Fiction, L. Acadia

All’s fair

There are many stories to tell of this war: imagined beginnings tending towards missiles piercing the city’s ubiquitous cloud cover, soldiers landing on sandy beaches, grim pronouncements from dour announcers. Yet some starts are ambiguous, and almost none are fully glimpsed through the small opening of an individual’s perspective when they live certain moments in history. Neither the president’s cabinet nor those practiced political commentators who gather at the neighbourhood temple to drink tea, burn ancestor offerings, and speculate are quite sure whether the blockade is provocation or declaration. No one can be sure whether this is the opening through which a war will emerge.

The third night of the siege, old men whose wives were the ones scrounging the remaining produce at market still sit in the park, filling the gazebo with cigarette smoke and competing contentions that it’s all just posturing, not war. A strange figure joins the men, but doesn’t listen to their memories and forecasts. She waits, apparently still and straight, yet internally agitated, as though all the symbiotic organisms in her body have grown limbs and are running in divergent directions. Turning towards a motorcycle engine’s scream, she seems about to internally combust when the motorcyclist kills the engine and removes her helmet to reveal a head of close-cropped curly hair and intense expression to match hers. The wordless length of their greeting then long-strided walk down the alley in step, still not touching, reveal how long it has been—since they’ve seen and known each other. 

They enter a familiar house, silent apart from the heave and clank of bolting the heavy teak door and a slight buzz of old wiring powering new incandescent lamps that make the old terrazzo floor’s copper veins spark. A distant crush pulls their eyes instinctively towards the door, still secure. The one who lives there comments that looting began on the siege’s first night, so they might as well drink the wine she’s been saving. Already, in the months leading up to the siege, nerves sizzled. She recounts an incident with a squat man who rammed through the round kitchen window with a stubby painted log, then threw the log and threats at her before slamming away. It wouldn’t have made sense to call the police, and now, no one knew what warnings to worry over. Her tight-wound energy recedes down a narrow side hallway, but the other can picture her in the basement pantry where they used to hide together, can imagine her squatting to grasp the right bottle—it will be a pinotage, she knows—then reaching a long-muscled arm up to the shelf with industrial and stemless glasses repurposed from wine bottles. Her return confirms this guess. 

 One sighs, then the other, and they each wonder what the other’s sigh meant as they ascend broad stairs encircling the living room that a glass ceiling over a forest of intertwining pothos and monstera vines turned into an atrium. The final staircase to the bedroom is enclosed, but photographs lining the walls are like portholes or portals. They both stop at the last, framed in faux gold and fingerprints. There they are together, as toddlers, with large tags around their necks, fleeing another war. They arrived together, but had never remembered whether they’d departed together, whether they were biologically the sisters they’d been raised to become. 

They touch then, one pressing two fingers into the other’s palm to lead her. They sit on the quilt they’d slept under before, and look as though for genetic markers, at one another’s brows and nose and lips, fingering hairline and jaw and clavicle. Do you think we are sisters? Does it matter now? They lock dark brown eyes as their lips press and yield. Neither can remember whether it is the first time in their lives, whether practice kisses are memories or reveries. Of course they know. Eyes open between blinks to the familiar patterns of wrinkles and movement. Tongues emerging from mouths to taste not just the smoky ripe exhalation of pinotage. The house has become too loud to make out the old wiring buzzing. Both know, smell, hear, see, feel the war burn through the heavy teak door, fire hissing through the humid forest of vines, up the stairwell, singeing their portrait at the threshold, licking into the room. Hands on shoulder blades and sacrum, they pull closer, into the open moment.