They dragged themselves across the broad fern plains with slow, shuffling steps; each one spilling over into the next without thought, without grace, without hope. Their backs slumped in exhaustion, bent under the oppressive width of the never-ending sky that shimmered with heat. Even the swarms of pinch flies lacked their usual energy.
The memory of cool mountain air disappeared under the stench of brackish water and rotting earth that clung to their noses, making it hard to remember the little things that filled their days when they were alive.
They carried nothing with them, save the things given to them at their funerals. The food and water lasted only a few days before it, too was gone. Even if they had food, it would not have mattered; the traveling baskets had long ago rotted away and crumbled into the black loam.
Some men still clutched at small the small necklace hung around his neck chest with ochre stained fingers. Made of wood or ceramic, the tiny, carved figures represented the All-Mother with her bear’s head and full hips that pooled together beneath her rounded belly seemed strange compared to the ragged skin stretched too tightly over bones.
For some, these items were all they had left of the lives that belonged to them before. Most had already cast them away in anger. Every man dealt with the reality of the curse in a different way. Some screamed and cried, trying to return to their villages only to cause horror and disgust among his old people. Others simply accepted their deaths, moving silently away into the trees.
Each man, marked with glyphs and the trappings of death, carried only the burden of longing for what was and what could never be again. They muttered to the little statues as they moved. Mother, Mother! They cried. Mother save us! Mother heal us!, but Mother had never listened in the long, long time of their deaths. So they clutched and muttered with half closed eyes in the manner of a man who was no longer knew what it was it is he was asking for, but could not stop asking anyway.
They clutched at them, muttering prayers as they stumbled westward over rock and frond, following the Speaker across the flat fern plains. They carried no other possessions; the Apartheid denied them this. Not food or water; not even the implements for fire. What water they were able to find was brackish and stale from laying in the long, thin washes that riddled the plains. They ate new the tender shoots of the ferns, when they found them growing close to the surface of the dark earth. Frogs were plenty, but even those who had the stomach to eat raw flesh could not bring themselves to take a life, knowing that they no longer possessed life of their own.
It crippled them.
Every step brought more pain. For them, every movement exacerbated their pain. Their thighs stung from the ferns slapping them as they slowly moved across the gentle roll of the plains. Even the slightest touch, no matter how soft and sweet, became burning fire that spread and multiplied. It became their existence, the sum total of themselves and their humanity. It erased the faces of their children and the smell of their wives’ hair. It ran through their minds, erasing the men that they were before and leaving nothing but the strange, sad litany behind.
Mother, heal us! Mother, save us!
*second draft, first page
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