The incredible beat of my heart

By Henali Kuit

The incredible beat of my heart is a provocative collection of short prose, varying in style from suburban-realist to surrealist. Kuit transmits the elusive strangeness of daily life in a deceptively matter-of-fact tone, spiked with bursts of rage, humour, and unmarked detours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deep South
• Release date: Dec 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781928476436

Henali Kuit

Henali Kuit skryf prosa en poësie in Afrikaans en Engels. Haar werk verskyn in New Contrast, Prufrock, Ons Klyntji, Nuwe Stories, LitNet en elders. Sy het vir ses jaar in China en Suid-Korea as taalonderwyser gewoon en gewerk. Die Engelse weergawe van geruisloos, ongemerk is in 2021 deur Deep South as The incredible beat of my heart uitgegee.

Book preview

1

Maps

I share a flat with an old lady. I saw the ad at the library when I was drunk. It said in all caps, ‘very independent, goes to job and to group-fitness daily.’ How romantic, I thought. Renting a room from her would not be about the room at all. It would be more about her than it would be about me. She made no mention of requiring sober habits or a reference from an employer. This was good because I didn’t have either. I moved in. Carefully pushing my mattress around the wonky little table by the door.

At first I wanted to make friends because I was sick of being alone. I saw myself in the old lady and it was plain that she wanted to see herself in me. If we could make friends, I thought, we would have no need for mirrors, or men. But it didn’t work out for us. We were both occupied with the webs we had spun around our days. She had to drive from the library, to church, to spinning class, to the traditional healer, then back to church, day in and out. And I had to continue, simply, to worry.

I worried that the old lady would go into the kitchen after I had made my dinner and that she’d step on a knife I dropped and somehow hadn’t noticed. Or that she’d bump against a pot of steaming water I had brought to boil but somehow didn’t empty. I worried about finding her on the kitchen floor: writhing, her thin skin coming off like tissues. I checked for things I might have dropped, sharp things. I checked, again and then again, for boiling things that never cool. I am compulsively compulsive. I tap and blink and clench my fist. I had to make lists too, because lists helped me to remember what I should be checking. Lists helped me worry into the right directions. I am not a lavish kind of person but I made lists of what I wanted for my room and compared these to lists of what I already had and to lists of what I couldn’t afford.

I also drew maps. Me standing in my new room and existing with my coordinates. Me surrounded by the old lady’s things, making eye contact before I extended my index finger and flicked something precious into the graticule of a deep hole with a concrete bottom. Or me standing next to her and us both pulling faces – the lines our faces made working like alidades: pointing into directions that are significant if you look well enough. Sometimes I printed my blood group in the top-left corner of my maps. When I was feeling nostalgic, I added my emergency contact, a number no longer in service, that my father made me memorise 27 years ago. Sometimes I get mad and I write vengeful notes in the top-right corner of my maps. Then I shut my eyes and picture the old lady blowing up in slow motion.

The garage

I woke up one morning and found that my father had unplugged me and moved me to the garage. I do not have a very active imagination and so this is basically the most shit thing that could ever have happened to me.

Humans have soft corners in their daily routines and brilliant things grow there like mould. Essentially the same is true of garages – but that would be garages in general, and my mother is a hoarder. Sometimes things become so intense that they flip back into nothingness. The garage is my home now and I accept that, but such lassitude has taken hold of me that I find myself spitting up into the air. And waiting.

I heard they found that shadows are composed of the black that goes out of keys when people turn them the wrong way in their locks. There has not been a shadow in the garage since I got here. I have never before been this invisible. While I stood in the living room, all I ever wanted to be was something else. I would control my diet and obsess over the patterns of my thought. While 40 is, generally speaking, the new 30, this has not proven true for me.

At night I pray for redemption and the ability to distinguish between night and day. If I had hands, I would touch myself to know where I am. But I have only my own sighs, soft and incessant things, as affirmation of only my cardio-vascular person. I heard that when you’re not able to sigh, parts of you will actually blow up. It would start in your extremities. If I had hands they would swell. These are the things you never think about when you are fully functional.

Look into my bullethole

I faked a kind of incompetence so that my father was forced to come back from the war and take care of me. I centred the incompetence around my mind. Not my own anymore, I said (weepily). Dunno what to do, I said. At wits’ end!

Sure enough, my father showed up on the stoep a few days later. Looking important, missing an ear because of the war.

‘Pappa!’ – this was an exclamation and my face was flushed.

My father emptied his pockets in my palm in response. A feather (red, soft). A porcupine quill. A handful of shiny stones I didn’t want, and about which he had a lot to say.

Finally: a bullethole. Rounder than I’d have thought possible. Bloody, very bloody. But somehow not sloppy. Circular. Perfectly focused. My father turned it over in my open palm and right away my palm held it proudly: a bullethole right through my hand, next to the