Tlotlo Tsamaase: Rev 1: Satellite Hearts

Name: Tlotlo Tsamaase

Genre: Young Adult, science fiction, thriller

Title: Satellite Hearts

 

Sunday carries a static silence in our home, punctuated by Mama’s praying; always in the lounge as though it’s a mihrab pointing to God. The air, our invader, is the only way the Botswana government can listen, with the often intermittent faint white noise. She doesn’t understand, I was my father’s property and now I’m the government’s property categorized under military warfare. They have authorization to do as they please with my life.

 

 

 

Mama shifts in the lounge and my heart knocks a marimba beat. I squeeze myself, carefully, through a crack in the corrugated sheeting that forms the wall of our home. Outside, I can still hear her soft voice praying, praying to the savior to delete my transfer date tomorrow.

 

 

 

Praying won’t save me Mama.

 

 

 

I stare at the compound of Old Naledi: rusty shacks, unpaved grounds littered with broken glass, fizzy drink cans, plastics and trees. My childhood prison.

 

 

 

It stings to know I’m leaving forever but I don’t know what it is to cry, how it feels before and after the tears fall. My program settings for tears are disabled. I was as much a victim as the patients Papa and I programmed: Papa driving a screw into their hearts to extract their emotions as though they were juice from a fruit. I don’t want to be a Prog—thoughts deleted, emotions altered and body controlled.

 

 

 

This is my body. I won’t lose it.

 

 

 

A few minutes left to decide my freedom: I’m sorry Mama, to be another death in the family.

 

 

 

 

 

I run four huts down from mine—old, scraggy and made from scrappy sheet iron— along the Old Naledi fence, my hand scraping the diamond wire.  The Botswana heat melts into the air coating my skin with a layer of sweat. I strain my eyes to look up as the fence rises—shaking in the breeze—towards the deep crimson sky: the time when the sun begins to bleed.

 

 

 

Freedom.

 

 

 

Walking to the Stats, our short name for the rank station, is tiresome but I’m not complaining; this is the last time I will see my home. I take my time as the sun sinks into the horizon. Not too long, an hour has passed. Darkness should freak me out, but I’m more nervous about how tonight will end.

 

 

 

The sky has a thousand eyes, a thousand insomniac moons: The celestial authority— The Beings of The Skies who’ve built a home in the skies from which to watch over our world. Want to know a secret? I think they piss on us, each time they gather for their monthly kgotla meetings and have a jol and they say, “Just rain people, just rain, move along.” Rain my ass.

 

 

 

During the day the Gaborone bus rank is full of bustling combis and hooting taxis, grey–clad commuters darting between them. At night, it transforms into a Death Train Station: a train the commuters board to death, having received the Letter of Resignation from society. It’s a desert of coldness, metal scraping against metal, empty pavements, and bare, derelict buildings. Tonight the wind whines a low wail, collecting paper as it sweeps through the station. Ghostly vapour creeps over the ground. I can see the old commuter bridge stepping over the railway to the rank area.

 

 

 

The breeze, controlled by the Celestial Authority, whistles through standpipes as if the night has a case of asthma. It snakes through the aboveground station, searching. I pin myself against a trunk when the nearby trees rustle and hold my breath, afraid the breeze will feed on more than my fear.

 

 

 

The fencing is torn through, so I step over it without much harm and search and pinpoint a lenyora. He’s a shady looking boy with pants high above his ankles and hands tucked into his pockets, shivering from the chill. His dark eyes are locked down at a body huddled at his feet, hands tied together. Perfect. A crime-druggie boy never disappoints.

 

 

 

“S’beno,” I say.

 

 

 

His head jerks up in relief. “Ao sister, z’khipane? What took you long?”

 

 

 

“Time.” I stare down at the culprit on the floor.

 

 

 

Michael Mackerel, a white, fat beefy man, stares at me with shocked eyes. “Little Z