White Dog Fell from the Sky

50



For a couple of days now, they’ve stopped taking him out of his cell. His head throbs without end, his vision has blurred. Each breath he takes pushes his broken ribs toward pain.

He runs a hand over his head. It is no longer his head. There is no hair on it. And the shape is wrong. They shaved his hair when he came to this place, and they’ve shaved it again. Lice, they said. Dirty kaffir lice. They all have lice. But it’s not true. He has never had lice. Not in all his born days. His head is now the head of a skinny man. Lumps where there were none.

He is an old man now. They have broken his ribs, five or six, maybe more. He is older than that old sick man who dug the sunken garden and gave him the hot pepper seeds. He is broken in more places than he can count. His nose, pushed to one side, blood clotted underneath. Traveling under the hearse, he thought he would die. He knows now he was not even close to death then. He can feel the line between life and death in this place, has prayed to cross it, to be granted peace.

Amen. Meeting Amen was where it began. If he’d walked down that footpath a quarter of an hour earlier, a quarter of an hour later, he would have slept somewhere else that night. Who knows where he would have ended up? But it would not have been with Amen and Kagiso. It would not all have unfolded.

Why are they not coming for him now? It has been a day, perhaps two. How often has he prayed to God to let him die, a God who has proven to be deaf, blind, criminally indifferent.

How is it that a small voice, even now, is saying, live! Some stubborn, reptilian creaking urgency wants to draw one more breath. And after that, one more. And again and again.

Surely death will be like water merging with water.

They have not been coming for him for several days now. He believes his usefulness to them has ended. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. They will come with their sharp threshing instruments and beat him small and blow him away as chaff.

Surely death will be like the earth dissolving in the rains, running before the deluge, merging with the moving waters. Or like letting your hands go from the branch of a tall tree and dropping, falling through space, the fall never ending, black nothingness forever.