She was roused from her slumber by the loud crowing of the rooster. The rowdy rooster was in the other room, which served as an indoor pen, yet it had sounded like it crowed directly into her ear through a powerful megaphone. She pressed her fingers against her ears in a desperate attempt to salvage a little more sleep. But just as she began to drift off again, the rooster crowed once more, this time at what felt like a million decibels higher.
Ndaziona—for that was her name—cursed under her breath. “This Christmas,” she muttered to herself, “we are definitely slaughtering this chicken!”
Realizing that sleep was now out of the question, Ndaziona acknowledged it was time to get ready and head to the maize field. She laboriously sat up on her mat and murmured a brief, silent prayer. Once finished, she groped around for the torch she kept beside her mat and switched it on. The torch barely illuminated the room; its batteries needed replacing, but that, like many other things, was a luxury Ndaziona and her grandmother could hardly afford.
Ndaziona made an effort to stand, but with her condition, it proved a taxing task. She shone the torch toward the wall so she could lean against it, but even that seemed a planet away. Her plan was to get on all fours, crawl toward the wall, and use it to help herself stand upright. The plan, like most, was simple in theory, but by the time she managed to fully stand, she was panting like a cross-country runner, and her threadbare nightdress was damp with perspiration.
Ndaziona stood for a moment to catch her breath, her hands reflexively finding their way to her obscenely swollen belly. Tears coursed down her once-chubby cheeks. She wanted to let out a loud, gut-wrenching cry but was afraid of waking her grandmother, who was soundly snoring on a mat just a few feet away. She had also been told that such emotional outbursts could be harmful to the unborn baby.
“How could this happen to me?” she whispered, shaking her head.
She thought of him, and the tears came harder. She hated—no, she loathed him. But above all, she despised herself for being foolish enough to trust him. God, how she longed to see him! There was nothing she desired more than to meet him, look him in the eye, and squeeze the life out of him with her own hands.
That bastard deserved it. Barely eight months ago, he had recited romantic poems and sung sweet love songs, promising to “always be there for her.” Now, not even a year later, he was millions—if not billions—of miles away. He hadn’t even had the decency to be by her side while the rest of her world—a world he had helped to topple like a house of cards—fell apart. She even had to hear from strangers about his whereabouts, that coward!
She had heard there were ruthless gangsters in Johannesburg—the place he had fled to—and she prayed he’d encounter the most merciless of them and that they’d do away with him. But it seemed God had chosen to turn a deaf ear to her prayers.
Speaking of God, she was furious with Him too. How could He let this happen to her when she had only done it once? Once! She knew girls at her former school who bragged about doing it more times than there were stars in the sky, yet He hadn’t let this fate befall them. There were even people out there climbing mountains and fasting for what she had. But no, He had let this happen to her—she who had done it only once! Once! And she hadn’t even enjoyed it!
Ndaziona realized she was sobbing. She chided herself for allowing the remorse to overtake her. Regaining her composure, she wiped away her tears, and, guided by the dim beam of her torch, quietly made her way to the storeroom to fetch her hoe.
She knew she was late; beams of light from Nthanda, the morning star, had already begun to filter into the grass-thatched hut. Her grandmother’s field was a full two-hour journey from their home. With her condition, she estimated it would take her at least three hours.
Silently, so as not to wake her grandmother, Ndaziona set off for the field. Her grandmother was old—too old to work—but she always insisted on going to the field. That’s why Ndaziona made it a point to wake up before her and leave without her, ensuring she would have no choice but to stay home and tend to the house.
As Ndaziona walked under the starry sky, her mind wandered back to the night she lost it all.
She saw her naïve self-sneaking out of prep under the pretext of returning to her hostel to retrieve a “forgotten” biology book, when in fact, she was going to meet him—the very son of the devil who would ruin her life.
He was waiting for her under the shadow of the giant mango tree behind the cafeteria.
“What took you so long?” he whispered.
“I had to—”
“Shhh!” he interrupted, nodding toward the silhouette of a security guard making his rounds near the cafeteria.
“Follow me,” he whispered into her ear, his warm breath grazing the nape of her neck, sending tingling sensations down her spine.
She had foolishly followed him, ignoring every warning her mother had given her about boarding school and boys.
“Here,” he’d said, “we’ll split up. Walk as if you’re going to your class, but when you see it’s clear, double back toward the staff toilets. I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“In the toilet?”
“Yeah.”
“What if the guards—”
“There won’t be any guards,” he had said with certainty. “What would they be guarding by the toilets? Look, this campus is manned by six guards: one at the library, two by the hostels, one at the cafeteria, and two at the administration offices.”
She knew he was right.
“But the staff toilets have locks.”
“Yes, but the last one has a faulty one.” She had looked at him askance, wondering how he happened to know that.
“I was sent to mop there this morning—I forgot to do that stupid math homework Pythagorath gave us yesterday.” “Pythagorath” was what the Form Twos called their mathematics teacher (behind his back, of course) because he pronounced the Pythagoras Theorem as “Pythagorath Theorem,” due to his lisp.
“I’m going now. Meet me there in five minutes, will you?”
Overcome by what she believed were called “butterflies” fluttering in her stomach, she had nodded in agreement. The devil’s son then kissed her lingeringly on the mouth, and away he scuttled.
If only one could turn back the hands of time.
Ndaziona wished she’d never done what she had that day. But she had wanted to feel the “magic” that her roommate Liz claimed boys possessed. Unlike Ndaziona, Liz was older and apparently knew boys like the back of her hand. Most nights, Ndaziona fell asleep to the sound of Liz recounting her numerous “sexcapades.”
At first, Ndaziona let Liz’s stories go in one ear and out the other, but with every tale, temptation got the better of her, until one day she made the mistake of asking Liz what it actually felt like to sleep with a boy.
“You know that sweet bliss you feel when you scratch an itchy ear with a matchstick?” Lewd Liz had asked.
“Yes?”
“Multiply that by a thousand!”
And that night, as she debated whether to follow that son of Lucifer into the toilet or not, those words echoed in her mind. Before she knew it, she found herself in the toilet, doing the very things her poor old mother had sternly warned her against. The very things that, like a terrible butterfly effect, would lead to her expulsion from the prestigious secondary school she had worked so hard to get into. The things that would induce a cardiac arrest in her frail mother’s failing heart, leading to her untimely death. The very acts that would give her poor father enough reason to spend the rest of his miserable life in dipsomania. Yes, the deeds that would see her relocating to her grandmother’s village, woken by a loud, squawking rooster each morning to walk barefoot to a field miles away, before the sun chased the dark dawn away.
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Japheth Gundani is an emerging writer from Malawi, whose passion for literature ignited the moment he learned to read. Driven by a desire to contribute to the literary world, he set aside his inner doubts and began crafting his own stories. While his work has yet to find its way into formal publication, he has shared a handful of poems and a couple of short stories on his blog on Medium (medium.com/@jahtheauthor). Japheth, who writes under the pen name JAH, is an alumnus of the 2024 Malawi Writing Better Creative Writing Residency, which was sponsored by the Copyright Society of Malawi (COSOMA). At the time he wrote this short story, he was in his final year as a chemistry student at the University of Malawi.
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