An Ostrich-Horse With No Name: A Short Story

An Ostrich-Horse with No Name

The tumbleweeds blew in the late afternoon breeze, a small respite from the scorching desert sun. In 1879, in a world very much like ours, but just a little off-kilter, a young woman, barely more than a slip of a girl, rode into town on the back of an ostrich-horse.

The ostrich-horse had a gait like the waves of an ocean. The woman swayed up and down in time with the rocking of the animal as she rode it into the gates of Hel, a small town that was the edge of the world, the last bastion of the last frontier of the dying days of the wild west.

Her son held tightly to her as he slept. He was a frail-looking boy with a shock of curly black hair and a jagged scar that zig-zagged across his face.

The woman was tall, with skin the colour of dark copper, and short, closely cropped dark-brown hair. Her eyes were half-shut and as she led the animal into Hel, the gates parted like the red sea before her.

She sauntered up to an inn where a faceless man was holding a phoenix-hawk in his left hand and a broken longsword in the other.

He looked up with unseeing eyes as the woman remained on her ostrich-horse.

“What brings you to town, stranger?”

The woman gestured to the boy who was beginning to stir from his slumber.

“Got room for me and my boy?”

The faceless man cocked his head.

“Don’t hear no man with you. You sure you wanna be stopping around these parts, in these times?”

The woman waited a beat, then said evenly “don’t need a man, friend. I got everything I want. I ask you once again, got room for me and my boy?”

The faceless man whistled and what sounded like a laugh floated from him.

“Got room for you both, barely, but I hear trouble is a-coming to these parts, so y’all better get in quick.”

The boy was now fully awake. He disentangled himself from the woman and they both disembarked. The woman hitched the ostrich-horse to a pillar, took out a small bag of feed and left it for the animal.

She held the boy’s hand as he limped beside her. The faceless man led them into the inn through doors that flopped on their hinges and up a rickety set of stairs to their modest room.

The scorching desert sun was setting by the time the woman and the boy returned downstairs. The faceless man had set out a simple meal. Just before their first bite, the doors to the inn swung open and three men walked in.

            “We need rooms, innkeeper.”

The faceless man scurried over.

“I’m sorry”, he said obsequiously, “we have no rooms left.”

“Then make us some.”

The leader of the group, a tall man with flowing locks of blonde hair puffed out his chest.

“Your guests will have to leave.”

The woman gestured at the boy and he went upstairs.

The ringleader watched the boy leave and turned to the woman.

“I suggest you leave, girl,” he said with a hint of menace.

The faceless man bowed low before the ringleader.

“I am sorry, traveler, but she is my guest and I cannot turn her out. I swore the innkeeper’s oath. I follow the way, as my father did, and his father before him.”

The ringleader struck at the faceless man, but before his blow could land, the woman closed the distance between them and stopped his hand mid-strike.

“You have two choices, friend. You and your men move on, or me and you have a duel of the magicks.”

The ringleader laughed a deep booming laugh that radiated from a sunken place far beyond the boundaries of the known world.

“So, you know the dark arts? Well, if it’s a duel you want, if it’s your own demise you seek, then I shall give it to you.”

The ringleader materialized twin revolvers from the air.

“Choose your weapon and meet me outside.”

            “Your sword”, the woman said to the faceless man cowering in the corner.

The faceless man took his longsword and threw it at her. She caught it in one fluid motion.

“But it’s broken.”

“Don’t worry. I can fix this.”

She ran her hands across the length of the broken shaft, and it transformed into a pair of broadswords.

She held them almost reverently as she flowed through the doors of the inn where the ringleader was waiting for her, his twin revolvers twirling in his hands.

“Do you have your weapon?”

“I do.”

“You know the rules.”

The woman said nothing.

They stood with their backs to each other. The ringleader walked 20 paces, turned around and fired his twin revolvers. In a motion that scarcely seemed human, the woman sliced the bullets in two with her broadswords.

He emptied his chamber and the woman deflected each of the bullets with superhuman speed.

She stretched out her hand and the ringleader froze in place. He struggled at the invisible bonds holding him while the woman walked slowly towards him.

“I could kill you”, she said calmly, “but that is not my way. I curse you to walk this earth until you die a hero’s death.”

The ringleader smirked at her.

“Is that all you can do?”

“And I gift you immortality from all the weapons of man.”

He smirked again.

She paused a beat. “And all the weapons of the gods.”

As the true horror of the life that awaited him dawned on him, the ringleader’s sanity slowly slipped away, and he crumpled in a heap on the desert sand.

The woman turned to the faceless man who was now prostrate before her.

“Trouble follows us wherever we go. I should never have stopped here.”

She reached out and cradled his head in her hands and his features slowly began to reappear.

“A gift…for your hospitality.”

The woman returned to the inn where her son limped toward her, all their possessions in tow.

“Come, boy. We must be going.”

“Yes, mother.”

The woman loaded the ostrich-horse with their belongings. The desert sun had fully set, and with his now all-seeing eyes, the innkeeper watched the woman and the boy glide through the gates of Hel, into the unforgiving desert night.

THE END

We Were 12 Years in Africa: An Essay

On February 5, 2002, I stepped off a plane and into a new world. It was snowing. A cold wind blew white flakes that swirled around me as I barrelled forward into a dark winter night. The metaphor would become apparent in due time.

Thus ended 12 years in Africa.

Thus, began an odyssey 20 years and counting. Out in the wilderness trying to return to who I once was, to who I really am.

Along the way, I would learn the power of myths and the strength of illusions. I gained consciousness, the ability to see clearly in a world that insists on refusing to see. I gained the ability to scream at the void when all around you everyone stays silent. To see the world as it is, when everyone around you is dreaming. I lost home forever. It was a fair trade. 

I had the luxury of not being completely ignorant of Canada when I first entered. In the history books where I learned about my people. The freed slaves on my mother’s side and the proud resistance fighters on my father’s, I learned of a place. We spoke of it in hushed tones, the same way we spoke of Mississippi, South Carolina, the South. We spoke of Nova Scotia. A place where my ancestors who had escaped the bonds of slavery, who had faced slings and arrows so cruel, were so maligned that they thought to themselves, ‘anywhere else is better than this’. And so, they travelled to another shore, back to the motherland. They risked dying on the high seas, being buried in the oceans, like their forefather before them, because they knew death was better than bondage. That to die on your feet was preferable to living on your knees.

I was coming to a place where the first race riots in North America happened. A place with laws such as these:

• His Excellency in Council, in virtue of the provisions of Sub-section (c) of Section 38 of the Immigration Act, is pleased to Order and it is hereby Ordered as follows: For a period of one year from and after the date hereof the landing in Canada shall be and the same is prohibited of any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.

And so, I was under no illusion about where I was headed. The myth of Canada held no appeal for me. I knew the truth long before I found myself on Canada’s cold frozen shores. 

It was many years before I realized the great luxury, the true privilege I had of not being born in or into Canada. I had perspective. The kind that can only come from being entirely removed from the mythology of a place.

Every nation has its myths. Like fish swimming in an ocean, its inhabitants need it to survive while simultaneously never noticing it all. I was lucky to be raised separate and apart from the influence of these myths. 

I was Sierra Leonean. That was my identity; who I was, but in time I would embrace Blackness, that hazy thing, defined as much by what it is not as what it is.

I wore it like a protective cloak against the gauntlet of whiteness. I read Black Panther, learned of the black panthers. I learned to give dap and I learned how to navigate whiteness and Blackness. I learned that it was not a black and white world. It was a black and every other colour world. That we were truly alone, that there was no such thing as solidarity. We weren’t all in it together. The one thing all other groups had in common was that they hated and feared blackness. I would come to realize that whiteness was a thing that was separate from white people, that sometimes it ensnared even people who weren’t white. A racist world that did not necessarily require racist people. Subjugation and plunder hidden in a genteel glove, a gauntlet hiding its true identity, a siren song attracting sailors to their shipwrecked doom.

At first, I fought the futile fight. What folly. The reward for speaking the truth, for fighting against the box into which everyone wanted to trap you was isolation, scorn, disdain. No one wanted to be told that the waters in which they swam were hopelessly polluted, so I kept my thoughts and my knowledge of the truth to myself.

Day-to-day, it was easy enough to be non-threatening, say the right things and on a personal level, you could get yourself through, but as a way to live a life, it felt impossible, like trying to escape a maze that everyone was telling you was a straight and true road, a hidden gauntlet you had to walk through, an invisibility cloak that covered everyone but me or people like me.

In time, to survive this gauntlet, I forged a new identity out of the remnants of my old one. I had to. Along the way, I learned new things about myself and about the world I was in. That it was possible to resist, but only up to a point, the gauntlet. The invisible orb everyone but you held.

And so, now I live, a sort of half life. Surrounded by people and feeling a sense of aloneness. How could you live in this world surrounded by people like this and remain true to yourself? You create two identities, a smiling happy face, a mask, and your true face, introspective, clear-eyed, alone.

It’s possible to muddle along with no one the wiser. I can break bread with people here, go to their parties, work at their soul-crushing jobs, eat at their interminable brunches, but that all happens on the surface. To see me is to see an iceberg. A smiling facade on the surface and a clear-eyed truth seer underneath. To trust seems entirely out of my grasp. How can you trust someone who you don’t believe sees the same things you see? Who you don’t trust to do the right thing when the dread time comes? An impossibility.

Sadly, I have no faith in this world and how could I, populated as it is with people who have no faith in themselves, who refuse to see the world as it truly is. Happy as they are to surrender themselves wholly and without reservations to myths, to succumb in their minds and in their actions to illusions and then in acting on these illusions advance them even further. Thus, I remain here, out in the cold waiting to find my way back inside, but unsure how or even if it still possible. And all the while, still wearing the perfectly beautiful and ugly mask.