Shantoné, 62, talks about rude time
by Emelia Steenekamp
Your brother wanted to borrow your silkworm collection and now he returns it and it is very much not intact. You are angry, spend hours plotting and decide that you will guard the bathroom. He wants to use it. You say fine but you’re going to sit with your ear cupped against the door to listen to his shit hit the water and now he cannot shit. It’s still going on weeks later and he is crying because he cannot shit. Your plan is to release the toilet on your father’s birthday in commemoration.
Years later your brother’s ghost will retaliate in the form of a man in a small apartment. The man is high when he tells you “I know you shit! I know you do!” Thing is, though, that you don’t. You can’t, because the apartment is too small and you are 19 and in your short-lived phase of being extremely attractive. Shitting is simply not an option. Months go by and your belly starts to show a mild distension, containing your secret shit, condensing it into a pungent rock. You smell it sometimes. You dream that you give birth to a rock-hard shit child who eats from ashtrays and enslaves you with your love for them.
So long after all of that, as assumed adults, you and your brother both have colon cancer and you think it’s because of the meeting of genes with your respective Years of Not Shitting, deformation and atrophy. Hand-in-hand you go for colonoscopies, and you love his hand and you apologise. Your brother is the only one who knows all the things you know. As a child he studied you. He let you dress him up, you sat in trees together.
You are engrossed with the back garden, its soil and water. You are a child. You have a certain relationship with bugs: a) they do not scare you, and b) they belong to you. No-one tells you otherwise. You hold them between your fingers and their bodies buzz or writhe there. Christmas beetles are daft, fly straight into stuff (but their hearts are in the right place). They may live. Flies stuck behind lace curtains are wicked and deserve to die. You trap them and press them between two fingers until their vibrations stop. Virtuous bugs are collected and roped into particular activities. E.g. earthworms, who are your favourites, when you open them there are no organs only earth: earthworms sit next to you on the swing while you sing graceful songs to the gods, backed up by all of nature. They dry in the sun and their corpses stick to the swing and stay there forever.
At another time you are 43 and you have not brushed the plaque off your teeth in weeks. You have been thinking about brushing your teeth. You tell yourself to do it, or that you will do it soon. In your limbs you build up a mountain of viscous moments towards the point of doing it. But when you reach the top, the structure melts into uselessness. You find yourself to be a plant or rock or kitchen utensil – something that does not brush its teeth, something that does not move of its own volition, something without volition.
It’s late, you are sitting on the carpet:
It gets dark. My mom is probably sleeping, the man is out. I lift the curtain to
see the street. A bird is crossing, its weird solitude concentrating my secret
backlog of schoolwork. My door handle is pulled down, then release.
Does it get dark? It is late.
Is everyone else asleep? Mamma is sleeping, the man has not come
back yet.
Do you see a single bird crossing the street on foot? A lonely wader
is walking across the road, ill at ease as if on stilts.
Do you hear the door handle shift and feel relieved to remember that
it’s locked? Someone tries to open my door, it’s locked.
Many years into this whole weighty project, you work somewhere and there is an intern and he sends you text messages. You try to change him, will him, into being someone you actually want to get text messages from. This does not work and the messages keep coming morning noon and night saying things like “mature women,” “experience,” “I will soon fuck your mouth,” and “condiments, e.g. mint jelly.” Eventually his messages fill up your phone and you have to throw it away. You do it while the children sleep. The next morning you say, “please help me do the laundry, I don’t have it in me.” You open your mouth to show that there is no laundry in you. The children take a photo of your mouth. Having evidence, they do the laundry, which hangs on the line whitely. Afterwards they point out that, although your mouth contains no laundry, it does contain cavities. When you show the dentist, he is serious, tells you that your mouth requires months of treatment, perhaps hospitalization.
Story of a dentist appointment, in chronological order:
1. Assistant puts you on the chair.
2. Assistant changes channel on TV facing chair. TV now shows a quiz show featuring doctors
having to diagnose things.
3. Dentist arrives, in a hurry.
4. Dentist starts doing his thing. Grinding sounds and such.
5. Try to relax your shoulders.
6. No pain tolerance. Surprising amount of tears on your face.
7. Dentist uses translation app to tell you that he will give you a shot.
8. Dentist gives shot.
9. Mouth is dead.
10. Mouth is a pot and Dentist is a forest creature cooking something in Pot.
11. Dentist leaves utensils in Pot while rummaging elsewhere or preparing something.
12. Pot accepts whatever comes, is a good and dutiful Pot.
Afterwards you tell the dentist that you were a pot. He clearly wants you to leave and does not have the command of the English language required for discussing mouth pots. Unfortunately you are in a phase of your life during which unwilling listeners trigger belligerent chattiness. You persist. You tell him also about buying more calendula lip balm every time you misplace yours and having a whole collection of half-empty calendula lip balms. You complain about your dead father. You confess the sins of your early twenties. Finally he asks you to leave. So you go to other places and you talk more and more as time accumulates. During a certain phase you feel as if it’s all happening at once and always has been, molecules pressed flat like a sheet of paper.
But then there is also right now. Right now, during the best part of it, the time is 9am and Matthew is warm and sleeping and 32. Yesterday you were on a bus together, moving through smallholdings, junkyards, rust and dead trees and dogless doghouses and such. Time hung around. Light moved in your laps. Your surroundings filled you up. But on Friday he is on a plane, and on Saturday you are alone, seeking eye contact from children or dogs.
october 6th, 2020Emelia Steenekamp is a South African writer with a background in film-making, film scholarship, and digital art. They have been published or have work forthcoming in Academics Against Networking, Strukturriss, Club Plum, and Datableed.