The first time Sara saw it was on a very hot day. The sun had been up since very early, and it was enjoying making everyone miserable. More so, because it knew that a dry, noisy wind was blowing sand into people's faces and huts. It was a day of the type that made ordinary people understand other people's suicides.
Sara hated going to the mission, but her daughter, from her second husband, insisted; coming up from her quarters at the station to fetch her. Sara only allowed herself to be dragged down to the place so that she could collect the free food that the silly buggers gave away each week. Imagine giving food away; it was so damn hard to get. The patrons must have been planning to trap the clan members and wield the power of their one God over the people by enticing them through their hunger.
Her daughter had lost her way completely; she dressed in the manner of the women at the mission, spoke their language, and had rejected a beautiful specimen of a man with the souls of many sons’ in his eyes that the clan leader had picked out for her.
“Tut, tut,” the girl had said, then laughed in the most unforgivable cackling way when they had introduced the boy to her. If he had been ugly, she would have understood; her own third husband had been very ugly, and it had taken her years to see the good person he was under the layers of his disgusting form—oh yes, revulsion she could understand. Not that it would've made any difference. If a man was chosen by the leader for a girl, no other among the men would dare to approach her. No, no, her daughter would grow old, sad, and alone now with her head in the sand of Western ideas and culture. She mourned the ghosts of her daughter's, never-to-be born, children, often in her prayers to the spirits’ of her desert world.
Sara saw it when the mission people behind the barbed wire, electric-topped fence, became less hazy as she and her daughter neared the station. It was such a thing! Sara had never seen the likes of it in her life before, and she was, by anyone's standards, a very old woman.
Her daughter saw her looking at it; she looked away from the thing quickly, hoping her daughter had not seen the envy and astonishment she knew was written all over her face. Her daughter, however, was also quick.
"Isn't she lovely?" Her daughter smirked, thinking that Sara had been admiring the weird pale mission girl who had been carrying it.
"Yes," she answered slyly, letting the thing out of her sight, to glance over at the mission dining hall instead. Her daughter's eyes followed hers.
"Aha," she said as she livened her pace, "they've got curry on the menu today; you always enjoy that, don't you?"
Sara felt guilty about misleading her daughter, but she didn't want her to know that, although she could sense its wonderful usefulness and practicality, she did not know what to call it— It was so, very, very beautiful, it made her heart sting and her head swim. Just thinking about it made her swoon. It was shiny, black, and glossy; it had metallic spines in its skeleton to hold it all together, and the connecting metal had the face of the sun in it. Bright, bright, and magnificent. Sara licked her old wizen lips. Her daughter, seeing her, grabbed at her hand, as she had been known to do in her youth. She giggled gaily and led her into the tin roofed room that served meals to all who came to hear the leader's words, whether they understood them or not.
Sara resolved to be on her best behavior for her daughter's sake, to make up for her failure at telling the truth. She vowed that she would neither spit (a sign of approval amongst the clan) nor fart if she could help it for the rest of the day. Both practices, she had discovered, embarrassed her child no end. She called them tribal, dismissively, but her cheeks, even under her supple dark skin, coloured every time Sara acted naturally. Her girl had become very strange, indeed.
She didn't see the thing again that day, but she carried an image of it in her mind's eye; that way she could hold it up and examine it privately, twisting it this way and then that, learning all its beautiful curves as if it were truly in her hands.
Sara was enjoying her visit to the mission for once, and her daughter, seeing her happiness, became very animated in her discussion about her life at the mission. Her food lay untouched before her, as she imparted all kinds of useless facts and figures to her. The entire conversation went straight over Sara's head (where she knew it belonged). Seeing that her daughter was not going to eat, Sara pretended attention while she polished off the contents of her daughter's plate. The missionaries might be crazy, Sara thought, but they certainly could cook, and since they all ate the same food together, Sara had decided that the risk of being poisoned was remote.
Eventually, when all the food was gone, she refocused on her daughter. A great sadness stabbed her suddenly in the heart. She clutched at her chest, feeling heaviness descend, like stones in her veins; it doubled her over. She yelled and fell to the floor in a spasm of pity for her daughter. She realized as she lay groaning on the floor that her daughter was caught up with this sect of people at the mission. She knew that the girl would never run with the wind in her hair across the desert on the spoor of a wild buck. She realized with agonizing clarity that her child would never learn the nuances of the great cave art of her ancestors. She knew that her girl would never learn to make the healing poultices of arnica and calendula. She understood that the girl would never, ever rock to the trance of the people's holy seeing. Her child was dead to her heritage, and she feared all her kind would soon follow.
Sara felt herself being drawn out of the dream she had fallen into with tear-jerking remorse; it had been such a good dream—she had been harvesting wild honey in her sleep, cunningly tricking the wise bees into leaving the hive unattended to sip on a cocktail of nectar and water she had laid out for them; she could still taste the stolen bees' bounty on her tongue. Under the glare of the loose, uncovered bulb, swinging to and fro from the ceiling above her, Sara recovered herself enough to know she was not out in her beloved oasis but in a sparse mission room with a nasty metallic, medicinal smell to it. She sat up to see her daughter, looking tired and worried, in the chair beside the stark white bed she had been lying on.
It came at her like an arrow; it was an epiphany; her daughter loved her. It made her feel even worse. She had been using her daughter's good nature; she had been using her daughter's belief that she, Sara, was there, not only for the food but to learn the ways of the new God her daughter now believed in so fervently. Sara sighed and guessed, in her infinite wisdom, that at some point all mothers felt exactly as she did right then.
She managed to get her legs over the side of the ridiculously high bed and hobble off it before they found it in their minds’ to try and make her stay in the dreadful stinking place. Her daughter came over to help her, and it was then that she broke her mother's heart. She explained that a great honor had been bestowed on her and that she had been chosen, from among countless hopefuls, to go to the city of Pretoria, to the great university of UNISA, to participate in an important Western study.
Sara began crying inconsolably. Her daughter patted her back in clueless empathy of misunderstanding. Sara was aghast, not at her daughters leave-taking, for she knew the girl would come back to see her before she died (even if she would never take up the ways of her people), but at the thought that she would perhaps never see the mesmerizing, fantastical invention she had witnessed earlier that day, ever again.
…she cried harder.
Sara allowed her girl child to guide her back to the hurriedly thrown-up camp she called home. Her people were nomadic, making only temporary accommodations for themselves in their seasonal tracking for essential food and water. After polite words of parting, Sara saw her daughter turn and head back to her new and exciting world.
At home, it was with bitter irony that Sara saw her neighbor glare out at her over her cooking pot, with undisguised jealousy. She had only sons, none of whom ever remembered their old mother or ever took her to see the wonders of the mission.
She blocked out the woman's evil eyes with a flap of her hut’s goatskin curtain, which she used for privacy.
She woke, in the middle of the pitch night, with the sweat of her vivid dreams upon her. She felt a lust, of a type that she had not experienced in her life until that very moment. It was even stronger than the desire she had felt for her first husband, in the days when she was young; in the days before any of her children had been born... she could feel the beautiful thing’s satiny, smooth, black texture under the skin of her work-roughened thumb.
She could imagine it her own, her very, very own.
Sara knew she was bewitched, but it didn't feel as bad as she imagined such a thing might. In her half-awakened state, she began to formulate her plan. She eliminated a number of possible herbs out of hand as being too toxic. Sara knew she was a good herbalist; it was something she had always been proud of. She could differentiate between the edible and the noxious almost instinctively from any number of similar-looking plants. It was a gift passed down to her from her great-grandmother, who had been a formidable witch with medicine. What she needed was something to stun the woman to quietness for a little while.
Before she left the safety of her village in pursuit of her heart's desire, Sara ate a section of the Hoodia plant, known to suppress the hunger of hunters’ on long, arduous journeys. Her daughter had once told her a funny story about the plant, saying that very rich, beautiful women in a place called California were willing to pay the clan vast sums in order to use their traditional plant to ward off the evil of fat. Sara could not imagine anything more beautiful than a fat woman. She had laughed for days at her child's silly story.
She picked her way carefully among the ever-changing dunes. She crossed the hot sands slowly on her bare feet, mindful that she had a tremendously difficult and dangerous task ahead of her.
But it was a task that fate would not allow her to ignore.
In a coffee shop not far from the campus of the enormous university that Sara's daughter had traveled to for her mission. A man sat reading an article out of a newspaper opposite a vacant-eyed, bored-looking blonde girl. He slammed the periodical down in front of the girl, almost toppling the plastic table with the force of his displeasure.
"Damn barbarians! Fancy, a good woman like that being taken advantage of by a bunch of ungrateful savages," he was fuming so much that steam seemed to be rising off the top of his nearly bald head.
"This Miss Jones, they are writing about, has all but given her life to helping these savages in the back of beyond—desert of the Kalahari—and what does she get for her trouble, a medal? No, it seems the bastards drugged her with some type of muti and then robbed her. Can you believe it? The poor soul belongs to some or other bible-punching mission, and she gets taken for an idiot by a loin-clothed bushman; honestly, I just don't know what this country is coming to these days."
Sara's daughter, two tables away from the irate reader, felt herself go cold with dread; she knew exactly who the man was talking about. She watched him leave the shop, then, like a bullet, she flew at the table and retrieved the paper to read the news for herself.
Miss Jones had, fortunately, not been hurt in the robbery; a window had been broken at her address in the middle of the night. Miss Jones had been drugged by vapors of some plant that the perpetrator had burnt in her house.
Only one item had been stolen.
The local constabulary were baffled since the object was virtually valueless and neither cash (of which there had been quite a considerable amount in the house) nor jewelry had been touched.
Sara's daughter stood in the center of the busy shop, closed her eyes, and began to shake with uncontrolled mirth. Behind the thin lids of her eyes, she saw once again the look of admiration on her mother's face, admiration she had believed, at the time, to be directed at Miss Jones's pretty blonde looks. Only now did she realize what her mother had been coveting...
Somewhere in the African desert—for her people traveled across the man-made borders that divided Southern Africa, knowing neither constraint nor law, only the shifting music of liquid in the ostrich shells from which they drank when water was scarce on the land—walked a massively lined old woman, proudly, under the protection of a glossy black, stolen umbrella.
I wrote this story a very long, long (long) time ago. It’s been lying about for ages. I rediscovered it a few days ago on an app that I haven’t used in ages. I had the piece in draft format on Smashwords (I put it up online for a few days, but then took it down because I felt it needed “more…”). I needed to finish it. Now I have (I think it passes as a “first publication,” which is one of TIW’s rules.
Sorry that it’s sooooooo loooooong!
