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67 pages

English

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Before Before and After After consists of short stories which explore the fantastical, the power of memory and the human capacity to love. Moving between the surreal, the absurd, the allegorical, and the meta-fictional, they elaborate on life's ordinary madness and the mysteries of the spirit. In most cases, they create a playful, experimental world that exists at a slight angle to the world as we know it.

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Short story

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Date de parution	29 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528965071
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Before Before and After After
Shelter K. Musavengana
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-06-30
Before Before and After After About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgements Pandemonium Patsy, Pam & Pat The Girl and Her Body The Pie That Wasn’t a Pie Not Even for Extra Pudding Farm Life Cultivation Into the Ground Forever After The Village Goat Territory Wars Harrison’s Land The Collector Empty Frames Rotten from the Spoon Lucas The Night to Come Under and Around Mercy Family History The Hole and the Shed Workers Felling a Tree Rocks or Crocodiles Horses and Other Creatures We are Absalom Night Flight Glossary of terms
About the Author
Shelter K. Musavengana is an entrepreneur, musician and an author of many dimensions with the ability to tap into different genres skilfully. She has been writing since childhood, mostly short stories and scripts for theatre productions. Her love for writing led her to study for and obtain a Bachelor’s degree in English and Media and a Masters in Creative Writing. She currently works as a part time creative writing instructor.
Dedication
For my mother, Theresa Musavengana, this book is the fruit of your unwavering support… I will forever be grateful.
Copyright Information ©
Shelter K. Musavengana (2020)
The right of Shelter K. Musavengana to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528927444 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528965071 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Stacy Hardy, Paul Wessels and Robert Berold for encouraging me to delve into the depths of my creativity when I was a Masters student. My time under your tutelage was the birthing of this collection. Thank you to my friends and family for believing in my writing and urging me to pursue it.
Pandemonium
When the alarm went off for her two o’clock, Teri was stuck. She could hear it beeping as though coming from a distant place. She stood at the window willing her feet to move but they wouldn’t. Three floors down, she’d seen it all. She’d seen her walking towards the building, crossing the road and then just like that she was gone. From where she stood, Teri saw no blood, no crushed limbs…nothing. She saw people running around screaming…crazy. Chickens did that. If you beheaded a chicken without holding its wings down, it ran around spurting blood from its neck. Once all the life was gone it would just drop dead. Teri had seen one when she was seven. It was at Christmas and all the family had gathered to celebrate. Aunts were moving about hastily in the kitchen, making salads, cooking sadza and rice, plucking chickens and cleaning the intestines from the goat that the men had killed and skinned. Teri remembered the headless chicken. It ran around the kitchen, knocking itself against cupboard doors until it dropped before her. It was the same Christmas she saw a goat’s head in a dish with its eyes open and tongue sticking out. She never liked goat meat after that.
That morning before Teri went to work, her sister, Kumbi, called her from town and said she needed to see her. Teri told her she didn’t have the time. The thing with Kumbi was that she only ever wanted to see her when she needed money or was in some kind of trouble and Teri had had enough. The two were born a year apart making them almost twins. Kumbi was older but Teri was the more responsible one: she was always bailing her sister out of some mess or other. Starting the day with a call from her sister didn’t bode well. She had a series of meetings lined up, clients to woo and contracts to sign. She’d have to file the Kumbi issue away and deal with it later.
The woman on the street wore a red coat. That’s the first thing Teri noticed. It was bright red and as if in some kind of scripted scene, everyone else around her wore drab grey and black. The woman had her hoodie up, shielding her face. It was the first cold morning they’d had all year. Standing at the window, hugging a cup of tea between her hands, Teri saw a boy of maybe three or four on a child leash, pulling at the man holding the leash, probably the father. The man seemed more interested in the girl in tight jeans and hooker boots walking in front of him. Teri was about to turn from the window when she heard the sound.
At first she thought it was a gunshot, a loud, terrifying clap sliced through the everyday noises and for a second, everyone outside froze. Then the screaming and running around began. Teri froze too but her freeze didn’t end with everyone else because from her window, she saw something else. Her cup with its half-drunk tea slipped from her hands and fell onto the carpet with a thud, the hot liquid splashing onto her stockinged feet.
From her position at the window, Teri could almost taste the fear and confusion in the air. The woman in the red coat, the man with the boy on a leash, hooker boots girl and some of the others walked over to the pedestrian crossing that linked that side of the street with Teri’s. When the light turned green for the pedestrians to go, the woman in the red coat walked on to the street first. The traffic was still. Everything was fine, until a louder clap. The ground opened up momentarily and swallowed the woman.
The man with the boy on a leash started running backwards, hooker boots girl ran around in circles. People in their grey and black coats screamed, some with arms raised, waving, and some clutching their bags. If this was a scene from a movie, Teri would have called it, “the scene where they all go mad.” Pandemonium.
This was the story Teri told her shrink, Dr Plunder, that evening. After she cancelled all her meetings and sat on the floor in the office trying to make sense of what had happened. She couldn’t stop seeing the woman, the street, the craziness. Of all the things that came to her mind that day, the most comforting was the boy on the leash…but the woman in the red coat, getting swallowed by the road, kept pushing her boy-on-the-leash thoughts out of the way.
Dr Plunder gave Teri something to calm her down. A taxi took her home that evening. When she got to her flat, she walked through the front door, past the kitchen, down the corridor and into her bedroom in a daze. She didn’t switch on any lights or think about having dinner or a shower. Fully clothed, only managing to kick her shoes off, she sat on the edge of her bed, staring blankly at the wall. After a few minutes, she opened the top drawer on the bedside table and took out a bottle of sleeping pills. Teri had got these three months ago when she stopped sleeping at night after finding Nick dead with the radio in the bath. Popping the lid, she took two out, tipped her head back, threw them into her mouth, swallowed them dry and flopped back onto the pillows. She stared at the ceiling until she slipped into darkness.
Teri was outside her office building, at the entrance, about to go in when a loud clap sliced through the everyday noises. At first, everyone froze for a moment before all hell broke loose. People were screaming and running around shoving each other this way and that. Teri stood frozen as if everything that was happening wasn’t actually happening where she was. She willed herself to move but her feet would not obey and so she stood there. Across the street she saw her. She’d seen her earlier and thought about a scene in a movie, in which the main character wore red and everyone around them wore black. A few minutes after the loud clap, nothing bad followed, everyone seemed to calm down. There was a boy on a child leash. The man holding the leash wasn’t paying attention to the boy. Instead, he was looking at the girl in tight jeans and hooker boots walking in front of him.
The light for the pedestrians to cross the road turned green, Teri watched the woman in the red coat step onto the street. There was a deafening clap, all the windows around Teri seemed to vibrate and then a loud tearing sound ripped through them. The ground cracked open where the woman stood, fear and panic etched in her face, before it disappeared…along with the rest of her…the ground closed shut. Everyone stood transfixed.
When they were young, Teri and Kumbi used to play a game in the bath, whoever could stay under water the longest would get the other’s dessert for the day. They called it the drowning game. They played this game until Kumbi was thirteen, then she was too grown up for such games. She liked boys. She wore her skirts short and wore red lipstick when Mama wasn’t around, which was a lot. She let Billy Spawn put his tongue down her throat when she was thirteen. She let Tendai Gatsi feel her boobs when she was fourteen. She was an early bloomer. She said she and Joey Bennet went all the way when she was fifteen. Teri and Kumbi were as different as a rock and water.
This was the story Teri told her shrink.
The woman’s coat could have been grey but it wasn’t. It was red. She knew it was red because everything else was dark around it. She watched the woman put one foot on to the st