She had lived to see the newspaper headlines that blamed the fire on radical white men protesting Mandela's new South Africa, and within hours, the entire world was outraged to learn that white men had burned up forty-two innocent little black children.  Riots broke out...for three days straight.

Riots
But Zorina and Eve looked at each other now.

They knew that it wasn't white men who had deliberately burned those children to death, the teachers, too.

Etah laid in bed like a whale and cried like a baby.  Above her head hung the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that her husband had proudly nailed to the wall on the very first day that they had moved into the house.  In fact, after carrying Etah over the threshold, the portrait had been the first item of decoration that he'd carried into the house, even before a single piece of furniture.  His mother had cherished it all her life and given it to the young couple as a life's luck gift.  She bid her son to respect it as if it were she herself.  So Nopopie had adored the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and now by laying beneath it at night, Etah felt that she was especially close to her late husband's spirit.  She believed that through Elizabeth II, Nopopie could hear her more clearly.

"Nopopie...it is me, again.  Etah", she cried.  "I feel as if none of our children have understood the warning in your murder, dear husband.  The way those white devils kicked holes in your stomach and left you in the church restroom to die.  Like you were just trash, dear husband."

The police had claimed Nopopie assaulted one of them after they had politely asked to see his traveling permit.

"I worry about Zorina", she weiled, tearfully.  "I fear she's been compromised, like your mother and sister were when you were just a boy and couldn't protect them."

His smell came into the room, because Etah missed him.
She missed the way he said grace at mealtime.

She missed the times when he drank and cursed the white overseers who worked him mercilously at the mines, making him beg every week for that pitifully low paying job, and then talked down to him like he was a boy.

She missed the times, right after Nopopie had brutally beaten her (clocked her upside the head with his boot)...the times afterward when he would pull her long, wide skirt up over her head and plunge his manhood deep inside her.  She ached for the banging and the wretched sobbing--of a man sincerely sorry about the cruel ways inwhich he abused and humiliated her.

"I love you, my Etah!"

"I know you do, Nopopie.  I know you do", she used to cry, so patiently, as her eyes were swollen shut and blood ran from her nose and busted lip.

Other times, he would beat her up and then take out his manhood and urinate right in her face.  All in her hair and down her pregnant belly.  "I can't afford all these kids, bitch!"

But she missed him now so much that she'd gladly go through it all again.  Every moment of hurt and humiliation.  Just to see him and know again...that he loved her.

Etah got up and put on some music.  Miriam Makeba, Etta James, Burning Spear.  She took her headrag off and greased the thick, soft African bushhead.  Hot tea was sipped down.  Prayers to Jesus Christ were hummed, spoken and cried passionately.  She promised herself that she would clean up Miss Lindy's massage room real good tomorrow and get that blasted dress worked on.  Then she slept...and snored tremendously.

 ~~

Eve's Monkey had been missing ever since the fire.
Zorina bolted upright in bed!
Awake.
Breathing hard.
Wondering if it were Eve and Jesus Christ again--outside her window, standing barefoot on the dirt road--calling her.
She wished it were...but it wasn't.
She wished Winnie Mandela was her mother, but she wasn't.
She wished everyone knew that Golf Theron just couldn't get her out of his mind, but she was a kaffir girl, and therefore, no one would ever believe it.
She wished her classmates hadn't screamed so horribly as their flesh burned, their bones crackled like firewood and their lungs strained, coughing.
She could still hear them.
She could still hear every last one of them.
Crying out wretchedly for their mama's.

~~

Before dawn, Zorina and her mother were back at the Theron estate.  Preparing the house for when everyone awakened.  At daybreak, Golf arose to have his usual oatmeal with his usual rat turds while Zorina sat by waiting to be brushed up against before a long, satisfying tournament of glassmaking.

It had been nine years since the school burned down, but as Zorina was experiencing cramps that morning and the start of her monthly bleeding, it didn’t seem so long ago, because along with her monthlies always came a nagging pain in the scar tissue of her burn.  As though the burn were new again.

“What’s in that pretty little head, ha?”, asked Golf.  “Keeping secrets are we?”

            “No...Noble.”

            In the beautiful oceans of his blue eyes she thought that she wanted to backstroke naked.  Feel the beating of his heart against her warm golden body.  Be swept away.   

            Suddenly,  Etah appeared--filling up the back door in her giant maid’s uniform.  She had none of Hattie McDaniel’s famous sass. No subdued outrage like the American star had shown in all her gallant portrayals of black maid women.  Etah was a real servant spirit.  “My daughter?”

            “Oh!...ahhh...yes, mama!?”

            “Miss Lindy would like to see you in the library.”

            “Is that my Zorina!?”

            “Top of the morning, Miss Lindy.”

            “You’ve got to get packed dear.  We’re flying to Durban.”

            “...ew...wu...Durban?”

            Cribbitch, her sweet blonde crystal-blue eyed little daughter chimed in with:  “Mummy’s having a glass show at the Wedgwood Gallery.”

            “Your glassworks are making me famous, Zorina!”

            “But, I haven’t anything to wear.”

            “It’s alright, love.  No one expects a black to be dressed that well, but I want you to represent the furnace workers.”

            Miss Lindy, who lead people to believe that she actually designed and self-crafted the Dutch Theron Glass Collection, hadn’t been inside the ahouse for twelve years.  Her husband, Dutch, had a reputation for taking his Indian whores down there at night, so Miss Lindy refused to set her wifely heels on those sticky floors.

            “Oh, Zorina!  They’re giving me an award!”

            “Glassmaker of the year”, chirped Cribbitch.

            It never occured to any of them (not even Zorina) that the award should be given to Zorina.

            “Hurry home and pack”, cheered Cribbitch.  “We’ve already told Etah that you’re going away.”

**

Zorina tried to remember how the poem went.  I come from a place...

            As the plane lifted out of Johannesburgh and creased blue sky towards Durban, Zorina tried to remember how the poem went:

            I come from a place...but my place is not named for me

            I am the caretaker, unnamed,

            the insider

            whose heartbeat your hear.

            I have no place...not even my own

            footprints

            have any place.

            She had never seen how breathtakingly beautiful South Africa is from the sky.  How earthen brown and green and soulful the landscape is.  An African’s dream; kissed by God.

            “My place” Zorina thought...as tears ran down her dark cheek and she thought of her devoted mother, her dead father.  Mines!

            One day, she prayed, all the whites would be gone from South Africa.  So that the black people could take the time necessary to get over all the cruel and inhumane evils that the Europeans had so lavishly carried out.  Even in the name of God, they had carried out unspeakable evils that could never really be forgtten.  It seemed so unfair, their being here...living high and mighty off the backs and the land of Africa’s true  children.

            Zorina wondered how it felt to die by having community police kick holes in your stomach?  And knowing how many black men and black women had experienced such horrifying deaths in South Africa, she wondered how many whites had experienced such evil? 

            “Remove them, God.”

            Zorina put her head back and stared out the window to the gliding wing of the plane (she was seated alone).  That’s when Eve’s face popped into her memory.  Little girl Eve.  So charcoal black that she wasn’t allowed to be registered at Children of Christ Protectorate School...even though it was founded, funded and ran by two black men.  Eve’s charcoal coloring prevented her from attending, and two decades before that, Eve’s mother, one of several dozen charcoal prostitutes, had been deterred from seeking education due to the same skin problem.

            The secret came back to Zorina now.

            “It’s morning time!”, one of the black Reverends had said when Eve’s Monkey tried to register.

            These two Bantu clergymen, schoolteachers, were of South Africa’s popular belief that the black race was moving away from oppression and the darkness that caused that oppression.  Girls like Eve were a threat, because no one wanted those genes passed on.

            Little charcoal black “boys”(in fact, one of them was Eve’s very own brother) were allowed to attend classes.  But whenever a charcoal black girl tried to register--the men did not allow it.  Why even the two girls as chocolate as mudd were allowed in--but not girls as charcoal black as Eve’s Monkey.

            “Don’t call me Eve’s Monkey!”, the seven year old barefoot girl had hissed back at one of the clergymen one day.  “That’s not my name!”, the girl had cried.

            “Well, you look like a monkey!”, retorted the Reverend.  A grown man, a chocolate-skinned man, a man of the cloth.  “And you won’t be enrolled here, you smelly, ugly little oil stain!  It’s morning time!”

            Everyday, Zorina had witnessed it.  The little blue black girl marching barefoot, dressed in rags to the school building.  All the other girls her color had accepted their rejection on notice, but not this nervy little black thing.  She was brave!

            “I want to learn to read and count my fingers!”, Eve’s Monkey would beg.

            “Go to monkey and ape school, little prostitute!”

            Brilliant laughter.

            Zorina could see all the children now.  Little chocolates, milky browns, golden browns, light browns, yellows, blue black “boys”--and especially Sowego’s majority color (peanut butter  browns)...oh they had a belly laugh!  Little girls with Afros, pigtails and some with long, thick black perms--they shot their shining brown eyes at Eve with venomous disgust.

            “You’re too ignorant to learn!’, shouted Eve’s own brother.  “You’re so ugly, the school books won’t stay in your hands!”

            “They left you in the oven too long!”, shouted one fat yam yellow girl.

            “Why doesn’t she grow some hair!?”

            Zorina could feel it again now...the heat and the pain and how everyone was suddenly in flames and the roof caved in and lucky for Zorina, she was away from her desk sharpening her pencil by the only door that led outside.  She had braced her nose against the gasoline fumes as she ran out...and she had spotted Eve running through the green pastures barefoot, dressed in rags, laughing.

            She had watched Eve running, in fact, until Eve evaporated into the hillside...like a ghost.  Then other dead children, children whose bodies were still burning inside the school, they began following Eve into the hillside...as if they were all going away to play together...and that was when Zorina

fell in love with the fires that shape glass.  Their spirits had all looked like clear glass objects to Zorina, joyfully leaping into a careless paradise.  Zorina had wanted to go!  Everyone else was going!  But one of the dead boys yelled, “You stay here!”

            Zorina was just eight then...and no one thought to put her into therapy for what she had experienced, and ofcourse, the tragedy would be blamed on white men’s racism,   not black men’s racism, but Zorina couldn’t have cared less if white men  were held responsible for it.

            The hotel in Durban was exquisite.

            Unfortunately, Zorina’s traveling with Miss Lindy and Cribbitch always meant that she would act as surrogate maid and secretary.  She had to unpack and hang up their clothes properly, prepare their baths and fix their meals, because Miss Lindy always reserved a suite with its own well stocked kitchen.

            She couldn’t even tell them that she was bleeding.  That’s how genuinely close they were.

            Meanwhile, down the street, cases of the glass pieces, almost every one of them conceived and crafted on the spot by Zorina, were pulled out of padded boxes by specially trained handlers and aligned along the gallery walls.  Lindy Theron was there to marvel at the wonders that bore her husband’s good name.  She couldn’t wait for the awards presentation dinner!

            “We should get a dress, mummy”, said Cribbitch suddenly.  “A dress for Zorina to wear.  It’s her big night, too.  She hasn’t anything to wear and she’s so pretty, mum.”

            “I guess I could do that much”, nodded Lindy.  “I don’t want her standing behind me in the photographs  looking like some unfed praire dog.”

            Back at the hotel, Zorina sat suddenly on one of the beds she was custom making.  She was dizzy and bleeding and felt like she was dying.  Her cramps were like stomach punches!

She lay down on the bed...flat...and stared up at the ceiling.

            Out of nowhere, she began to miss her mother, intensely, as if she might not ever see the plump, pretty face again.  Zorina had always been a girl who knew instinctively that mothers need their daughters.

            And she loved Etah more than anyone in this world.

            “O...”, gasped Cribbitch.  “That is so pretty on you!”

            Zorina couldn’t believe she was being fitted in such a gown as the one Cribbitch had picked for her.  Cribbitch might only be twelve, but she was a very sophisticated little girl and her taste in clothes was impeccable.

            Shiny, lemon-tea light brown with the loveliest face and a perfect crown of cottony African bush hair on her head, Zorina looked like a Zulu princess in a strapless, flowing white Athenian tube gown complete with golden arm bracelets and gold bangles.  The dinner was being given outdoors by fire pit (with a roasted pig and dancing Zulu girls), so it was only fitting that Zorina be dressed summer-like and glamorous.  At just seventeen years old, she was too stunning for words.

            “The only thing I don’t like”, said Miss Lindy, “is the way the...”

            Zorina already knew what it was.  She had feared it, too.

            “...well, your bottom fits the dress funny.”

            Zorina’s heart sank, because it was her big butt that  was always messing up the shape of her clothes, and she was too skinny, way too thin to be cursed already with her mother’s big fat firm, heartshaped ass.  She burst into tears!

            “Oh, Zorina...no, honey.  Don’t cry.”

            Zorina collapsed into Miss Lindy’s arms.  Her heart full with memories of the way her father had always teased her mother’s backside by calling it “funk-trunk”.  It was such an ugly name, a cruel endearment.  Etah had always hated it and yet Nopopie would go on and on about the sweat collecting between the crack...of Etah’s funk-trunk.

            “Now you listen to me...you look like a fashion model in that dress!  Naomi Campbell would be proud!  And as far as you being able to afford it...well, we’ll just take a percentage from your salary every other week until it’s paid for.”

            Zorina sobbered up immediately.  She wanted to say:  Why don’t we just pawn that award you’re getting and pay for the dress--you selfish caucasoid bitch!  But, ofcourse, she didn’t dare say it.

            Thank God Cribbitch said it!

            “Mummy!...Zorina’s already earned that dress!  She’s the one who made all this beautiful glass that you’re getting an award for.  She shouldn’t have to pay for that gown--rich as you and daddy are!”

            Miss Lindy turned pink and relented.

            But on the way back to the hotel, all Zorina could think about was the way that the black boys in her neighborhood were always dreaming of being rappers or athletes and how a girl like herself might be walking by and they might go:  “Funk-trunk pussy stain...bang, bang, bang.....Funk-trunk pussy stain ...bang, bang, bang.”

            It was supposed to be a compliment.  It was supposed to mean that she was sexually desirable.  However, Zorina was smart enough to know the difference between a boy dreaming about banging up inside a hot-hole and a boy dreaming about making love to a girl.  These boys, so dark and handsome, imagined her as nothing more than meat for sex.

            Zorina figured that some unseen mystery girl, probably not from Sowego, was their choice for dreams about lovemaking, but whatever the case, she foolishly blamed her funk-trunk for her status with neighborhood boys.

            The next night...Golf Theron arrived in Durban!

            With his beautiful fiance’, Maritza.

            “I wouldn’t miss your big night for the world, mother!”

            Miss Lindy grinned, proudly, and kissed him and hugged him.  “Oh, my baby boy!”

            Zorina was dizzy with excitement--because Golf was going to get to see her all dressed up in her glamorous evening wear!  It was just too good to be true! 

            But first...she was told to custom make Golf and Maritza’s separate beds.  So she went to their suite.  First, she went into Golf’s room and made his bed.  Then she went to Maritza’s  room.  There was music coming from the dressing room that led to the bathroom.  It was Diana Ross singing, “It’s My House and I Live Here.”  For some reason, hearing that song in Maritza’s bathroom made Zorina intensely jealous.  She didn’t think that Diana Ross should be christening Maritza’s territory.

            She heard faint laughter.

            Obviously, Golf was in the dressing room with Maritza.

Zorina could smell him.  His cologne.  Then suddenly they laughed out really loud, Golf’s voice proclaiming from behind the wall, “I must be in love with an angel!”

            I am an angel!...Zorina wanted to proclaim out loud, as tears moistened her large brown eyes, not so much for Golf, but for the God who had cast her black and African.

            Zorina couldn’t help herself.

            Really, she couldn’t.

            She went to the crack in the doorway of the dressing room and peeped inside.

            Beautiful gowns, jewels...strewn everywhere.

            Apparently, Maritza was trying on different outfits and Golf was there to lust over the creamy white contours of her incredibly tiny body.  Her breasts, thought Zorina, were like slivers of liver hanging with big, cherry nipples.  But her hair was incredible--flowing like gold all around her shoulders.  Her face was so pale, like the Queen Elizabeth II portrait over Etah’s bed.  Pale like a queen.

            “Is there anything I could want more than an angel?”

            “Yes, a woman”, replied Maritza.

            Golf chuckled at her sharpness, and there was a way that he held her.  Held her in his arms like she was grace itself.  It was so incredibly endearing to Zorina’s watching eyes.  A kind of poetry in motion that she suddenly remembered dreaming about...wide awake sometimes, asleep other times.  Now she remembered that she had dreamed about that kind of silly, emotional hanging on.  Like in cinema films.

            No.  It was better than that.  This couldn’t be staged.

            The way his eyes searched for Maritza in the mirror even though she was right up against him. 

            He loved her hair--he fingered around in it.

            His chin rested on her shoulder and Zorina knew, intuitively, that they had never ever made love and that Maritza was a virgin.  She just knew it.

            “You smell like sunshine”, he told Maritza.

            “It’s called Privileage by Dutchess Wayborn.”

            His hands fastened in front of her and his dreamy blue eyes closed and rocked her gently.

            At the door, Zorina slid slowly, quietly, to the floor.  There were no tears in her eyes now.  She was totally engrossed in watching Golf behave just as she had dreamed he would.

            “How many children should we have?”

            “Two”, she said.  “A boy and a girl.”

            “Only two?”, he growled.

            Then he tickled her.  She giggled and shook free of him. 

            Zorina noticed that they had the prettiest wine she had ever seen--sitting in glasses in front of the mirror.  What beautiful color!  What richness!  It had to be absolutely delicious, Zorina thought, and her tastebuds suddenly went to fantasizing about what it must taste like.  A wine that red and pretty.  I...made those glasses, she suddenly realized. 

            Golf lifted a glass just then and took a swig from it.  His white knuckles against the stem.  Zorina’s nipples hardened...her heart panted and her eyes felt as though someone had suddenly blown hard in them.

            He put the rim of the glass to Maritza’s thin rosy lips and she drank a swallow, comfortably closing her eyes and sinking back into the warmth of his chest.

            “You make me so happy, Golf.”

            “I told you not to call me Golf when we’re alone.  Call me Noble.”

            She giggled and said, “Yes...Noble.”

            Zorina suddenly couldn’t see a thing.

            Not through her tears.

            She went about the task of custom making Maritza’s bed.

Fluffing the pillows with an extra something--her admiration for Maritza.  In and out of her mind, the memories of being raped by Golf Theron at thirteen sprung up like some annoying radio tune that she couldn’t stop humming.

            Tears fell off her chin...onto the lavish bedcovers.

            Some old blues song was coming from the dressing room.  A drunk lady singing out:  “...put that dog in the back-ah the house...tie ‘em up; tie ‘em up...hand me my pigfoot, hand me my beer!...tie ‘em up; tie ‘em up...”

            Zorina was done with the bed.

            Just then...Golf came tumbling out of the dressing room.

He halted as Zorina turned startled and said, “...Zorina!”

            She wasn’t accustomed to him calling her Zorina, so she said, “It’s Zora to you...remember?”

            Golf gulped.  He came over to her and said in a low voice, “I really need to talk to you about something before you go to bed this evening.  It’s about us, Zorina.  It’s really important.  Could you come to my room later--around midnight?”

            About us Zorina.

            That was so shocking to hear out of a white man’s mouth and she couldn’t believe that he was acknowledging that there was an us between them.  Honestly, she had started to believe that she was just some fool traumatized by a rape,  obsessed with getting from the rapist himself some kind of acceptance or forgiveness or approval.

            But he had said us just now.

            “Will you come, please?”

            “Yes...Noble.”

            Miss Lindy was all teeth, wrinkles and huge blonde hair

as she went up to receive the award for Glassmaker of the Year.

            The entire dinner was for her.  There were no competitors, no judges, no nominees.  She thanked a long list of people, but not one of them was Zorina.

            Othello came.

            He had driven up with his wife LissaMondi, but some old white man had turned them away at the door and by the time Miss Lindy was told of it, it was too late.

            Zorina could smell the smoke from the school again, but she tried not to let it get to her.  She was the only black person at the whole affair and found herself roundly ignored.

            Completely and absolutely.

            For one thing--her young body in the strapless, tight white gown had upstaged all of the other women.  The fact that she was such a pretty girl and the only oasis of colored skin in the room had made her into a striking kind of exotic goddess flower.  It took Zorina a few hours to figure out that white people don’t appreciate it when a black woman does something that only white women are supposed to be able to do.  They could accept her as a young, raggedy maid--but not as a beautiful black woman of childbearing age.

            The biggest surprise was Golf’s strange behavior.

            He didn’t look at Zorina one...single...time.  Even when she spoke to him (to get him to look) he acted as if she were butt naked or something.  The other men seemed to sweat whenever she walked by them.  They clung to their wives and girlfriends as if they felt literally threatened.  Zorina felt dirty, because not even the waiters and maids (all Indians and Asians) would acknowledge her presence or her beauty.  Cribbitch was too young to attend the party and Maritza Buitengracht simply didn’t socialize with kaffir girls in public, period.

            Out of great fires, the breathtaking glasses that Zorina had created lined their velvet tiers like trophies, and increasingly, Zorina wanted to scream out that she was the one who had formed and sculpted everyone of them by hand!  It was her  they gathered to honor--the kaffir girl!  All of this glassed beauty was because of the monumental sorrow that had pushed forth her genius, but she couldn’t do that to the Theron family and get away with it.  The cost would be too high.  Like the mice who lived in the walls back home, the white people scampered around merrily, careful not to make eye contact or place themselves in the open, away from the safety of the walls.  How many souls had they nibbled on to stand here munching caviar and sipping martinis--and why did Zorina want so desperately to be acknowledged and accepted by them?

            By the end of the night, Zorina felt as if she were just a coffee stain on somebody’s white silk lap napkin.

            She made it to Golf and Maritza’s suite at two in the morning.  Golf , who seemed to have been waiting by the door, let her in and then quickly rushed her through the black darkness to the lighted doorway of his room.  It had been years since his hands had gripped Zorina’s body this way and she  thought she might pee on herself from the adrenaline that was pulsing through her veins as his large white hands tightened around her soft little cinnamon-stick arm.

            “Don’t make a sound”, he whispered harshly, his breath smelling like liverwurst and scotch, and there was no more music, no more light coming from Maritza’s room.  Just black silence--her door closed.

            Slowly, Golf closed the door to his own room and Zorina wondered how she should act?  She had seen Halle Berry in a cinema film and liked the combination of vulnerability and strength that the actress possessed.  She thought she could act like that and stand her ground no matter what he said.  She might even get loud if he said the wrong thing...so that people would wonder what a little kaffir girl had been doing in the privacy of his room at such an ungodly hour.

            But just then, Golf flicked off the lights.

            The room went black and she felt him grab her.  His hands digging in to the plushness of her ass and his wet, dirty mouth kissing and biting against her neck and shoulders!

            He panted: “Don’t fight it, Zora.”

            One of his white fingers was plunging between the crack of her ass.  Her panties, she felt, were being dragged off.

            Her eyes bulged, swelling with tears, and she couldn’t speak or make a sound--she was so shocked to be getting what she had thought she wanted.  Not sex.  But just   man-woman attention from a man that she was infatuated by and supposedly  wasn’t good enough to have.

            But she hadn’t expected it to feel this disrespectul, this dirty, and yet intellectually, and by memory...she had known that it would.

            Her mind told her to scream.  To make him stop.

            Men like Golf had kicked holes in her father’s stomach and taken credit for the art that African people created.  Men like Golf had called black mothers apes and taught little black boys to do the same.  Men like Golf had raped little black girls and fully expected those little girls to behave as friends the very next day.  Men like Golf knew about selfish greed.  They knew all about people that were weaker than them.

            You don’t deserve this!, some voice inside Zorina seemed to be raging.  But Noble was tearing her breasts loose now.  Young and high they jiggled in his hands and got caught in his slobbering mouth!  Zorina’s dress stank already, she realized, and it was smudged and soiled and torn, and so she merely braced the cold air as it came off.  Her soft, hot flesh instantly being dug into by what seemed like the hands of many.  He hurt her privates by wetting his fingers in her lips.

            He didn’t guide her to the bed--he bent her naked ass down to the floor. 

            Zorina wanted to stop him, but she didn’t have the courage to stop him.  She could feel her mother’s slap against her face and she didn’t know if she was good enough to demand to be treated with affection and tenderness.

            “Oh, you sweet dirty little bitch”, he moaned in ecstacy as he licked her neck, slobbered her mouth and bit at her nipples like a dog pup fighting to get milk.

            There was no mention of her smelling like sunshine.

            His thick white dick (penis, prick) went up in her.

            The pain of it shooting through her body and ripping the tight skin of her pink opening.  She was already bleeding.

            His hand stifled the scream and her tears poured down the sides of her face, but she kept her weeping restrained so that no one would come and see what Golf really thought of her or find out how worthless a stain she really was.

            She closed her eyes and tried to leave her body.  She tried, desperately, to pretend that it was the kingish and very  beautiful actor Djimon Hounsou inside her.  Her favorite cinema idol.  Then she could like it and want it.

            But her mind wasn’t strong enough to create all that.

            It was Golf Theron banging her dirty little coffee stain!

            Worthless kaffir trash bitch!  That’s what she called herself.  Dirty, nasty little worthless piece of nothing.

            nigger bitch.

            Golf  suddenly put his elbow in her mouth to brace the sound.  Then he dramatically increased the swagger and the anxiousness of his beastfucking.

            The pain shot through Zorina’s body and she could hear the rythm of the black boys as they chanted, rooting Golf on, cheering:  “Funk-trunk pussy stain...bang, bang, bang.”  You have to get the flow of a rapper and picture a cute South African girl with a plump, tight ass and say it faster:  “Funk-trunk pussy stain...bang, bang, bang!”

            Funk-trunk pussy stain...bang, bang, bang!

            Golf jumped up off her!

            His dick was all bloody and he was coming.

            He shoved his penis into Zorina’s wet face and shot off his wad with a fierce stifled groan.

            His chest heaved with heavy breathing and his wet, hot sticky jism ran in her eyes and all down the sides of her face.

            “Wash yourself off, Zora...I got to git me rest, eh.”

            Golf was exhausted.

            As Zorina lay on the floor, she could not seem to pull herself from the fire this time.  Her classmates’ screaming seemed to form a kind of chorus to a lullaby.  The cinders were hot, but cold, too...this time.  Eve smiled at her and handed her the knife.  Eve kissed her on the cheek.

            The knife?

            Zorina didn’t remember there being a knife in her hand, but suddenly, there was...and she was floating through the hotel’s corridors.  As if suspended just above the plush carpet.

            In one hand she held the knife...and in the other...Golf Theron’s white dick and his pink hairy sack; all bloody.

            That seemed awfully odd.

            Ugly, too.  The sound of Maritza’s high pitched screams.

            Zorina ran out of the hotel.

            The police hadn’t put the bullet between her eyes yet.

            So she ran...freer than she’d ever been.  Down to the street til she reached the docks.  She stood there...staring out at the shiny black sea.

            Beautiful ocean...becoming more and more of itself.

            She didn’t hear the sirens of the police automobiles.

            No.  She heard the drunk blues woman singing from America: “...that front porch...that’s one dayyyn-jerus PLACE.”

            They called Zorina’s name.  So she turned around.

            The gunshots sounded so far away; annoying.

            So she turned back around.

            She saw two people...walking on water!  Walking right across the sea, swiftly coming towards her.

            It was Jesus Christ with charcoal black Eve!

            Coming to get her, she realized.

            Jesus didn’t look anything like the effeminate Christ that the whites always portrayed.  He was tall and buff, dark like a Mexican or some other sexy latin breed of king...he had wet curly black hair and suave, sensuous bedroom eyes.

            He reached out his hand to Zorina and said, “Don’t be affraid of the way it feels...”

            To her stunned surprise, she had already fallen into the water.  But now Jesus Christ lifted her to her feet.  She stood, quite astonished, atop the water’s surface.

            She and Eve embraced as tightly as long lost sisters!

            “I hope you won’t miss the fire”, said Eve.

            “I won’t”, said Zorina.

            “We have a new life for you”, said Nopopie, Zorina’s father, as he stepped out of the fog...and into the moonlight.  Zorina ran into his arms.  She was so overjoyed!

            “Oh, daddy”, she cried.  “Without a father, life is so hard!”

            Then Jesus Christ, whose wet honey-bronzed chest stuck out like a shield of faith, asked her, “Do you have any last words before we leave this place?”

            Zorina’s eyes filled with tears, because for a moment, she felt human again.  She thought of how some whites had often called black women mules.  A mule is a small brown donkey that stinks and is considered ugly and used exclusively for servitude.  A mule’s stinking baby is called a mulatto.

            “Yes...I do.”

            She turned and looked at the lights of the now crowded pier, legions of superior white faces around the ambulances, the fire brigades, South Africa’s evil police.

            From an irrevocable soul, Zora promised Jesus Christ: “The black woman...is the meteor...that is coming to this earth!” 

Read another classic short story by Kola Boof:  http://doorofkush.50megs.com/contact_1.html