“But the land will be abandoned by them and will enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them; and they will accept the punishment for their wickedness and make amends because they rejected My ordinances and their soul rejected My statues.”

–Leviticus 26:43

Simon staggers towards me with two neat glasses of whiskey. His eyes carry a sinister contempt. I repel against all the warnings my body brings forth, because no one has ever looked at me with such disgrace. But, I love that he wants to do dirty things with me – to me. He wants to light a fire, and coax the devil in his sleep. He wants my insides to eat at him, with my loins clamouring for clemency. 

“Forgive me father for my sins,” I confess. 

I am bent over the wooden pew and my sundress is hoisted over the arch of my back and my tongue escapes the labyrinths on his body. He anchors me with growls, “Speak of your sins.” His fingers are on my naval. He tells me he wants to feel out for the gospel in my flesh. He suckles on my breasts and he seeks to find new meaning to this ravenous act. Even when he only desires me when I disappear into the night sky. So, he christens me Eve.

When day breaks, and Sunday comes, he preaches a new sermon. We do not go to the back of the church or the wooden pews. He protrudes and calls me a heathen under his breath, with the same mouth that carries my phallus. It does not matter that he was the age of Jesus at the cross when I was born. I was enamoured by the burden of his shame and his ability to not wake the dead whenever he was inside me. Or me, him.

Monday morning I find Reynard beheaded on a coaster. He is restrained by a hungover consumed by his lust of life. Lines furrow on his forehead and his secrets, suspended in time, reveal a scared little boy behind a sanctimonious countenance. The boy only comes out when he is inebriated and with no caution to silence the beast.  He drinks too much, and I clean up after him. I clean up after both of them. I pay my dues by housing all of their sufferings when they are without their congregation. We live in the maisonette of the church. Simon and Reynard are the descendants of the Holiness Union Missionaries from Sweden who found footing in South Africa in the late 1800s. The men who ordered for more churches to be built in the townships – away from the white cities. The men with an onus to preserve a history of anarchy through white nationalism. The men who introduced Christian literature. I am the consequence of what happens to a people when their gods are taken away from them. The Book of Life was conceived before I could exhume the tongues of slaves who would have passed down the idiosyncrasies of who we were through the mouth. My genealogy is a phantasm. I have no memory of how I got here. I have no history. 

***

“I need the lights to be switched off.”

“What?” he says, breathing heavily. “We always have the lights on.”

“Yeah, but not when she’s staring at me.”

He exalts on top of me, and asserts his body. I point at the pendulous Hail Mary pendant hanging on his neck. I have never been this precious with a boy. I love who I am when I am with him. The promise of youthfulness that holds onto an innocence that ebbs with age. There is no council to make a verdict on my flaws, or my transgressions. I do not have to pretend to be something that I am not. I am confident in my mess. My misguided vocation. I find solace in his refuge. When he is on top of me I realise that the surface of his skin and the composition of his blue eyes are identical to his father’s. The scaffold of his arms compose accusations that lead me to familiar routes. A perennial lineage with frontiers strong enough to withstand storms. 

These are facts that only a mother or an intimate lover would know. Only one survived with the memory to recount the fissures on both men; and I live to tell it all. I found the need to split myself into two parts by virtue of being the only woman that both father and son could have. But the memory of a past life haunts me. The touch of the man feels familiar. Sweat mutters off him and my nose is bridled with a scent of a placenta when one is in the womb. How much of these are inherited from my mother? How much of these belong to me?

 “If we don’t leave now, you might never make it out.”

“And that’s okay with me. There is no place for us in the world.”

“We will make one.”

“Where would we go? How would we define ourselves? There is no language for people like us.”

“Love has weathered storms.” 

“Love? I have never known any.”

He could have easily went down the terminal of disaster: kept his virginity for his one sordid true love who would find warmth in between the thighs of another; married at twenty two; had kids; retired his life offerings to the church and grew vegetables with his damsel. Instead, he had to go around confessing his love for me when I am insufferable. He had to beg me to cascade into open fields with him, and chase after the wind.

“You will not survive in the world without him.”

“You speak of him like he is some kind of deity.”

“That’s what you made of him. You follow him around like a shadow. When there is no figure, there is no you.”

“No I haven’t. He is nothing to me, even when I know they think of him as revolutionary just because he stands on that pulpit. They offer him tithe and sing praises. I don’t know if those praises are fashioned for God or for him.”

We do this dance all the time. We synchronise in his melancholy and I bear the brunt of him falling short against the war in his mind. His desire to want us to get away from his father. He wants to be my saviour. 

“Reynard, I do not want to be remise of you. I am your equal before God.”

He gazes up at me with a look that promises me perdition. 

“Did I offend your God?” I ask timidly, with fear brewing under my breath because of what he might do to me. Even with his love. I know of the power that possesses men to aide their lovers to the cemetery by killing them. 

Sometimes she appears when I least expect it. Even though I can almost never make out her face because it brings a mirage to my vision, I always know that it is her. Her return from other realms would be silent and she would still find a way to deafen my ears with her being there. When Reynard speaks of his mercy, or his chivalry, or what he deems as his love towards me, I do not hear him. She is the only one I see. In the rain hurdling the kids away from the storms. Behind a counter at a convenient store where she hands me back my small change. When I catch my reflection and she stares back at me. And on Sundays when I take on tasks that once solely belonged to her: preparing a lunch for after Sunday service for both father and son; and sometimes standing beside Simon on the pulpit. She’s all I see. She had a choice to live life or leave it. 

The curse of birthing a child and dying is that they reincarnate as you. And as a consequence you will go through both: you will leave and live without disruptions from other realms. Unfortunately we were bounded by fate that always had us being parallel in different realms. And as it turns out she has always been my mother. And I have always given birth to myself. 

“Simon, I do not want to be remise of you. I am your equal before God.”

He gazes up at me with a look that promises me perdition. 

“Did I offend your God?” 

She has an appetite for death. She fears no man. She took on the world with gusto when they tried to take over the land of her people. Even when she was in love. Her oblivion to the wrath of those men was her fatal flaw. They shipped onto shore and asked them to surrender for they had the word, and the word was encumbered with deceit and she refused to accept their offer. She could have feigned prayer in their tongues; improvised with their spirits. But, she refused to become a false prophet; a charlatan that wanted to appease the tapestry of the wicked. And as a result, without displaying courtesy towards her humanity or her with child body, they felt the need to avenge the shadows of their past selves; of their secret lives. 

So they killed her. Or her spirit. Her youthful grace became old, until it wasn’t. Now her throat hoards spirits. When she opens her mouth and all those that are not living cascade on the periphery of every open space and enclosed endings of nebulous confines. They call them ghosts. They yearn for a reprise because they did not live full lives. Their voices escape the divine conduit, dancing discordantly, with a cadence that offends the theatre of the church. They somersault and oscillate between fortitudes until we are tired of their presence. With their malevolent crescent smiles, they made gospel from her ruins. They called her a martyr for their cause. They inclined towards her malignantly with a jurisdiction that raged with contempt. 

They skinned her alive, for her gospel exhumed that their truths were fallacies that they used to capture her people. Fear disparaged them from their gods – her Ancestors, and their destitute had them believing in one with blue eyes and blonde hair that could not hold up against gravity. Who was she before they conjured up grief to a child born without a mother? What incited them being there? Had she been a witch? A sorcerer? A means to an end?

I know both men in different realms. Before I was christened Eve, my mother named me Tshiu. I was born at the twilight of dawn, and those were also the last days of her life. She had not known that she would soon kiss death when she mysteriously became with child. With a vague yearning for a reprise, she ate at me until all that was left of her dark flesh was dry marrow that would soon turn to dust. She would rise on the seventh day from her muddied blood, and Simon would foster her infant body, and she would become his all over again. But if it is a fact that we return to our makers, how poignant is it that the corpse returns to feed on the flesh that once conceived it so it could rise again?

Reynard becomes distant after I refuse his offer. But I know how to wring him in even when his degenerate parables pry on me.  Lay a table for four. I hold onto both parts of myself; the present and the one I do paroxysm tangoes with. I encircle the rim of the whiskey glass. I spectate as they scavenge through my servings. I am not impressed, but I love the sight of them eating. 

I make a banquet of myself for both of them, wholly. I am a woman, but I was not raised to be one. An animal? Yes. Benevolent to burn the limn desires off the faces of sanctimonious coquettes. When they are done, they will extinguish the flames that adorned us with a sip of Three Ships Whiskey, and they will live to forget. We will dance before I choose who to lay with and make a sacrifice of myself and I will live to burn for a reprise. I know when they are without their God they kneel to me. I become their altar. And unlike their God, I can actually make them repent. God forbid, they speak in the same tongues when they come – every time they come. Because I know what mercy looks like on men.

About the Author:

Mosa Neema Rabannye is a Black Trans Woman from South Africa. She is a writer, a theatre practitioner, and a qualified language scientist. Find her on Instagram: @moetsalibe_  & Twitter: @moetsalibe & Mosa blogs @ https://moetsalibe.wordpress.com

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay