by Lavie Tidhar

This is how it ends: with a sky brittle like purple-coloured glass, with the death of the kid Morano, on a lonely beach at the edge of a dark continent.

It begins… it begins with the Zog.

I was sitting on the beach in Clifton watching the penguins. What they were doing on a tropical beach I have no idea, but there they were, amidst the almost-naked rich burghers of Cape Town.

The sun was approaching the waterline, casting reds and purples across the sky and the sea. It was peaceful.

Then, snow began to softly fall. Purple tears came from the skies, fell on the sand, in the water, on people’s towels; on people. When they touched the ground they seemed to move of their own accord, stretching and bending until they merged together into people-sized, purple blobs.

I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they were trouble and I needed none of that.

I got out of the way.

I got on my bike and revved it up and was gone along the narrow rockface road towards Hout Bay.

#

Morano threw stones into the sea; where they hit foam rose. He was the only one on the beach. On the other side was a Zog.

The current joke amongst the South African intelligentsia was that the Zog would have fucked up Apartheid: blue was clearly not an appropriate colour. Morano, who was half-Portuguese and half-Zulu, neither knew nor cared, and he approached the Zog and stood before it.

The Zog was flowering: small blue branches spread out from its body, bearing small, delicate fruit, their colours fading across the spectrum.

Morano reached a hand and took one of the fruits. There was no one to tell him he shouldn’t, anyway.

Morano put the fruit in his mouth and chewed it.

#

The whole world was affected. It was an invasion, pure and simple: non-violent, non-reversible: one day the world was ours, the next it was shared by the Zog, and there was nothing you could do. I watched all the news reports from my hotel room in Hout Bay, overlooking the quay and that magnificent bay. Hout Bay’s pretend-republic, previously a harmless tourist attraction, became in effect a real republic a week after the invasion: the rest of South Africa, the rest of the Cape – hell, the rest of the world, really – was closed off.

They were going to somehow get rid of the Zog – though how do you kill off an amorphous blob of something that keeps coming together again is beyond me – but they were sidetracked when Morano came.

Morano came from the sea: he walked. His eyes were burnt amber, and his cropped thick hair was the colours of the rainbow.

He took over the quay and turned it into a giant warehouse; he found musicians (and where in the Cape can you not find a musician?) and they played the music only Morano’s people could hear, the ethereal, doomed beats of the Zog, that echoed and pounded against the sea and the earth, through day and night, sunrise and sunset.

And on the highest platform Morano stood, his eyes burning in the flashing pounding bursts of light, and his hand a continuous blur as it moved in an arc, spreading the dancers below with small, purple blobs.

And they wanted me to kill him.

#

This is what Morano saw:

The earth was glassy disc; he could see the red veins pulsing underneath the glass, tentacles slamming against the underground. Green and purple vegetation grew everywhere, and insects, large flying things with emeralds for eyes, flew between them, seeking giant yellow sunflowers that sucked in the sun.

At night, the moon in the sky was replaced with a large, misshapen yellow rock. And the song was everywhere: the movement of the flowers mixed with the pounding of the purple tentacles under the glass disc, with the humming of the insects.

He became rich.

#

There were three of them. A judge, a second-rate M-Net presenter, and a hotel magnate. Pretty impressive stuff.

I smoked and listened.

‘We will pay you,’ the judge said.

‘What with?’

‘Whatever currency you prefer,’ the M-Net presenter said smoothly.

‘What currency is good anymore?’

‘Oh for crying out loud, man!’ The hotel magnate, a cigar quivering. ‘Do it for humanity! Do it for community value! We’ll give you anything you want. Twenty million Rands.’

‘Why?’ I said.

They looked at each other. They didn’t like me using the w-word.

‘Why what?’ the judge said.

‘Why do you want him dead?’

‘The kid is a plague! He is a servant of the Zog!’

‘Fifty percent,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Fifty percent of the kid’s stash. You can keep the other half.’

‘What?’ the cigar, quivering.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘You’re racketeers. Hoodlums. Mafiosos. You want the kid’s business. Fine. That’s not my problem.’ And again, slower: ‘fifty percent.’

And there it was.

So I killed him.

#

This is what Morano saw at the moment of his death: the ghostly shape of a man, blowing through the thick vegetation toward him. He saw the bullet like a trail of red tears freeze-framing through the air. He heard it as a melody that encompassed and surpassed the song around him. The bullet connected with his head and Morano was transformed.

#

From the place of Morano’s death grew a Zog. As it grew, the earthly body of Morano disappeared and was absorbed into the purple mass. I just stood there.

It grew branches: the whole thing took seconds.

Nobody noticed. They were raving down below like it was the end of the world.

I couldn’t get away. I had to know. I dropped the gun to the floor and reached toward the Zog, and picked one of the small, delicate fruits. Then I left.

It was cold on the beach, and quiet. The sky was a brittle purple-coloured glass.

I figured I’d leave town for a while. Head into the wine farms around Stellenbosch or Paarl, or up along the Wild Coast, to George or Knysna. I threw the piece of Zog in my hand into the water and watched dark foam rise.

The Zog are here, and they are here to stay. Maybe it’s worth seeing the world the way a Zog does. I wouldn’t know. When it came to it, I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I just couldn’t face Morano, on the other side.

I rode my bike down the highway under the yellow, misshapen moon.

Purple snow began silently to fall.

More stories like this by topic: Characters of color, Israeli authors, Jewish authors, South Africa