The incredible beat of my heart

Henali Kuit

Description

The incredible beat of my heart is a provocative collection of short prose, varying in style from suburban-realist to surrealist. Kuit transmits the elusive strangeness of daily life in a deceptively matter-of-fact tone, spiked with bursts of rage, humour, and unmarked detours.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Africa
• Short Stories
• Short story
• Southern Africa
• List of African writers by country
• Literature of South Africa
• World Literature

Informations

• Publié par: Deep South
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781928476436
• Langue: English

Extrait

The incredible beat of my heart
The incredible beat of my heart
Henali Kuit
2021©Henali Kuit All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-928476-42-9 ISBN ebook 978-1-928476-43-6
Deep South, Makhanda [e-mail] www.deepsouth.co.za
Distributed in South Africa by Blue Weaver Marketing and Distribution https://blueweaver.co.za
Distributed worldwide by African Books Collective PO Box 721, Oxford, OX1 9EN, UK www.africanbookscollective.com/publishers/deep-south
Cover painting: Mary Wafer, Untitled IV 2015 , oil on canvas Cover design: Amy Nicholson Text design and layout: Liz Gowans
CONTENTS
1
Maps
The garage
Look into my bullethole
My killer’s fingers
Dad
2
André
Sweetheart
Brink
Carel
Jesus
Like a person
3
Bonbon
Hole
The incredible beat of my heart
My mother kicked me into space
I carried your oxygen
4
The garbage dump
HomeShop
Honey
The beautiful girl
The Amazing Human Body
Beau
Wangta
5
Obstinacy
The drain snake
This one
Goddamn terrific
Gordon’s Bay
The blue crane sanctuary
Wet Speedo
The wrongest thing
Dikkop
1
Maps
I share a flat with an old lady. I saw the ad at the library when I was drunk. It said in all caps, ‘very independent, goes to job and to group-fitness daily.’ How romantic, I thought. Renting a room from her would not be about the room at all. It would be more about her than it would be about me. She made no mention of requiring sober habits or a reference from an employer. This was good because I didn’t have either. I moved in. Carefully pushing my mattress around the wonky little table by the door.
At first I wanted to make friends because I was sick of being alone. I saw myself in the old lady and it was plain that she wanted to see herself in me. If we could make friends, I thought, we would have no need for mirrors, or men. But it didn’t work out for us. We were both occupied with the webs we had spun around our days. She had to drive from the library, to church, to spinning class, to the traditional healer, then back to church, day in and out. And I had to continue, simply, to worry.
I worried that the old lady would go into the kitchen after I had made my dinner and that she’d step on a knife I dropped and somehow hadn’t noticed. Or that she’d bump against a pot of steaming water I had brought to boil but somehow didn’t empty. I worried about finding her on the kitchen floor: writhing, her thin skin coming off like tissues. I checked for things I might have dropped, sharp things. I checked, again and then again, for boiling things that never cool. I am compulsively compulsive. I tap and blink and clench my fist. I had to make lists too, because lists helped me to remember what I should be checking. Lists helped me worry into the right directions. I am not a lavish kind of person but I made lists of what I wanted for my room and compared these to lists of what I already had and to lists of what I couldn’t afford.
I also drew maps. Me standing in my new room and existing with my coordinates. Me surrounded by the old lady’s things, making eye contact before I extended my index finger and flicked something precious into the graticule of a deep hole with a concrete bottom. Or me standing next to her and us both pulling faces – the lines our faces made working like alidades: pointing into directions that are significant if you look well enough. Sometimes I printed my blood group in the top-left corner of my maps. When I was feeling nostalgic, I added my emergency contact, a number no longer in service, that my father made me memorise 27 years ago. Sometimes I get mad and I write vengeful notes in the top-right corner of my maps. Then I shut my eyes and picture the old lady blowing up in slow motion.
The garage
I woke up one morning and found that my father had unplugged me and moved me to the garage. I do not have a very active imagination and so this is basically the most shit thing that could ever have happened to me.
Humans have soft corners in their daily routines and brilliant things grow there like mould. Essentially the same is true of garages – but that would be garages in general, and my mother is a hoarder. Sometimes things become so intense that they flip back into nothingness. The garage is my home now and I accept that, but such lassitude has taken hold of me that I find myself spitting up into the air. And waiting.
I heard they found that shadows are composed of the black that goes out of keys when people turn them the wrong way in their locks. There has not been a shadow in the garage since I got here. I have never before been this invisible. While I stood in the living room, all I ever wanted to be was something else. I would control my diet and obsess over the patterns of my thought. While 40 is, generally speaking, the new 30, this has not proven true for me.
At night I pray for redemption and the ability to distinguish between night and day. If I had hands, I would touch myself to know where I am. But I have only my own sighs, soft and incessant things, as affirmation of only my cardio-vascular person. I heard that when you’re not able to sigh, parts of you will actually blow up. It would start in your extremities. If I had hands they would swell. These are the things you never think about when you are fully functional.
Look into my bullethole
I faked a kind of incompetence so that my father was forced to come back from the war and take care of me. I centred the incompetence around my mind. Not my own anymore, I said (weepily). Dunno what to do, I said. At wits’ end!
Sure enough, my father showed up on the stoep a few days later. Looking important, missing an ear because of the war.
‘Pappa!’ – this was an exclamation and my face was flushed.
My father emptied his pockets in my palm in response. A feather (red, soft). A porcupine quill. A handful of shiny stones I didn’t want, and about which he had a lot to say.
Finally: a bullethole. Rounder than I’d have thought possible. Bloody, very bloody. But somehow not sloppy. Circular. Perfectly focused. My father turned it over in my open palm and right away my palm held it proudly: a bullethole right through my hand, next to the swell of my thumb. Right away it ached like something I’d misplaced but never lost. I lifted it to look at the world through its bloody frame. I could see the white of my tendons when I tilted my hand away from me. I brought it up to my face to smell it. It smelled like rust. It smelled like the farm late at night.
Growing up on the farm was the first gift my father ever gave me. It was an inadvertent gift because he didn’t really have any place else to put me but I considered myself lucky nonetheless. The bullethole would be a grand addition to my life here. Would the bullethole whistle in the wind when I ran across the fields? That would enhance the experience of running. Underline it in a high pitch.
‘Thank you, Pappa,’ I said, holding the bullethole up to him and clutching the other gifts in my other hand. My father responded by ruffling my hair and telling me to get him a cup of coffee. My father sees me as a person with a soft personality, as someone who asks for things and waits to receive them. In turn, I look at my father as someone who sits down on the stoep after returning from war and asks for coffee without so much as entering the house first. And yet my father brought me the bullethole after I had merely expected the shiny stones I didn’t want. You see how I underestimate him.
‘Cream?’ I asked.
‘And sugar,’ he responded.
As I brought the kettle to a boil, I held my hand over the spout and watched the steam rise through my bullethole. It was delightful.
My father devoured a plate of Hertzoggies along with his coffee. The sweet tartness of the jam complements the bitter coffee.
‘Ah,’ he said.
I had garnished the plate with the red feather and three of the shiny stones. When the cookies were gone, my father took the biggest little stone between his fingertips, brought it to his lips (there were Hertzoggie crumbs on his moustache), stuck out a small pink tip of tongue and licked.
‘Uh,’ he said, taken aback, bringing the stone up to his eyes to inspect it. He moved his eyes to me, glared.
‘More coffee?’ I asked, and he nodded silently.
In the kitchen I lit a fat cigar, opened the window to send a smoke signal to my fiancé on the farm next to ours. I brought my palm up to my face, inspected the roundness of the bullethole as my lungs burned with smoke. I made a wish and exhaled right into my bullethole. As the smoke funnelled through the hole, I felt a sort of childhood glee returning to my body. The smoke had a reddish tint when it came out on the other side. I made a long spout of smoke like I was a dragon. I pumped my arm and imagined that that would make the smoke expel with more force. I brought the cigar to my lips again and sucked. I exhaled one long strip of smoke and three short dots, all of them through my bullethole. It tingled.
Almost immediately I heard my father from the stoep. The sound wasn’t a word. It was a noise that feigned surprise to suggest welcome. My father might have said ‘look who’s here’ if he were the type to prefer words to noises.
‘Fiancé!’ I exclaimed. I share my father’s features but not his muggy silence.