By Tshepo Maredi

This morning I disappeared. Quietly and uneventfully. And quickly enough not to alert the township’s two-footed tabloids of my imminent departure as they rubbed their sleepy eyes and organised the new day’s gossip. It wouldn’t be too long before they noticed that I was gone. Not with my father’s house being on the corner of the road where Mofokeng crosses over Mokoena—a tired-looking fence being the only thing standing between the neighbourhood’s salivating tongues and my family’s business. And by that I don’t mean our own chaos, but rather the business of my father being a gravedigger.

You see, there’s this recurring dream that I have. In it, I’m always running, and each time I’m a different age. I’m either running away from people or from animals or from appliances or apparitions or other unidentifiable objects. Sometimes, I’m running away from nothing at all. But the dreams always end in the same way—my father calling out a name that isn’t mine.

“Tumelo” he called out to me in a dream I had last Tuesday. This, after being chased for what seemed like hours by a large cast iron pot. I was about 3 in this dream, and I willed my little legs to carry me further, faster. But when he called out this name I stopped, overcome by a deep sense of calm and lightness.

My father dug Tumelo’s grave on Thursday, and he was buried on Saturday morning. 

“A terrible tragedy,” my mother relayed to one of the neighbours on Wednesday, who purposefully walked too close to the fence to be ignored after greeting. “He fell into a boiling pot of water. Oh, sweet baby. His mother is devastated.”

It’s this that the neighbourhood vultures were always after. The next name on death’s list. Hoping that it’s not one of their own but also secretly wishing that tragedy befalls an enemy. My father forbade us from telling anyone who it was in my dream the night before, but my dear mother always found a way to let it slip. Sometimes, though, she did manage to keep it in until the day after the person had died.

“She never was all that good with children,” the neighbour replied to the news of Tumelo’s untimely death, to which my mother walked back into the house without another word.

In my dreams, I could always smell death on my father. A strong but not unsettling mixture of soil and rotting flesh. It’s this same soil and flesh that filled my nostrils again last night. I was running over what felt like heaps of sand. I couldn’t see, but I knew what it was. And so I ran as quickly and as carefully as I could, knowing that my father would be hot on my heels. It proved to be quite tricky, running in the dark. Especially because what I was running away from hadn’t quite become apparent.

Before it could even occur to me that I was still the same age, I slipped on a mound of sand and fell for what could have been an eternity. Eventually I hit the bottom, and a torch appeared at the top of the hole like a halo. As I had come to expect, I saw the caring face of my father, and recognised the edges of the hole to be that of a grave in the light.

“Rorisang,” he called down to me. The name he had given me.

Tshepo Maredi is an often quiet but occasionally chatty copywriter born, raised, and still living in Johannesburg, South Africa.

All rights to this story remain with the author. Please do not repost or reproduce this material without permission.