PUBLISH’D AFRIKA MAGAZINE FACEBOOK SHORT STORY COMPETITION – August 2023 Leg/ Bwalya S Kondwani

THEME: KNOCK YOURSELF OUT
TITLE: PAIN AND PENANCE
Written by Bwalya S Kondwani

Dalitso stood atop the tallest building at The University Teaching Hospital, soaked in the most violent storm Lusaka had seen in seasons. His tears blended into the rain like they weren’t even there. Poetic, isn’t it? For his tears to go unnoticed, just as his pain had gone for so long. They often called him troubled. All he ever wanted was to escape this hell, just that, escape, but how could he escape something within him? How could he ever escape himself?
He knew one thing for sure though – he could never find the forgiveness he was looking for, not here, not in this life. So if there really was a deity to grant him forgiveness beyond the sky, it would only take one more step to find it. So he took it.
As his body free fell from the roof, he got his last glimpse of lightning stretched across the dark night sky, the last beautiful thing he would ever see, accompanied by a harsh dissonance of thunder, which he took as God’s approval, heaven’s “welcome home”. Before the last rumble of thunder could be heard, everything went black for Dalitso, all the noise in his head was finally gone, and so was he.
***
It was Chimfwembe’s first night on duty as the hospital’s head of security. After being fired from his last job, he was vigilant, he wanted to make a good impression on this one.
The night had been peaceful so far, until the thunder broke through the noise of the rain, everything seemed to spiral into chaos from there. Chimfwembe was convinced it wasn’t just thunder he had heard, so he left his station and walked towards the entrance of the hospital to investigate, pulling himself through the strong winds of the storm. As he approached the gate, he heard a woman scream just outside the doors of the outpatient, so he put a tighter grip on his raincoat and ran towards her. He found her holding her mouth and staring at the body of a young man with his skull cracked open on the ground.
“Get inside madam,” said Chimfwembe, but the woman just stood there, her eyes locked on the lifeless body on the ground. “Madam” Chimfwembe said, as calmly as he could, “Please get inside and call a nurse for me, tell her to come with a stretcher and another security guard.” The woman left, hesitantly, she walked back into the OPD and about two minutes later a nurse and security guard came running through the doors with a stretcher.
“Mwelesa!” exclaimed the nurse, Chimfwembe and the other security guard carried the body on the stretcher, and took it straight to the morgue for an autopsy. The nurse called the pathologist on-call that night.
Dr. Chama was a pale, slim old man, he looked well over his retirement age, but he was good at his job and he didn’t seem like he had any life outside his work, so everybody just agreed never to ask, his age was between him and the human resources department. He strutted through the long hallway with the fervor of a man half his age. He found Chimfwembe standing at the entrance of the mortuary.
“Who are you?” asked Dr. Chama, in a raspy but high-pitched voice, while walking past him as though he hadn’t seen him.
“My name is Chimfwembe doc, I’m the new head of security.”
“You’re new?”
“Yes I am, doc.”
“Try not to vomit on the bodies or equipment.”
Dr. Chama spoke through the whole autopsy, recording every step as he did it. Chimfwembe could barely understand half of the things he said, it was mostly medical jargon, but he could grasp the basic idea of what he was doing. At some point the doc paused for a moment, stopped recording and called Chimfwembe to come closer.
“Where did you find this body?” he asked Chimfwembe.
“Just outside the left side of the OPD entrance.”
“Was he here as a patient?”
“Not according to the records, the name we found on his NRC was checked in as a visitor, but never checked out. I’m certain he jumped from the top of the building, I heard the sound of glass breaking, the thunder must have drowned out the sound of the impact, but I also found shards of glass scattered around the body.”
“Take me to wherever you found him,” said Dr. Chama. They hurried through the hallway, passed the OPD and made it outside to the sight of the accident.
Dr. Chama was quiet for a moment, and then whispered to himself, “That makes much more sense.”
“What do you mean doc?” asked Chimfwembe.
“Call the police.”
“The police? I thought he jumped.”
“Of course he jumped. What doesn’t make sense is that he died. Look up there, what do you see?”
Chimfwembe squinted to see what the doc was talking about, then he finally saw it. “A net?”
“Precisely,” said Dr. Chama. There were construction works being done to the building, and so, nets were installed as a safety precaution just in case one of the construction workers happened to fall. “If the boy simply jumped, he would have been caught by the net…”
“Doc,” Chimfwembe interrupted before he could finish, “I still don’t understand, if the boy had hit one of the windows on his way down, his body could have easily been propelled away from the trajectory of the net. Which would explain the broken glass and why he hit the ground.”
“You were a police officer before this, weren’t you?” asked Dr. Chama, “I’ve worked with many security guards here, most of them don’t even come in for the autopsy, much less care enough to come up with such a deduction.”
“I was a detective, until I was fired from duty for… misconduct.”
“That’s a shame, your deduction was almost right, except there are bullets in his head. This boy was shot, by a shot-gun to be specific. The bullets must have broken the glass, partly shattered the boy’s skull as he fell and the force propelled the body away from the net. The impact is not the only thing that the thunder had drowned out, the sound of the gunshot too. This boy would have survived this fall if it wasn’t for that gunshot. Which leaves two questions, how did someone sneak a shotgun into the hospital with you watching? And who was this person really aiming at?”
***
By midnight, the police had located the shattered window in order to find which room the gun had been shot from. The hospital was on lockdown, so that no one could either go in or out, but this was all unnecessary. When the detectives barged into the room they found an old couple holding hands on the bed, and a shotgun laid two steps away from the entrance of the room.
The man was Frederick Phiri, a mechanic, but before that he was an officer in the Zambia National Service, he was retired at a young age due to insubordination. Fred was a temperamental man, everybody knew that, he knew that.
The woman was Laura B. Phiri, Fred’s wife of 37 years now. Laura was a quiet and sheepish woman, she wasn’t one to argue, or even speak up. In a way she lived through Fred, he was always there to fill in the blanks. He said the things she couldn’t for herself, he stood up for her when she couldn’t, Fred was everything she couldn’t be, and having him in her life felt fulfilling.
Their marriage was far from faultless though, and for the past few years it had only gotten worse. Fred had started to drink more, he wasn’t as affectionate as he used to be. His protection did not feel like protection anymore, it felt more like imprisonment, he wouldn’t speak for her anymore, he now just barked orders, and she would fold into herself as she always did. Fred spent more time at the garage, Laura barely saw him.
They had a son, he was 22, but they never really saw him around. He was 18 when he left home and things were never really the same from then. He never spoke to his father, the last time they were in the same room they nearly killed each other. So Laura never told Fred that he’d come to see her from time to time, it would do no good. She felt alone, all the time.
Laura was in the hospital because of joint pains she had been having continuously, the doctors said they would keep her there for observation. It was nothing new, so Fred was in no panic, he just called her to tell her he would pick her up the next morning because he was too tired to sit with her all night.
There had been rumors of Laura cheating on him for months now, he never thought much of them, Fred knew she was far too scared, far too boring even to hold up an affair, so he just brushed them off. That night, a friend of his who worked at the hospital called him and told him that a strange young man had gone up to visit his wife and hadn’t come out for hours now. Furious, Fred took his gun, threw it in his truck and sped off to the hospital. He went straight to her room with the gun hidden in a bag. When he got to the room, he sprung it out, kicked open the door but only found his wife.
“Where is he?” he asked, in a low but angry tone.
“Fred, what are you talking about?” replied Laura, shaking from fear after seeing the gun in his hands.
“I said where is he, Larua!”
They went back and forth barking at each other, the anger in Fred’s chest kept building up, he felt like he was going to explode, and then finally, almost unaware of his own actions, he pulled the trigger.
The bullet flew passed his wife’s head, and straight through the window, shattering the glass. Laura’s screams, the sound of the gun and breaking glass, were all swallowed by loud thunder. The fear on Fred’s face was very vivid. He dropped the gun to the floor, walked over to his wife and hugged her, he held her tight. He kept spilling apologies like a mantra, there was nothing else he could think of saying except, “I’m sorry”.
Moments later, when the room had fallen silent again, the police barged in, Fred simply got on his knees, and put his hands behind his head. The tears could not stop rolling off of Laura’s wrinkling cheeks.
***
“Listen sir,” said detective Banda, as calmly as he could. All he needed was a confession. Fred had been cooperative thus far but none of what he said was conclusive enough. “You killed a man, whether you knew it or not, you did and that alone cannot go unpunished. On top of that, you are being charged with attempted murder of your wife.”
“I was not going to kill my wife!” barked back Fred, this was the first time he had raised his voice in this whole interaction.
“Oh, so you just brought the gun to play kankuluwale? In that case we should let you go.”
“The gun was meant for the man she was with, I already told you this, but I wasn’t going to kill him either. The gun was just to scare him. I am not a murderer.”
“There are easier ways to scare people than with a loaded shotgun. Don’t you think that was slightly excessive?”
“That’s the thing, that gun was not loaded, I haven’t loaded or used that gun in over 10 years. I knew that even if I accidentally pulled the trigger, nothing would happen. I would never intentionally put Laura’s life in danger.”
“There’s a boy in the morgue with a shattered skull. What you would or wouldn’t do doesn’t matter at this point, it’s what you did that does.”
A man walked into the interrogation and whispered something into Banda’s ears, detective Banda turned around to look at some papers in shock. He then turned back to face Fred.
“Mr. Phiri, are you currently aware of the whereabouts of your son?”
“Last I talked to him he said he was moving to Kafue, why?”
The detective glanced at the man standing beside him and exhaled heavily,
“The young man you shot, his name in Dalitso Phiri, aged 22. He came to the hospital to visit a woman in Room 33. Your wife’s room. He exited the room shortly before you arrived, but security did not see him leave the gate. Your wife says they had an argument and he just stormed out…”
Everything said after was drowned out by the ringing in Fred’s ears. The blood was flushed from his face, leaving him pale, he could not feel his fingers, and his mouth instantly went dry. He thought about Dalitso, his boy, his only child. He never hated him, he loved him so much, what he hated was how was becoming so much like him. That’s why he was so hard on him, he thought he could fix him before he was broken, but he only ended up breaking him. He killed his boy.
***
The sun made its way through the broken glass of the hospital room as it rose from the east face of the city, the light landed on Laura’s blanket, shining right on her tear stains. All that was going through her mind was that this would be the first of many sunrises her son would never get to see.
Chimfwembe stared at the blood stains on his hands. He picked up his raincoat and prepared himself to go home, awaiting that inevitable call from the human resources department.
Fred saw the sun through the glass widows in the back of a police car, tears running down his face. He knew Laura must have been watching the sun rise, she always loved to welcome the day. He wondered if she would ever forgive him.
***
A year later, the case had already been closed, Fred was serving 40 years of prison with hard labour, 39 now. Detective Banda was working on a robbery case, it was found that the culprits in this case were all linked to Dalitso Phiri. When investigated further, they found out that this gang had been conducting robberies for years now, and Dalitso was once part of them. Every time he’d go back home to visit, he borrowed his father’s gun and they would use it for the robberies. The last time he did that, he forgot to remove the bullets from the gun after the job, these were the very bullets that killed him.

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PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Magazine Facebook Short Story Competition is funded by the National Arts Council, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme 3