Anna was beautiful with the skin on her arms hanging like diapers. In fact, she could see with her long fingernails and taste with her eyes. Luckily, she could hear the crawling ants. 

The skin covering her eyes waved like clothes in the wind. Her 1920s smile revealed the remaining tooth, but she smelled the perfume of wild herbs, unlike her age-mates, who were chewing their cheeks. 

Last week, her friend crossed over after choking on her gums, but she swore that she would attend Vicky’s matric farewell. She lived alone whenever her grandchild, Vicky, went to the hostel. That weekend, Vicky brought an iPhone but stuffed it inside her pillowcase. 

The alarm on the phone was recorded in the voices of two girls quarrelling, and gurgling their throats, and went off at exactly noon and again at midnight. This strange sound drummed the old lady’s heart, who feared no one but a ghost. The midday ghosts, talking for an hour inside her quiet hut, made her swallow her old-age pills without water. She could not sit under the fig tree because the wind threatened to pick her up and bounce her against the clouds. 

She joked with Vicky in a campfire story that a spooky wind had picked up brick-size rocks and thrown the rocks at her while napping under a dead fig tree. She remembered the haunting wind choking her hut with chocolate-brown leaves, turning it into a cemetery. Now she couldn’t call the villagers for help, for they once mocked her that she was a witch and could hear ghosts in broad daylight. So, she faced her fears by smoking leafy tobacco. 

Sometimes, she pictured fluffy clouds inside her washing bucket and played with the foamy clouds like a child.  That midnight, the quarrelling ghosts started, and now she couldn’t find her matches and searched everywhere in the darkness, before bumping into the cylinder lamp and breaking it. Luckily, the moon shone through her oval window, and she rubbed her baggy breasts. 

There, she found her matches, but the lamp was turned into shards. Her troubles continued until the next home weekend, when Vicky returned looking for her phone.  

Unfortunately, it was a day before the talking ghosts had forced Nana to step out of the hut in the middle of the night. She returned with a log and flogged the ghosts inside Vicky’s pillowcase. In the end, peace returned to her hut, but the flashing lightning videoed her wrinkled arms and legs. The next day, the villagers stoned her after blaming her for slashing twin cuts over their bodies, while they were fast asleep.

-Mungambue@gmail.com