by Patrick Roscoe

Flies grow drowsy and drunk in Tanzanian sun, bumble against the mesh-screened window, burst with the promise of blood. Beside the sill, a small boy kneels on the floor of red tiles polished once a week by the silent houseboy; a scent of wax lingers like an eternal reprimand in the air. With a pin pinched between thumb and finger, the child contemplates the flies, discerns which is the fattest or biggest or most lazy. His left hand holds the chosen one in place and his right hand guides the pin into its body. Time holds its breath while the insect's thin hard encasing is being penetrated, then exhales in relief as the silver sliver eases into inner softness. The wings of the fly beat and buzz as red liquid drools upon the window ledge, glues its body there. With one finger, the boy paints lines and shapes upon his blank anonymous arm. He can draw numbers, letters of the alphabet, or more elusive symbols. Recently, he has learned to spell his name.

The ants are always very quick. Before the blood can begin to dry, they are marching toward the tantalizing aroma of an easy prey. Tiny, efficient jaws nibble the helpless fly; tear away choice morsels, tender meat. Some ants are overexcited by such bounty, unable to decide whether to eat the food on the spot or take it to a safer place to savour. Insane with greed, deluded by hunger, they pile more plunder upon their backs than can be carried. The boy intently watches the scene he has set into motion, now and then scatters objectionably voracious ants away. Only once do his eyes look out the window; they become immediately overwhelmed by the sight of a world too much larger than the kingdom he controls. At the edge of the yard, beside the frangipani, the houseboy and gardener are each holding one end of a thick, long snake. Their Swahili words twist and tangle inside the boy's head; like a branding iron, southern sun strikes him flat and hard. The snake is dropped; the gardener's machete slices it in two. The boy blinks. He cannot remember the distant place he is often told is his real home, where a mother hisses and coils in a cold, white room.

He decides to save this fly, for no reason except that such choice lies within his power. He withdraws the pin, then nudges the insect away; surprisingly, it appears little worse for its impaling, barely more dazed than before. The other flies seem unalarmed by what has occurred nearby; disaster is always far away, deceptively drone sun and heat and dust. Perhaps the boy will sever the head of the next fly with one quick slice of pin. Or he will tear off only the wings, only the legs.

His bare knees have grown stiff and sore against the hard tiles. Shifting, he intuits a presence behind him. He turns to encounter the houseboy's stare. Black eyes float in pools of white; dark skin stretches tightly across high cheekbones of a face as without expression now as when the boy's father whimpers in the back bedroom after dusk. Without a word, on soundless feet, the houseboy turns out into the yard. There he will burn garbage in the barrel, surround the house with smoke, encircle it with scattered ash to keep death and demons away.

The boy reverts his eyes to the window ledge. Suddenly he is sick of greedy ants and he is tired of flies that are fat and foolish and easy to kill. He looks out the window again, down the hill that slopes toward the west. At the end of the dry season, the red dirt has become baked hard and cracked by heat; a secret earthquake might have broken the surface of the earth. From the mission above, where encroaching jungle looms, tolls the bell that tells pink priests to chant their feeble prayers, to fumble their way through wishful sacraments.

.....

There is no telephone in the apartment the boy occupies ten years later, when he learns the truth at seventeen. Mail declines to arrive; a knock never sounds; other residents of the building remain unseen and unheard. The days are very quiet; nights are equally still. Occasionally the youth goes out into the cold to buy food, and several times a week attends a nearby university. He sits silently in the classroom; his pinched face is otherwise without expression. Staring at the instructor as if trying to read lips, he fails to place marks on the white paper before him. The words that march into his ears are supposed to be understood; this country is ostensibly where he belongs. The concept slices in two as soon as it is formed. In the apartment, he sometimes forces sound through his throat to ensure that his voice still works. Incomprehensible noise swells the air; it is perhaps Swahili, perhaps some secret language. At night, cars glide along the street below; their headlights crawl like phosphorescent snakes across the walls. The boy prefers the rooms in darkness, when only a circle of red glows upon the stove. He rests the blade of the knife against the element, bends his face to feel burning heat. When the metal is ready, he presses it against the skin of his arms. A subtle scent rises. The knife must be reheated several times to remain effective during repeated applications to receptive flesh. Later, when the light has been switched on and the room jumps out from blackness, the boy will study a pattern of marks on his arms, as if trying to interpret hieroglyphics, or to read a muddy map. The design will often seem close to possessing some almost-remembered meaning; from beneath the skin of surrounding silence slivers a whisper that is very familiar, nearly understood. Years later the marks will have faded into small pale scars; when the decorated skin is tanned, they will become almost invisible.

.....

At evening, in one of a cluster of white houses upon an Andalucian hill, the young man lights three thick candles of the same variety which old Spanish women dressed in black burn beneath miniatures of the Holy Virgin or of The Saviour. They are encased in a skin of red plastic; as their wax burns down, the translucent tubes offer a roseate glow. The trio of flames barely waver in air that drifts inland from the Mediterranean, carrying the scent of spice all the way from Africa.

On his narrow bed the young man lies suspended by the voices of the family living on the floor below. After three months, they have given up inviting him downstairs to sit with them around the heater on chilly evenings; the kindly senora has stopped asking why he never goes out, whether he is sick, if anything is wrong. A burning cigarette is pinched between two fingers of the young man's left hand; the other hand continually and unconsciously worries the flesh of his face. From his prone position, it is possible to look through the window, across the terrace, towards the faro of the next town along the coast; its light sweeps a circle, performs a ceaseless search through darkness. The young man gazes at the orbiting illumination, as if it will extinguish without his regard; he glances away only to strike another match that hisses at the cold, white room. Long after midnight, when the last cigarette has been stubbed out, Spanish-speaking voices still reach from the street below. Although he understands this language well, years spent in far-flung landscapes have taught the young man how to flick a mental switch that transforms the immediate air's idiom into mere sound. He allows the candles to burn a vigil through the night; three pink planets float in the dark room as its inhabitant drifts into dreams of fireflies leading the way through the jungle of the Ngondo hills, flickering a path through thick Morogoro night. At morning, he looks into the truthful mirror. His forehead is marked by perhaps a dozen small wounds, disfiguring and red, where the nails of his fingers have dug deep into skin. A scent of wax hangs heavily in the room; puzzlement creases the young man's injured forehead until he realizes that three forgotten candles still burn. Carefully, he blows them out.

On his terrace the light is very clear, and the mountains to one side and the sea to the other appear in sharp focus. The January sun feels almost hot. The young man leans back in a chair, tilts his face toward the sky, closes his eyes. When they open an hour later, their vision is darkened for several moments; then bright light pricks itself painfully into the retinae. He looks again into the mirror. Red marks remain upon his forehead, resembling the tattoos of a primitive tribe; but already they are vanishing into an expanse of darkened skin. In a few days or a week the last traces of his wounds will be gone, and the young man will gaze into the mirror, trying to remember his name and age and place of birth.

Patrick Roscoe is a Vancouver sex worker whose seven internationally acclaimed books of fiction have been translated into nine languages.