The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo Read Online Free

followed his teacher.

9
ANTOINETTE
    S ometimes, as now, on the edge of morning, she hears the stifled cries of the Hebrew women giving birth in secret. Pharaoh’s
     men are tossing boys into the Nile. Antoinette wakes and stands in the dark and prays for them, and for her own lost, her
     first, a daughter, taken away before she had a name. Aren’t daughters supposed to be allowed to live?
    She bows her head to pray, but she will never kneel. Not in church, not anywhere. Since she was a child, she’s known this.
     To ask something of God is not a humble act. It’s a demand. Why try to disguise it by doing it on your knees?
    Eyes closed, she listens for the birth cries of all the lost children. With her rheumatic fingers, she makes her hands into
     a basket; but she will never kneel. She waits for the noise of the cries to fade, the voice of her own blood and the blood
     of so many others.
    They never named her. You don’t name a child until you hear it scream, and this one was born silent. The death certificate,
     the only relic holy enough to store in her Bible, is written in highfalutin Afrikaans.
Herewith on said day the following unnamed personage…
They paid ten rands for it. Ten rands for a fact anybody could tell just by listening to her not scream. Still, there are
     days when she takes it out and rereads. The paper is worn away from rubbing. At the folds are dirty creases; the certificate
     is breaking apart. She thinks how it must have lasted longer than her daughter’s bones.
    Born in peace, weren’t you?
    *
    She leaves her house and her sleeping husband (asleep again in his chair) and heads across the sand to the boys’ hostel. It
     will be another half hour before the light spills over the mountains and floods the veld.

10
A DROWNED BOY
    A mong the farm’s ghosts was the soul of a Standard Five. One morning, nineteen years earlier, the boy had drowned while swimming
     in the far dam, up near the ruined, roofless buildings of what was still called Old Goas, where the original farm had been.
     In theory, we lived at New Goas, but nobody called it that. Back then, the far dam had been used for the cows’ midday drinking.
     This was when Goas had more cows. There had once been a fence around it so the farmhands could check for missing cows after
     they were corraled. Now the fence was gone, as gone as the water, although you could see the remnants of it flattened into
     the dust by years of hooves.
    He wasn’t a very demanding ghost. Some mornings he’d come and stand by our coffee fire. In the lingering dark, we’d huddle,
     jostling each other with our empty cups, waiting for the coffee to percolate. You knew he was there, because the smoke started
     wafting in the wrong direction, into the wind. Obadiah said the boy was using whatever breath he had left to push the smoke
     out of his eyes. The dead can’t use their hands, Obadiah said. He also said the boy was a Twsana, the only Twsana at Goas
     at the time he drowned, and that he visited us for some warmth and to be remembered a little. A boy who died so far from his
     people. There’s nothing criminal about needing to be spoken of once in a while. But it happened so long ago, no one remembered
     anything else about him other than that he died and that he was a Tswana. So whenever anybody claimed the smoke wasn’t behaving
     according to certain meteorological laws, we made things up. It didn’t matter who said what on those mornings. We were too
     cold to care, and people murmured into their coats. We all claimed the mantle of being as lonely as that boy must have been
     the moment he went under.
    “Born in Gobabis, son of a rich chief,” said one voice.
    “True,” said another. “His father—before the drought of seventy-nine made him a poor man—owned four hundred head of cattle.”
    A third voice, or maybe it was the first. “But at Goas, the boy roamed in bloody feet.”
    “Why bleeding feet?”
    “Someone stole his