Apex Magazine April 2018 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Book Company

* * *

Nowadays, the serial-killer act reincarnates itself in any woman,

the girl is pregnant with it, blind with fury; their bodies, wombs to bear murder. Born this way.

Sisi noticed the change in our village. “So, you don’t feel pain anymore when the victim is an mfetu—a guy?” she asked.

“I no longer suffer from pain because I no longer die in my dreams,” I confessed. Time passed. We tried to excavate the loss of our parents from our hearts, but it was threaded in our bones, mourning during our inhales and exhales.

“Revenge,” Sisi whispered, “is a grave we’re all born in. We won’t leave it.”

The next culprit, who was interviewed on their motive, bluntly responded: “I know it’s a sick way to think. I’m supposed to be ladylike, timid—that’s exactly why I shoved his nuts down his throat and asked him, does he like how he tastes? Because I certainly won’t. He shouldn’t try to make me taste him. My résumé doesn’t list me as a blowjob-giver.”

I shared art class with the murderer, but she always looked innocent. Sisi was right: we’d made a home of revenge.

Normally, for some time, it was the women who usually died. But not anymore. It seems the way of things where I live, in the rural backwater of Bodibelampeng, a northern-province in Botswana. Our village is small, with a population of 1,200, nestled by the hills with one rusted church, a school from pre-school to secondary level, and an ill-equipped police station. Old shebeens are oft-stuffed with old men and old women mixing tales, and a forest thick with morula trees. One would assume this a nice, peaceful and ordinary village, save for the murders. Murder is common here, taken as a monthly occurrence, the village’s menstrual cycle. Bodibelampeng is the accomplice. Its tools, the forest, the lake, the paths that become skew, turning lonesome strangers into hogtied victims.

Tonight, after Anaemia has forced me out of the fasting hut to eat supper with my aunt, uncle and sister, and my sister’s recognition that normally women used to die, we turn in to bed. Sisi is still packing her clothes, for we leave this damned village for varsity in three days. Her phone vibrates. Her boyfriend. It’s close to midnight. She promises me she’ll be back soon. The last thing I see of her as she sneaks out the window is her feeble body made of brown, her hair made of Afro, her sight made of hope.

I turn to my side, haemorrhaging into my bed. At least this is happening before we transit to the city. Perhaps once I leave this village, it will all stop. But tonight, the chronic nightmare wrecks me and slips me into the next episode of Every Night I See How They Die. I’m the director, the producer, the victim.

In last season’s episode, I was the woman who died because—it doesn’t matter. It never matters, as long as it serves the plot.

Hours pass. In my bed, the nightmare’s pacing has turned

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