Vignette: Chicanery at the Canal

By David Love.

On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly).

The theme for the 67th contest was Slasher.

It was still raining when Simbarashe woke. He hadn’t realised he’d fallen asleep, but his body told him it hadn’t been for long.

“Tongai,” he called to his brother, who grunted.

“Tongai,” he called again. “Come on, the rain sounds less.”

Tongai sat up, looked at his brother, grunted again, and then stood. He opened the door and peered out of the hut in silence. Simbarashe couldn’t see anything with his brother’s big chest blocking the view.

“Mkoma?”

Tongai grunted again, and stepped outside. Simbarashe quickly stood up and followed. The rain was indeed lighter, but the sky was a dark grey, the storm clouds decreasing the dawn light to a faint glow.

“We’ll be lucky to see anything,” Tongai finally spoke. “These moronic clouds are hiding everything while they piss on us.” Turning back to Simbarashe, he added, “Leave the boy, he’ll only get lost in this.”

Simbarashe looked back at Kudakwashe, and closed the door, leaving their younger brother sleeping.

***

The two brothers walked along the track, down the slope away from their home and towards the bridge on the main road north to Buchwa. They still could not see very far at all, and walked in silence, until suddenly the elder brother stopped.

“Mxm!” Tongai clicked his tongue.

“Eh?” Simbarashe asked, but could see where his brother was looking. They could not see the bridge yet, but they could see water: the Mwenezi river had burst its banks, and the floodwaters were not far away.

“Could father have crossed somewhere else?” Simbarashe asked.

“Not likely,” replied Tongai. “There’s Renete, but it’s a lot further north, the main bridge here is so much closer to his shop. But we have to check.”

“If he had crossed there, it’s further. It could explain why he didn’t make it home last night,” Simbarashe concurred.

“The road that way takes off down there,” Tongai said, pointing into the floodwaters. “We’ll have to walk to where it comes out.”

The two brothers set off along the edge of the floodwaters, going slowly upstream. Soon after, they crossed the main tarred road to Buchwa without comment, as it disappeared into the water. They walked on through their now waterlogged family fields for about half an hour, until they reached the dust road they were looking for.

The dust road stayed fairly close to the floodwaters, the brothers moving quicker now, the mud being less than in the field.

“Why did father have to go to the shops yesterday anyway, in this terrible weather?” Simbarashe began.

Tongai cut him off with a glare, then, “You know why. Month end. You know him.”

“Books to get in order,” Simbarashe continued.

Tongai interjected, “And stuff to hide in case the Chief’s assessor comes. Those shops! Easy money! You don’t remember what it was like before father got the shops, before the war you were just a baby...”

The elder brother’s voice trailed off. There were two bloated shapes on the edge of the water. Dead cows.

Simbarashe walked up to the corpses. “Mkoma, look, look!” His young voice quavered, squeaked almost.

Tongai grunted. “Yeah, the floods have killed some of our stupid cattle, come on.”

“Not that,” Simbarashe squeezed out, “look, their throats have been slashed.”

“Probably just sticks and stuff in the water. We need to move.”

Simbarashe straightened up, and he followed his brother along the road. But soon they stopped. The road was going downhill, disappearing into the floodwaters again, the top posts of a small bridge just visible beyond the water’s edge.

Tongai stared at it. “That’s our canal. It’s flooded with water come down the Mwenezi. The water can’t be very deep if we can see the top of the bridge, and there should be dry land--”

“Mkoma!” Simbarashe shouted. “In the canal!”

The younger brother was pointing down the canal, away from the bridge. The canal was swollen with floodwater, but there was something there, darker than the pale quartzite of the canal walls.

“Another dead cow, there’ll be plenty more of them too,” Tongai said dismissively, but Simbarashe was already moving towards it. “For Mwari’s sake, do you have to look? Isn’t it enough to--”

Simbarashe screamed. The younger brother had run into the shallow floodwater on the edge of the canal. He could no longer hear his brother yelling at him, although the rain was fairly quiet now. He just stared.

Two legs were sticking out of the water, a man’s body upside down in the canal.

His brother’s hands shook his shoulders, and he turned. Tongai merely grunted, and they each took hold of a leg, pulled the body out of the canal.

It was their father.

They pulled him upright, and dragged him by the shoulders out of the shallow water, and onto the land, where they laid him down.

Both brothers were silent for a while.

“Njusi,” said Tongai, quietly. “They are not supposed to leave the river pools, but in these floods, who knows?”

“No,” said Simarashe, between his tears, “Njusi drown people, they don’t--”

His voice trailed off as he pointed at his father’s throat, at the bruised marks on it, and the slashes.

“It’s just like the--”

“Shut up!” his brother cut him off. “None of that. We have to get him home.”

***

It had taken them nearly two hours to walk back home, carrying their father’s body between them. As they approach the homestead, they saw their mother was waiting outside the door of the main hut, despite the rain.

Mother ran down the slope to them, and her pants turned to wails as she realised the man they carried could not be alive.

Later, after the brothers had laid their father’s body on a straw mat in a room they could avoid using for now, Simbarashe gathered himself and turned to his mother, who was standing, crying slightly, and staring out the door into the steadily increasing rain.

“Mother, why were you standing in the rain”? he asked.

“Simba, your brother went out, and has not returned, you did not see him?”

“What?” Tongai exclaimed. “No, we didn’t. Let’s go!”

He rushed out the door, Simbarashe following him.

“Kuda must be in the fields, or the other way down the main road,” Simbarashe began.

“Unless we missed him in this murk,” Tongai responded, “but you’re right, let’s go the other way first.”

They reached the tarred road, and turned away from the Mwenezi bridge, but had not walked more than ten minutes before they found floodwater again.

“The Sossonye must have broken its banks too.” Tongai said softly.

“You mean...?” Simbarashe began.

“Yes, we’re on a fucked island. Where can the boy have gone?”

“I guess we check the fields? At least the rain has stopped.”

“We still can’t see far. It’s like it’s half dark already.”

The two brothers left the road, and walked through the family’s sodden fields, calling out, and peering through the murk. There was not a ray of sunshine to be seen anywhere.

They had passed five dead cows, Tongai refusing to comment, even speak, as Simbarashe quietly pointed out the marks on their throats, before they stopped at a tree on an anthill that gave as much vantage as anything did in the weather.

Tongai gasped, and then pointed. The two brothers rushed through the muddy field to a minor canal that in normal times carried water to this and the next field. Kudakwashe was floating lifeless on his back.

Simbarashe staggered and burst into tears, but Tongai began to shout.

“Who is doing this to us?" Tongai screamed. “They took our sweet brother and left him in the canal like gadadzva!”

Simbarashe’s wails continued, the scatological curse not registering.

Tongai pulled the boy from the water, hugged his body to his chest, then turned to Simbarashe.

“Take him back,” he ordered.

Simbarashe wiped the tears off his face, but simply stared at his brother.

“Someone is out there,” Tongai pulled a thick knife from his belt, “and I mean to find him.”

Simbarashe took his younger brother’s body, silently staring at the slashes on his neck, and then looked at Tongai.

“You were right,” Tongai said quietly, but firmly. “This is no njusi. It is a man. I will get him, and I will kill him, and I will come home. Go.”

Simbarashe watched silently as Tongai moved off through the fields, then, with his younger brother’s body over his shoulder, started to trudge back home.

***

Much later, Simbarashe sat by the fire with his mother, their plates of the simple meal of sadza and spinach that she’d forced herself to cook hardly touched, the door closed against the full dark and the rain, which had returned. Tongai had not.

Mother broke the silence. “Your brother should not have gone. What is out there cannot be killed.”

Simbarashe looked at her in surprise. “It was no njusi, mother. Father did not drown, he was attacked, killed, so was Kuda.”

Mother looked sadly at him. “No Simba, it was no njusi. How much do you know about your father’s shops?”

Simbarashe was puzzled. “They were owned and run by some guy who collaborated with the bhunu during the war. He was a traitor, so when the bhunu were driven back over the Limpopo, the man was killed, and father got the shops.”

Mother shook her head slightly. “Not exactly. The day after the bhunu were defeated, and fled past here, your father and I went into the village and we killed that man. Tongai was with us. You were just a small boy, wrapped on my back,” she smiled sadly. “When the Royal army came through that evening, they found us in the shop, and just assumed we used to own it before the war. No-one said a thing.”

Simbarashe stared at his mother in shock.

“This is no man bent on revenge,” she said. “The traitor had no relatives when we killed him. This is a Ngozi spirit. I don’t know why it has returned only now, but that man’s restless spirit is moving now, moving on us.”

“So… we must appease the Ngozi spirit, mother?” Simbarashe knew little of spiritual matters, but he’d once heard such talk at school.

“Yes, my son. As soon as it is light, we must go to Shayamavhudzi, speak to the Na’anga there, and do all the rituals that the appeasement requires. Is the road passable?”

“Shayamavhudzi is the same direction as we went this morning. The road is flooded where it crosses the canal, but Tongai thought we could cross. It… It is where we found father.”

Mother shuddered, but said, “Very well, all of us must go.”

***

Simbarashe and his mother approached the bridge. The top posts were still sticking out of the water. They had walked the dust road through the rain in the morning gloom, the clouds as silent as mother and son were.

Simbarashe walked out onto the bridge, fatigue of two nights with next to no sleep tugging at his muscles. The floodwater reached his waist, but then dropped to his calves as he reached the crest. He turned back to gesture his mother on, but she was looking down the canal.

There, where they’d found father was what could only be Tongai’s body.

As Simbarashe looked, with his mouth open, but no sounds coming out, his mother rushed through the shallow floodwater towards his elder brother. Something long slithered off Tongai’s body, and slid swiftly and silently into the canal. Rooted to the spot, Simbarashe watched as his mother seemed to lose her balance, and fall from the shallow water into the canal, just metres from Tongai.

A sound from the other direction made him manage to turn, as he realised the water was rising, at his waist now. Upstream, the floodwater was foaming, and a wave, higher than the bridge was approaching.

As he watched the wave get closer, Simbarashe could see a dark shape in the water.

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Glossary

Bhunu Originally (and still in this timeline) Boer, Afrikaner. In OTL it came to be applied to white Rhodesian soldiers irrespective of ethnicity

Gadadzva Faeces floating on water

Mfana Younger brother

Mkoma Older brother

Mwari God, supreme being of the old religion

Mxm Denotes a clicking sound used to express frustration. Not a curse, but not used in polite conversation

Na’anga Traditional healer

Ngozi  A restless spirit, usually related to an unsolved or unresolved murder

Njusi Murderous river spirit, usually translated as mermaid

Shayamavhudzi A village in Mwenezi District. Translation is NSFW.

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