doek and wipes out the blood smears from her torn lip.

***

My mother leans against the door frame; on her left hand she holds my diary while drinking from a glass of ‘Four Cousins, Sweet Rosé’:

“this is how they maim us,

they feed our innocent bodies burning tyres

and watch the smoke fly to heaven and,

to the same god they promised never to cast the first stone,

to the same god who said everyone is guilty before his eyes.

they kill us for making honey out of another man’s skin.

they hate us for loving;

i don’t know when the word love became evil,

rude and dirty on man’s lips.

but i know it is dangerous today to say the word love,

more especially if the person loved is a man.

when we are born,

we inherit fear, we inherit guilt,

we inherit loathe, we inherit sins.

we always run, we are cut out from society’s pages

by society’s editors like unwanted words

on a clean document.

we are cut out like dangerous neglected

verses from the bible.

that’s the consequences of being born in

a different soul wrapped in a prison called body;

the prison mankind glorify so much like

it will not end up as dust and ashes.

where is god when we are shunned for loving,

when society’s boot rip our ribs

for lying in bliss with another man.”

She reads the passage out loud while punctuating the sentences with long gulps from her glass. I just grab my pillow; squeeze it like I used to do Sam. My mother looks at me, and then comes to sit on the bed and hugs me,

“Hello Sihle,” she looks at me with care.

I caress my pillow,

“I don’t feel like Sihle anymore.”

“Of course you are. My little boy. Remember,” her smile is coy, I know it means pity.

“The only thing I remember is that I couldn’t be there for him,” I feel tears prickle my cheeks.

She holds my chin and lifts it up, looks at me straight in the eyes,

“Look at me. He will always be with you; he is there, in your prayers, in your tears, in your sorrows. The best you can do is, be strong.”

I lift my head and look at her,

“I have always believed in you and I always will.”

“How can I believe in myself when I couldn’t save the person I care about the most, now he is gone, he just lives in my head,” tear drop fly straight from my eye and falls inside her glass of wine. I can see it drown deep in the wine, just the same way Sam’s body drowned in the furnace.

“He may be gone but reality is just perception. He exist in your thoughts and soul my boy.”

“Then how did we end up being here mama?”

“What do you mean Sihle?”

“How did we end up being these cruel human beings who kill others for loving?”

“I don’t know my boy,” she says, shrugging her shoulders.

“You are the one who brought me here Mama, you tell me.”

“When you were young, you used to love this world. Catching butterflies was your favourite sport. The world was beautiful to you then, it had no meaning, it had imposed no fears in you. You’d play with your father over there, in the garden, and you were a happy child, carefree and loving,” she says.

“I don’t know how we ended up in here, maybe it started the day your father decided to leave me for a gay guy,” she presses her fingers on her eyes and rubs them rigidly.

“You know, that’s when I learnt that gender is a code. It is a code designed to impose restrictions on free existence. It was designed to restrict our freedom on what and who we want to be and how we ought to live.”

“But it’s not gender that makes us who we are my boy. You are not that man says you are. You are my son.”

I shrug my shoulders and suck mucus stuck on my nostrils,

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.”

She runs her hand on my left cheek and looks me straight in the eyes,

“No one understands you Sihle. No one ever will. What you need to know is that you are in control, whatever it is that makes you what you are belongs to you—and only you,” she presses her hand firmly on my chest, as if to reassure me.

My mother’s edifying lecture invigorates me; it feels like she has just pumped a new life in my empty shell. My mother knows a great deal about beauty, as she knows a great deal about ugliness. This she didn’t need to go to school to study, she knows more about light as much as she knows more about darkness.

***

Mpho kicks in the air as he squeals like a rat yanked out of its habitat by the tail, but sadly he fails to escape because Prophet Noel’s grip is strong and tight. He puts him on his right shoulder like a rifle.

“Sssh, sush,” he orders the boy.

He wraps his rough long hand around the boy’s thin waist. He grips him like a slippery fish, like a sadistic African president holding on to power. The other hand clutches a black suitcase. It is fat like a wallet stuffed with fresh banknotes.

“I love the night. It has a very strong chest. Darkness has depth. It has a chest that is deeper than an ocean. It won’t spill out the secrets I share with it. Night is not a bitch. I have shared a lot with this lonely friend called night. I have been a lover of darkness my entire life,” he says.

To silence the 9-year-old Mpho, he soaks a cloth in methylated spirit and gags him. The small office in his pigs’ farm has a red bulb. The red has a tinge of yellow, a ghoulish kind of yellow, a yellow that is mixed with fading yet macabre darkness. This light darkness makes the office looks like an abattoir. In the persistent dark, the boy catches a glimpse of his abductor. He realises that it’s Prophet Noel. His scar now looks like a sharp knife. His smile is diabolic, a mixture of death, darkness, deception and cruelty. The boy yells but his muffled voice fades a few kilometres before it reaches the village. Prophet Noel’s pig farm is situated 10 kilometres outside the village. He pins the boy against the floor, undress him like he is skinning a cat alive. And then opens his suitcase.

“This is my world. My small heaven. Justified. Just. Free. And Freer. Here I lose nothing. Not a face, not integrity, or any reputation. I am free. I have created my own world full of freedom. I am the law unto myself,” he says.

Prophet Noel takes out a gaudy pink Brazilian weave from the suitcase and puts it on. He then wraps his body with mojikisa, a traditional sarong, and puts on red lace panties. The brassiere he wears is oversize and hangs loosely on his broad chest. He wears a red lipstick and applies mascara. Prophet Noel slides the panties, fishes out his stone-erect penis. The boy kicks, grabs him by the shoulders and tears his flesh. The laceration makes him even stiffer. He likes pain. It completes him. The pleasure that comes with it is volatile, more explosive than the stubborn sperms of a rapist erupting in the darkness of a womb. When orgasmic explosion comes, he grabs a table’s leg and moans, jerks like a goat on an abattoir. He screams like someone is cutting out his balls. Prophet Noel grabs the boy by the neck; strangle him until his hands hurt, shake and gets weak. The skin on the boy’s neck peels off; his hands have swathes of torn skin. When the boy kicks like a dying horse, Prophet Noel’s whole body quivers like a bombed 19-storey building tumbling to the ground. The orgasm is eruptive. He feels his blood boils, it simmers and makes ripples that are heavy like a huge river, and his veins are heavy with a flow of rushing blood. His head spins, as if drunk, Prophet Noel passes out. The body of the naked boy lies there, helplessly on a pool of faeces. When he wakes up, he applies the faecal matter on his face. His erection kicks again, he sodomizes the body before he takes it to the pigsty. He takes out a chainsaw and severs it into pieces like Jamal Khashoggi’s then feed it to his pigs.

***

At Koranta club I grab a chair and sits down. The barwoman I am not familiar with asks,

“What can I get you hun’?”

“A beer I guess. A very cold black label ngud.”

She hands over the beer,

“So are you new here?”

“Yes. I am from Koranta-II, not really far from here.”

“What for?”

“I am sorry?”

“I mean we don’t get new visitors in here.”

“That’s bad, seems like a nice village. I mean we don’t have clubs of this nature in Koranta-II.”

“Sure does,” she winks her eye and moves to the next guy.

Prophet Noel comes in, he smells fresh and new. Despite hating him, the freshness sweeps my attention and brings him closer to me. His fine soot-dark lips are like a flame deep in the darkness of a river. His skin is clear of pimples, his dental structure is effeminate. No man possesses such a special beautiful smile. It is either you are possessed by his smile or his smile possesses you. He is one super fine angel on earth, his speaking voice is low, but it commands all the attention it deserves. Like a white dove amongst other dull-coloured doves, he looks so innocent, so special, and so deserving of one’s pity and love. But he walks with a special kind of arrogance, the beautiful arrogance of a stunning cat. His protruding chest is just a symbol of what a healthy stubborn man looks like. He is a mule.

“You are new here,” he says as extends his long hand to greet.

“Uh—yeah.”

He grabs and pinches my ass then pulls my hand and places it on his. He has a soggy ass that’s soft like a spoilt mango. He tilts his head closer to my ears. He belches. Alcohol-stained breathe gets exhumed from the pit of his stomach, then it wrestles to cover my nostrils like a shawl.

“Yeah... I mean wanna dance.”

“I am not really much of a dancer. I am here to drink.”

“Come on. I mean one of these guys would love to dance with me.”

“I am sure they would, that means you’d never be—lonely.”

“Oh please, what a fucking coward,” he walks away.

I take a long gulp from my ngud and begin a long journey into myself. I travel deep in thoughts; the barwoman reappears,

“What’s your name?”

“Me?” I jump from my sit like a frightened rat.

“Sorry, did I stump you?”

“Haha, oh no no. It’s uhm, uhm, Sihle, but call me Si. Si with an I not ee’s.”

I reply while scratching the back of my head.

“Oh, why did you come here Si’?”

“Sorry what do you mean?”

“I mean to a club, alone. Even a sluttiest Prophet in the village can’t get you to dance?”

“That was tempting. I admire guys who behave like that.”

“Oh, how’s that, slack?”

“Oh, what’s your name? What do you mean sluttiest Prophet in the village?”

“Do you also have fake prophets in here?”

“As always, even that shitty book said it, in dooms day fake prophets will come. One of them is already here. A gay prophet.”

“Call me Ana.” Before she can tell me more, the Prophet comes to sit next to me.

He throws a local newspaper on the table.

“Fucking Jesus, when is this going to fucking stop?”

TRAGEDY HITS KORANTA VILLAGE, ANOTHER BOY GOES MISSING:

Koranta is hit by yet another tragedy as the 70th boy goes missing. Police say their preliminary investigations show that the perpetrator is man who operates in the village but are not yet sure of his features and other things…

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” screams Ana.

“Had they been white boys, the police would have long brought the culprit to book,” she continues.

“Oh, tell me about it,” I weigh in.

“Fucking hell. Oh by the way I am Prophet Noel.”

“I am Sihle.”

“What’s going on in our village Sihle.”

“Shit is going down Proph, boys are getting killed like animals. The previous month they have burnt a gay friend of mine.”

“Ah oh man, I don’t really feel bad for gays. They are a bad mixture you know. They are too whisky for our tonic,” he says. But I just allow this subject to fly with the air like a piece of used tissue paper.

“I have read somewhere that your father was an abusive man and that you are mentoring boys?”

“That’s a polite way of putting it.”

“Oh, what do you mean?”

“You see my father was brutal. He raped my mother multiple times. I am a product of rape. One day he decided to cut out her clit saying this will reduce sexual pleasure thus prevents her from fornication, and then later he murdered her and cut her body into pieces.”

“Aggg, that’s scary man,” he laughs at me, and then holds my scruffy hair.

He clicks his tongue in a feigned annoyance and shakes his head,

“My boy, scary is an under term. It is traumatic; you can’t begin to imagine the post-traumatic stress disorder I am battling with.”

“My father was abusive, most gay guys who are still in the closet are angry. They are envious of the freedom society affords to straight guys while they are treated like scums, then they marry or gets in relationships with women just so they can be accepted in society.”

“Oh,” he ignores the subject.

“You know when it happened. I couldn’t fight for my mother. We would hear the worn-out mattress springs screech and our father panting like a dog. Our mother would just cover her mouth with her hands while the bastard digs her cunt like a monkey raping a puppy,” he says as he stands from his chair. He brushes his buttocks like he was sitting on a sewer spillage.

“Let me go take a piss. I will be back.” When he is out of earshot, Ana whispers, loud enough so I can hear her over the counter.

“He wants you, he is gay. He can get you some rounds if you don’t mind,” she winks and wipes a beer glass.

***

The music he plays sinks in well with the silence of the fresh morning,

“Wake up boy, you can’t sleep forever. You are not gonna sleep until the sharpness of sunlight digs you in the anus,” he screams from the other room.

My eyes are heavy and painful like someone poured a handful of sand in them. I rub them, gently. My throat is horse. My body feels as though I wrestled an uncanny force the whole night. The only thing I remember about last night is the whiskey shots we gulped like thirsty camels. He comes into the room,

“You can take a bath then leave. One of my workers will see you out. I have some work to do,” he says as he takes off. After bathing, I take selfies.

***

At home, my mother points at the selfie and asks,

“What’s that at the back, on the far right?” she points at the picture then shakes her hand to adjust her wrist metal bangles.

“I don’t know mama. Why?”

“Zoom it. It looks like a T-shirt I know.”

“So?”

“Come on zoon it,” she takes a sip from her glass of wine, and then sighs like a huge load has just been lifted off her shoulders.

“Oh fuck!” the glass slips from her hand and crashes on the floor.

“What mama.”

“That’s Mpho’s T-shirt,” she allows the silence perked on our lips to die with the hot air of grief exhumed from the pit of our souls. And then continues,

“The one I tailor made for him on his 7th birthday. Look at that Aloe design there. He was the one who said he wanted it to look different. He chose the Aloe flower,” she elongates the photo.

“Oh shit, you are right mama.”

“Please call Mmampho, now!”

***

Outside Prophet Noel’s farm, a group of protestors bearing placards with the, ‘hands off Prophet Noel’ messages inscribed on them deny police access.

“There is no way we are going to allow you in. This is our Prophet. You gonna have to kill us all first before you get in,” one woman screams.

“There are no men in this village. All we have are bitches wearing pants. They don’t have balls but empty sacks. Look around here, no man. Not even one man came to defend our prophet. Only women,” another irked woman screams.

***

HE FEARED GOD BUT LOVED BOYS

The fire that gutted Pastor Ndlovu’s church South of Koranta four weeks ago continues to offer up a gruesome bounty.

The South African Police Service (SAPS) spokesperson, Brigadier Mandla Nkomo excavating the charred ruins said the bodies found have now well up passed 80. He said the bodies were found severed and stitched together.

One witness called it a human tapestry of torture and sadism and a sight he will never forget.

“We are yet to find a complete body, with a limb or any internal organ,” said Brigadier Nkomo.

He said Police were looking for Simon Nyawira, 45, known in the village as Prophet Noel Ndlovu of the Lamb’s Blood Mission Church. Nyawira absconded arrest on Tuesday after a protesting mob denied Police access to his farm.

“After thorough investigations, we have found more than 80 skulls in his pigs’ farm. It is believed Nyawira sexually abused his victims before severing them into pieces and feed their remains to his pigs. The skulls are believed to be of the missing victims.

Nkomo said Nyawira came in the country pretending to be a prophet and businessman, he also used a fake identity; he built a church, farm and spaza-shop in the village to help lure victims to gratify his paedophilia repulsive disorder,” said Police spokeswoman Brigadier Mangwana Masilela.

Locals said they always thought he was a good man but were disappointed to learn that he was a sick paedophilia who feared God but loved boys.

“He would even pay for our boys’ school trips. This is horrible. I can’t believe our people defended a sex predator,” said weeping Mmampho.

I throw the newspaper away and sink back in my bed. My mother comes, as usual; she stands by the door and leans against its frame. The glass on her hand is fuller than usual.

She flips a piece of paper with a sentence inscribed on it in the air,

‘Even if I was arrested, it would change nothing,’ she reads it out loud.

“That’s the note the bastard left in his farm,” she says.

By Keketso Mashigo

From: South Africa

Website: http://.blaqkulture.com

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