In this season I am rich, wrapped in white and loved to rot. My mother washes my hair in sweet smelling pawo from the black trees that only grow in the Anyani marshes. She has walked far for this treat – the purple stains her hands for days and I smell as though coated in sugar and baked in the ground.

My goma kneads my feet in boa butter. It takes her days to grind the seeds to a paste, to boil the paste to butter and to strain the oil from it. Her ancient, knotted hands make easy work of my calluses. I feel the slip of her fingers at the source of my feet and in my soul. We do not speak. We do not need to.

In the day that follows I spring outside in the gaiety of my newfound womanhood. Still clad in my white and air in the wine I have slurped from the hands of my aunts. I feel clouds above and beneath my feet. I do not hate it, this womanhood.

I find Ndalo in the trees, where I always find Ndalo. She too is new in her white. Her face is painted bright red with siri powder and when we are close I smell yellow roses on her neck. I wonder if our mothers walked together to the Anyani marshes.

“Look what I have,” she grins and pulls a diwo from behind her back. It is brimming with wine. We drink ourselves swollen.

“I do not hate it,” I say to Ndalo, “this womanhood.”

She laughs and falls soft against the ground. The starch white of her dress marring the dry once-green of the fallen mopane leaves.

“I do not hate it either,” she smiles and closes her eyes. “I miss Amu who cannot join us in this womanhood.”

“He has us everywhere else,” I laugh and lay down beside her.

We are both so young, and wide with wine. Ndalo tastes of it too, when I kiss her, sweet and red, low and languid – warm in her throat and ablaze in my belly.

I think of purple hands in my hair, knotted fingers at my feet. I think of love and cannot put it here where my mouth opens to a flood. I think of hunger and drag the word onto my lap with a handful of white fabric and yellow roses in my lungs.

We are both so young.

Ndalo is up and running through the trees before she is even dry on my fingers. I hear her breath still, catching and liquid, singing in my ears.

In the night we gather the Vinimini. She is there behind the golden gaze of the roaring flames. The open valley is surrounded by the shadows of the stretching mopane streets. I want to reach through the fire but I can barely stand to my feet, when our eyes meet and she looks away first. All of our valley has gathered here save the men too old to be bothered with our moon blood – they already have far too many wives. We are more than one twenty, the new women in white, wine drunk and hot with the blood of the moon.

I hear a voice close, wet breath on my neck and I flinch at the memory, wince at how badly I want to lean into it. It’s only Amu, his brown eyes wider than the smile that splits his face in two.

“Lami?” he asks, his hands on my shoulders as he turns to face me. Once we could stand chest to chest this way, now my shoulders nearly hover his ribcage.

“What?” I ask him, when he peers into my gaze and forces our eyes to meet.

“Do you not hear me, Thuna?” He asks.

“I do, Amu, speak!” I say, my head tilts slightly, my eyes play for the shadows around the fire. Amu drones in my ear like a swamp fly. I catch a glimpse of a red face behind the flames.

“Ayi, Thuna! Listen to me when I speak!”

My eyes snap back to Amu and the steel he can suddenly bleed into his gaze, his big hands on my arms, when had his voice grown so deep?

“Who has been telling you that you can shout at me?” I ask him, leaning away from his air as though his breath were foul.

“I am sorry,” he folds, his hands leave me and hang at his sides. “I am just, I am trying to get your attention.” Amu’s eyes soften and I remember that I love him, and that he is my friend.

“What do you need, wami?” I cradle his face with my palm and make a true effort to keep my gaze from seeking out a red face behind him.

“Can we talk? Not here, in the trees there?” He points and I follow him when he leads. I wonder at this talk but only just, knowing Amu he very likely has conjured another “grand scheme” for how we can find our way to the city of the morning and make our fortune.

It Is nearly freezing in the dark of the mopane trees after the blaze of the fire. I clutch myself and stifle a shiver.

“Hurry now, Amu, it is so cold here,” I say. Amu turns around, with one swift motion, pulls off his one black coat that always smells of cow hide and slings it over my shoulders. His hands are gentle where they linger on arms. He peers down at me, something in his eyes, maybe always there but I see it clear for the first time as he steps to me. “What is this?”

“There’s something you must know,” he says, voice all low and intent. Practiced.

“Amu, I-“

“Something you must know. I have kept it long this hot in my blood like it bubbles in a cauldron.”

“I-“

“Hear me, Thuna lami, listen!” His voice is a hushed shout, a booming whisper. But he says my name how he always has, in soft reverence. My shoulders slump and I listen.

“I know what I am. A dreaming man. Isthunzi esimnyama. An abomination. But I will chew the dombi everyday for all my life and push that man down. I will never dream! Never shame you! I will be worthy of you, Thuna lami.” He is crying. My heart is drumming in my ears, I cannot will words to my tongue. How do I tell him? How do I say?

“Amu,” my tongue is drenched linen in mouth, “Wami, I, I-“

And then his mouth is on me, lips dry and shivering. I leap an entire league from him as though touched by fire. I land on my backside and then scramble to my feet as he stands there, long arms useless at his side as he watches me, perplexed. His black coat falls from my shoulders as I flee for my homestead.

I spend days hiding in my mother’s hut, not daring a foot out into the village. I whimper and feign sickness each time I am sent to fetch water with the others. I still keep to the teachings with my goma for, “no sickness or ill.” We sit in the smoke each evening and I follow her voice through the dreaming. Yet, my mind always wanders to yellow roses in my lungs and cow hide around my shoulders. I know it will not be long before she steals these memories from me and then I will have to answer for them.

“Thuna!” She does not raise her voice, my goma, but she is sure that the sharp will slice.

“I am sorry, Goma,” I plead, the river slinks back from between our toes and I feel the hard mud floor beneath my feet.

“See to the noise in your head before you next see to me,” she gestures me out of her hut with the back of the hand. “I am too old for this adolescent keening.”

I hang my head and make my sorry way out.

“I should have come sooner,” Ndalo says, “I was scared.” She has dragged the chair to the doorway, dragging too a chasm between us. Her legs sprawled out infront of her, drenched in sunrays up to her bare knees.

“Is that why you are sitting so far from me?” I ask from where I lay on the bed, one leg dangling the side. She meets my gaze and tilts her head so we are eye to eye. Our shadows meet in the middle of the room, mingling like black blood.

“It’s not you that I fear,” Ndalo says, and then she sighs and looks away. “It is me, here, with you.” She whistles out a breath through pursed lips. “Like we have not known all of each other since we were babies in the mud. Like I have not always loved you! Like I must learn it again!” She slams a clenched fist against the side of the chair. My heart thuds in my chest now. I bite the inside of my cheek to still a smirk as I watch her, and let her untangle in this fury, then drag herself back as is her way.

“I am scared of this heat,” her voice is low, honey from the comb. “Haunted by this heat.”

“What heat are you talking about, Ndalo enhle?” I don’t mean to tease but I can’t help it when she is so plagued and staving off the inevitable.

“You are not funny, Thuna. This is serious,” she says, brow furrowed at me like a blade she flings.

“I know,” I say and lay on my side and look at her in earnest.

“You don’t know. You think all of it is easy.” She is upset now and stands from the chair, crosses the room. “What if we are wrong? What if we are confused about what this is?”

“I’m not confused,” I say, sitting up. “I know that I want you.”

Ndalo turns away from me, and I cannot explain it but I read her smile on her frame. And I am not confused. I want her there, where she stands with her back to me. Before, in the jungle deep with the grass beneath my thighs I wondered about the love of my mother’s purple hands, my goma’s knotted fingers at my feet and how I could reconcile that to this heat that she speaks of. This fire coiling beneath my gut.

“You think this is so easy,” she says again.

I realise now that it is the same love that I learned when she held me beneath the tree and our pfofu nests. It’s the same love that I must learn anew and rebuild with bone. I lay back down and wait for her to come to me.

Ndalo paces the room and eventually I feel the dip of her countenance at the edge of the bed, like water dampening the blankets and tugging them down. She doesn’t move for a long time and I lay there staring at the ceiling, I cannot go further than this. She must come to me.

When she eventually lays on my chest I cannot will myself to move. And then she crawls over me and lays her cheek on my cheek.

“You think this is so easy,” she whispers, her mouth open on my throat. And it is not that, that I think it is easy but that I know through my fear and my uncertainty that Ndalo is how I was meant to love. I open my mouth to hers.

By Shanice Ndlovu