A woman in rebirth

September 30, 2008 by Chief K.Masimba Biriwasha ·
Filed under: Short Stories

In the beginning is a word, and the word becomes a voice shut up in her bones; in a whisper, it weaves itself into her loins telling her to burst forth like a bud from her self-made cocoon.

She hurries away from the word wearing a resolve to find her lost seed. But her heart thickens within cobwebs hanging inside the crevices of her being. The voice groans inside her. With her left toe, she scribbles a note on the ground for her grandmother, and another for herself, and then she drags her feet, shoulders clumped as if she is carrying a heavy load.

In the sky, the moon hides and re-emerges from behind a patch of clouds. The sight of heavy boulders streaked across the distant horizon almost distracts her, but even now, she walks past giraffe grazing on long leaves, a bird with dark steaks on its breast flutters away.

She kneels, and measures the size of the beads round her ankles, then spots a snake slithering through the long grass. The word now drones in her head as the snake disappears before her eyes. She holds a thought of the word ever so gently in her hands, nursing it like a newborn till it splatters to the ground, and forms a rivulet that disappears into nowhere. In that moment, she awakens to a new world where she passes through a vestibule from one dream to the next, slowly awakening to the grand verities of her being.

“For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back,” she says, rousing herself. “But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant!”

With the word now glowing in her spirit, she emerges from behind a pile of balancing rocks from where she had confined herself into the glare of a full moonlight. She loves the moon she thinks. She adores how it slides from behind the horizon and rises into the sky – inch by inch – to pour light across the firmament. For a moment, she imagines the moon as the seed that she has been in search of for so long. For a moment, she is not sure if she is herself or the moon.

Then she stretches her arms toward the moon and feels as if wrapped in its warm, angelic, and silky vibrations. Her heart reverberates and she desires every moment of her awakening self. She tells herself that her story will mot be complete if its not told through the lens of the moon.

Tell the world: