Chapter 1 The Exposition

Hide is only a complexion, hide faces a masquerade: people are not what they look like even mirrors aver of their two faced symmetries. Fashion externalizes the exquisite externalities of external fleshy exteriors. Masquerades hide faces.

The 21st century of digeteria is a new millennium of technologies laden with conveniences,so inconvenient to society's traditionalistic individuals.

Lindokuhle Sukati had just woke up from a sleep of Dreamland,cold fresh eyes laden with a new lease of life's animation. Seven o'clock it was, a diorama of the precedent night of nebulous novas, and birds were chirping melodies on the highmost echelons of the sky. The sun's spherical shape was cut half by mountains protruding in the horizon's phenomenon. Every one seemed boisterous, and everything was a simpering hustle and bustle. Everybody was shirking at the breakfast which had just been decked on the table, Fanelo in his usual behavioral clamouring self,had just incited a subject of which could daze even the Cabinet. In Mbekelweni ,we descendants of Phitsilili Sukati live amongst other clansfolk, the Simelanes,Shongwes,Dlaminis and many more. I had just earned a good pass of my form five,life to me seemed to be a malice of conventionalities, a boring and monotonous systematization. Going to the University Of Eswatini everyday, I seemed to yearn oodles of malicious adventure, not a curfew or an affair with an Anna Karenin. It had been an off week for varsity students, trife,strife was the rife presentiment. I had been to funerals many or forth in a week, and I was not receptively perceiving the receptions about that schematic stimulus. I was entangled in a psychotic illness, physiologically I was a wretched walking dreg. In my room, reposed while seeing the restive youth outside the window pane walking with slanting steps crabwise on the slopey foothills, heads blooded with bandanas, crack boys in the parasol next door were smoking weed in droves. Phinda Vilakati was on the sofa attentively glued to the television. I nurtured the nullifying numbness of reality's nurgatory system of numberless nuisances. Life was a notion normed with a nourished notoriety for a noxious nub of nostalgic novelties.

On my way straight to my dome, I stumbled into my granny, unconsciously mired in an ill thought of hypochondria. "Any plans for the day,maybe a resort what execution are you to undertake?"

"Working the yard, removing weeds, fence repairs, any work around the home",I said concisively. I was usually non-chalant, amongst a noisy ambience of nutty children nipping out noise. I was again nobbled about the niggling niceties of life which I could not nail for myself. I was wry about life as it always wrought me wrongs and wrecks. I was walled by the wanton warfare of westernization, but being a behavioral westerner I was always whimsically whispering whimsies contrasting the ideal of being westernized.

Absorbed in her monotone monochrome industry, granny continued her slow steady stance walking past the corridor to her room left beside the kitchen door. She was about ninety, senility was her normality, but she had normalized herself to manual endeavors, work had normally become a normative norm of her existence.

In my room inside, I propped my hand lean on my bed, perching on the bedside, I stretched my right arm, firmly held my cellphone. I plucked headphones out of junk bag, plugged on ears to listen to hip hop tracks spazzing. I waggled about the room wreathed by the optimistic peoples speaking well-tuned eccentricities of language.

Outside were the children chicken chasing, kiting frisbees, skipping ropes,hand muddedly muffling sandbox. The haven outside was behold a leavened diorama of childhood ectasy, busy as mites on a mound.

Soon barging in my room towards me sternly staring at me, Fanelo took to my drawer, pranked a pun on me but soon I was infuriated at his indignant annoyance.. One could bet I had been made a jockey ,so I asked for peace but he did not cease parroting like a mockingbird atune.

"No noise,please. Can someone meditate contemplatively in the midst of this jeering parroting", I said angrily.

"This is not your house to tell us when or where to talk. Go else where if you want to boss about your malevolent manness. Until then suck up this attitude cause I'm not young for you to dictate me around", Fanelo said discontentedly. As the disagreement ensued ,I went up straight to him,hurled my right arm across his face, in counteractive retaliation he bummed his head against mine. He threw a big old wood ball back at my face,I gnashed my teeth as I felt for a kitchen cleaver inside my trouser pockets. Enraged like two metadors faced at loggerheads in a bullsfight, as heavyweights in a blood fight mangle malevolently. He kicked me at my left knee, I punched his chest back with a thunderous thud, I woke my feet up, clenched his face in between a vice grip and chocked him until he signed breathlessly while nimbling at the intensely niggling strangulation. He moved his arms nervy, shaking weak my arm's grip engulfing his neck. Now he was fronting me face on, but funking he withdrew to my room door, cowering then as I took off my sweater, blood dripping on his slacks. He nerved his butchered bursts of his bunched shoulders, and he resorted to picking up a broomstick. He bundled it at me winding it around, he butted me to a pulp, but savagely I had to salvage from the detriment. I deprived him of his now half broken rod, seized him by the neck, uplifted him up high and sent him flying over a chair beside my bed adjacent to the mirror. He retreated off to his room crying into sobs of which even common loons could humor.

As always was his habit, I knew he would run to granny to bitch about me as if I had been the one to arouse the scuffle. I too had been numbered considerable times bodily all over. I had teared into tatters my red Levi's sweater, I was bleeding profusely on my nose, my head was swirling in spirals, my forehead bumped up like a hilltop high. Lisa would want every word of explanation as if I was first boyfriend to be trashed half conscious,my father would pray this situation over or whip us darn like headless naughty swines. Half dead I lay on my bed groaning, I peeped the noon outside,and the sun was suspended in her highmost zenith, ultravioletly cancerous. I grabbed The Great Gatsby, read three chapters as if to deviate my mind as of what had ensued, my conscience can aver what great turmoil welled deep in my mental being, the luck of the scuffles presentiment was that it's unfolding did not yield more spectators than merely the two of us. What was to unfold hence I wondered shriekingly throbbing as I failed to nerve the spasms.

In here an alter ego of the bearer may overmanifest the bearer's persona I thought how impeccable it would have been if I streaked over my mental subconsciousness. The sun shone deeper into the east horizon in retreat, a chill breeze was swooping trees, humidly mild the atmosphere became airy, the stasis of the wind exceeded into oversaturation. At home in the Sukati house muscles were tensing, but the old earth of tomorrow today was always an uncertain futurity for a dwarf to reckon. I had been highly spiritualized before noon, I was a buoyant hypocrite who was normed to the hypocritical utilitarianism. I could not site a situation of happiness in that home diorama, and hypocritically I sought utmost utopian heavenly vacations. I was becoming a malcontent and a malefactor of that home maladjustment.

My father, Mphetfo Sukati dashing inside the house with physical apprehension nerved the strife radiating amidst atmospherical stillness.I had sinned to have fought with my fraternal side over what seemed a trivial matter, even for jockeys it could have been frivolous. As we dined dinner, suddenly my father inquired interrogatively "how have you been doing throughout the day? Fanelo how much enjoyable was your big brother's company? Did you remember to wash your school uniform as schools open tomorrow?"he asked wonderingly. "We've been very fine and the day was a thrilling eventful unfolding, I did wash my school uniform" Mphetfo replied concurrently. My father suddenly frowning his face lamentatively exhaled a heavy sigh, "nothing of this day has been less than omenous, in Matsapha around six o'clock this morning a boy about Linda's age was run over by a big police truck. What a tragedy, he is been supposedly presumed to be one of the street kids around the Mbhuleni area. We live in a Sodom and Gomorrah, just today in the Times of Swaziland a man killed his wife and children over the wife's asking for divorce, it headlined the front page. Moreover, the Eswatini Electricity Company has placed even more heftier tariffs on electricity. Hospitals are short of medication, long queues of sick elderly folk were sent home as there is no medicine to help treat them".

As this was the time of domestic politics, all heads around the dining table listened attentively, I and Lenhle continued piggingly champing the lot of our dishes. It was a usual weekday, Phinda and aunty Celimphilo had left for Hlutse around three o'clock, the sun had then seemed like a hollow yellow sphere red infrared figure transversing the sky to the east.

"Indeed these are the last days of Christ's Second Coming, how many women have we lost through the epidemic of femicide this year, the numbers are a staggering statistic. Once ago public outrage was feministically radical over Oscar Prestorious' allegedly murdering Reeva Steenkamp accidentally. Women are rocks, you touch a women you touch a rock. I'm too a fundamentalist of feminism, I'm a warrior women born of suffrage of cheerleaders and superwomen",my granny said sagely.

"We exist communally in a commune cosmopolitan community of creoles and other folks of varied ethnicity. We are a pacifist monoculture of monism and a monogamy of monotheism. My sentimental monologue never mutes, I am a sensitized one of civil citizenry, sensetionalized to all pagan exoticism of Orthodox tradionalim", my conscience so inwardly spoke. "I am not an ignoramus blissed by ignorance, I assertedly aver that what I have been brought up knowing might one day prove refutable by learned probes of knowledge", I brooded resolutely in my mind.

And so then hence we all said our goodbyes heartily to one another, withdrew to our rooms​ but the gawking between me and Fanelo enstraged us further apart, those looks were repulsively cold, I shunned gawking back at times. And so then we withdrew to our sleeping places, dogs howling, grumbling of which we knew a chick chase had begun. And a full moon glistened high where a cirrus keeps to the day, a beautiful setting of stars in infinite numbers fitted together in the nebulous livid night sky of faint nebulas..

Sleeping I wished a morrow morning of peaceful bliss, though I know I am a freeborn, still I am institutionalized by social corporate civilization. I wanted to luxuriate in all the luxuries of life, I was lusting after the luscious lustre of youthful vivacity. I did not see life luxuriantly with all the peoples around me telling me to grow up, get a job and pay taxes to the government work much of the day, salaried peanuts. I had seen most of my cronies locked up for drug smuggling, growing maruajana seems a cliche occupation. It seemed on the contrary, to most of my peers a niche way of life but to me it seemed overly glamorized. In every university in Eswatini protest is word, hardly bearable to most if you hail from a middle class family from the bundus. Everyone seems to thrive in a society where to strive is a resort for surviving. Music I muse to myself sometimes, is now a pagan perversion for an exhibitionist generation of fashionistas. Only in my mind I recall the jazzy old generation of hippies, blissed by the saxophone, fathers with berets dancing dabs holding boom box, now such fashion dubbed traditionalistic. Born in a generation of exhibitionism and dapper dandies, music and fashion been radicalized into a radicalism that externalizes expression of exhibitionism and nudism. To believe in existentialism, everything to me seems pagan even the churches too. I was maladjusted to that home management, so even in a small kingdom as this, society is mainly consistent of a peasant citizenry, then few of the noble citizenry. Me and my friends, Senzo Maphalala, Fana Mahlalela, Agnes Mamba seem to be only blissed by extravagance, an extremist extravagant people who delight in extravaganza. I was lustful for the luminance of latitude, not the lugubrious reality with a less ludic ludicrousness. I wanted to be a luminous luminary of the luminescence of youthfulness.

I really do infer averredly to granny's postulation that fashion is now too much eroticism, music and art are conjugations connotating erotica. In my wet dreams I only fancy copulating with Lisa, clad in a pink skimpy miniskirt and her bosom breasting her nipples in her crop top. Sindisiwe Dlamini as my pal, has grovelled me a lot to be part of Christ's congregation, "what would really then circumcise my soul with a newer foreskin?" I ponder evaluatively with a expressionless smile of enigma. To my parents and the community I seem to be a vulgarian, one who funks Christ but exults to worshipping materialism. Mentally I seem to be a wretched mind with expressions internalized by schizophrenia, sometimes my asking for solicitude I am mistaken for a misanthrope. I do feel sometimes I could outlaw every institution, regain my essence in cosmos of a cosmopolitan universe. I am not a sociopath, but sometimes I feel the need to scheme up my own schema. I was always a lovable like for a lovelorn love interest, my love life was a loveless love, and I always sought loving lovelies.

So in sleep I did dream a truce with my brother, Fanelo. I wallowed in my self pity all the while throughout that night. Through the midnight of bald eagles chirping like loons laughing, it seemed the noon hour of witches flying on brooms as was always supposed. Tomorrow as I minute in my diary ought to be better day of uncommonly uncomplaining life universities, I pray. "Have I changed my essence in the midst of all this, why have I a loathsome feeling for this quietism of this most peasant citizenry? It's as if I loathe them for being disadvantaged, why can't they transcend their socioeconomic challenges, they are a lazy quietist people as Donald Trump said" I so thought sneeringly.

I was swept into sleep, sprawled on the bedspread. I was sputtering over what was a sprawling dream, spurting springy over the seams of fantasy and reality. I was sprung between mindness and subconscious inebriation. Spumes of spurting springs splattered in a sound splash, I had to brave the spunky sleep of sprites, fantasy is a spurious spur of actuality. Squatters squat for a squarish place to sleep, there I lain stacked and sprawling , squirreling away from the staccato musicality of eagles chirping. I stagger on the spurious stage of sleep, gobs of saliva squirting from my mouth. I do not stable in that stadium of spurs and squishing stablings, staggering in a stagnant mindness. I could hear the stammering rascals stalking past the gate, and the staleness of sleep stalled my stamina.

Fear had always stampeded me to sleep, neither could I stamp out the stalking staleness of fear nerving me. Outside was always a stamping ground of stalkers at night, it was always the standing standardization of the midnight ambience. I stapled myself to sleep as the starlings starred the stagey musicality of the night. I was startled by those standing voices along with the startling hymnal tunes of loons stashed everywhere outside. Even though time stationed in its usual kinesis, I could not stand being stationary in that steadily steep stay of mind. The stench of the nightly sternness was a stellar stepwise show of stewing stiffness. I was still a sybaritic stereotype amongst the syncopated music of the symptomatic midnight. It was an ongoing symposium of symphonies, a symbolic symmetry of one of the many dreadful nights. It was a symbolism of an omenous happening, only then no one could dub about that syndicalism of symphony. The wind would swish in a dreadful swirl, swooping birds away, thus I swivelled on the bed sleep fully swooning.

Sometimes a swift swill of rain swerved on the roof. The sweeping stillness swelled me sweaty, nobody could swank from sleep, quickly by a systemic synapse I swatted a bug which was swanning on my neck. I was swathed by my swarthy heritage of swearing vulgarities at the surreal surrounding of a surreptitious surprise. It was a continuous obstreperous occasion of occult occupancy, that obstructive obtuseness obviated my obsession for sleep. Every occupier was occasionally asleep, but sleep had then occurred to me as an occupation of obsolescence. The rain could be heard raking the railings outside, as it heavily rambled on the roof. Snoozing was a rankling random ramification. I ransacked the bed as I ranged about the sheets rampantly.