Soul sucking whore by Leroy Mthulisi Ndlovu

It’s early Thursday morning and I feel like shit. There’s quite a din outside. The dogs are barking. My brother’s gone out to see what it is but I know it’s nothing. Dogs are strange animals. One dog knocks over a trash can and scares himself silly, so he starts barking at nothing and the dog next door thinks it’s a challenge and barks back. Two seconds later Ringo, and Popi, and Danger, and Saddam have all joined in the chorus. Dog-Mozart would be proud. I throw my blanket aside and promptly feel a shiver go down my spine. It’s been cold for a couple of days now. On each of those days the girl on the 3 – 6 am show on the radio declares that we will have partly cloudy skies with temperatures rising into the mid-thirties later in the day. On each of those days she’s lied. The floor is cold as ice. I need a cigarette. I need a hobby. Perhaps I should start breaking into people’s houses. I don’t sleep much these days. I’ve tried and tried but at most I’ll sleep an hour a night. My brother’s just come back into the house.
“Damn dogs!” he shouts.
I chuckle. That’s his way of telling me I was right. His bedroom door slams shut. I shuffle my feet in the dark until my right toe strikes one of my sandals. Sandals on, I get up and go to the toilet. I’d quit smoking. Four years clean. It’s amazing what a little sleep deprivation will do to you. Our toilet is a tiny two square meter room with a single large window. I swing the window wide open and light my cigarette. Tiny hillocks of flesh have broken out all over my arms. The air is very nippy; who cares? I need the nicotine more than I need the warmth.
I close my eyes as I blow smoke through the bars; smiling slightly as I remember the first poem I ever wrote. I must have been eight or nine; can’t remember. The title we had been given was “Smoking”.
I wrote about four stanzas. I remember how the first one started:
“Smoking! Smoking!
You are bad.
Smoking, Smoking
You make me sad!”
I chuckle again. I can’t remember the whole thing but somewhere in there I said something about killing and lungs and all the usual rhetoric. That was twenty years ago. I was an innocent kid with a bright future and years of mistakes ahead. Now I’m a skinny degenerate with an addiction to nicotine, and a shattered heart. Didn’t you guess already? There’s always a woman involved, even when we claim there isn’t. This particular woman happened four years ago. And I’d prefer not to talk about her; although when the question does arise, the phrase “soul-sucking-whore” promptly comes to mind.
The neighbours are singing. Sounds like another all night prayer. I really don’t understand Christians. For people whose religion is founded on love and peace they really are a belligerent and divided lot. If I told you that there are over forty thousand forms of Christianity in the world today you wouldn’t believe me. They are all over the place. Macedonian Catholics, Roman Catholics, Apostolic Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Utraquists, Adventists, Church of Norway, Ukrainian Lutheran; I could write a very fat novel just naming all the churches of the world. So you tell me, with all these different opinions flying around, who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t? Anyway, I’m just a writer; no one listens to us.
I throw the filter outside and linger a moment. I’m freezing now. The wind is howling in the trees outside, almost drowning out the singing from next door. I can hear a vague tune. Sounds like ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’. My soul sucking whore was a Christian. First time we met she asked me if I had accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour. I laughed and said maybe. Later I told my friend that I was going to shag a Jesus freak.
It seems like a dream when I think about it now. Life is funny that way isn’t it? Once a moment passes it loses all sense of reality. Like a dream about a dream. Even now I can’t help sighing deeply as I think about her.