PUBLISH’D AFRIKA MAGAZINE FACEBOOK SHORT STORY COMPETITION – August 2023 Leg/ Kaluwe Haangala

THEME: KNOCK YOURSELF OUT
TITLE: THE LAST TRUMPET
Written by Kaluwe Haangala

“The Onyx TV Main News in detail. Reports reaching our newsroom, quite extraordinary in nature, are that people are resurrecting from their graves. Footage obtained shows healthy people and not zombies coming back to life! This has roused religious communities of the Christian persuasion in to quoting off scriptures to do with the sounding of the last trumpet, a Biblical call for the dead to rise…”
***
He hears the noises, the commotion reminiscent of the crowds he entertains. He stretched out to rid himself of his slumber, and the feeling that he had slept a really long time. To his shock, he was in his favourite suit! What the hell? Who even sleeps in a suit? He struggled to get up out of what seemed like a box. To his horror, it was a casket next to a grave. He stood up. The sight before him was as gory as it was intriguing. He looked down and the realisation hit him like a flood! He was surrounded by people as well dressed emerging from the ground. It soon dawned on him that this was a graveyard. He felt like he was having a bittersweet dream!
The last thing he remembered was being on a hospital bed. He had been sick for quite a while till a darkness enveloped him. Tuberculosis was what the hospital staff kept saying. The regimen of medicines would be what eventually took a toll on him. In the end, or towards the end as he corrected himself mentally, he was just tired. And for whatever reason, his letters to his wife to come and see him went unanswered, or so he was told by his bed minder relatives who he knew hated the woman he had loved so much.
Someone bumped into him and as he turned to dole out a few choice words, he laid eyes on a young woman with a confused look on her face. She mumbled an apology and was about to hoof away when she looked back at him, and her face lit up!
“Stevie Sieve!” she screamed.
He smiled sheepishly and looked around to realise no one was really paying attention. He looked back at her in time to realise she was leaping to hug him, literally.
“You haven’t aged a single bit!” she said. “My father had all of your vinyls, tapes and then later the CDs!” she added, to his shock.
“Haven’t aged a bit?” he rehashed, more in rhetorical wonder while looking down at his hands, then back at her.
“You haven’t aged! Look, you are maybe a little disoriented, I know I am freaking out. But we have just come back from the dead, like everyone you see here…” and she mumbled on as his mind zoned out as it used to when he needed to think.
Back from the dead. That hung in the air for what seemed like ages. He looked around him and saw all graves had somehow been unearthed, plaques and tombstones strewn all over the place. He looked at a tombstone lying at his feet:
Agabeth Tembo
Born 12 December 1992
Died 13 March 2021.
He looked at the plaque again. The shock took a whole new level when his mind told him the last date he remembered was 14th August 1988!
“What year is this?” he asked the young woman.
“It’s 2023, Bro,” answered a young man clad in the strangest garb he would yet see, with chains, studs on his ears and nose, and jeans dangling below his buttocks as he walked past.
Musonda, or Stevie Sieve as he had been called back then, realised that for whatever reason, after having died in 1988, had emerged from the grave 35 years later. Old Leopards Hill Cemetery was the immediate information he gathered about where he was. The last place he remembered being at was the University Teaching Hospital.
“What next?” he said more to himself than to anyone in particular, and the young woman started her mumbling thing again. All he could think about was the wife and daughter he had left behind. He was shown to the main road and he was immediately struck by the amount of traffic, the variety of cars. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a shortage of transport to the hospital in all the ensuing commotion. On the ride over, everything looked big, strange, weird. Nothing seemed at all the way he recalled, and it was all so overwhelming. He felt a heaviness, a darkness pass before his eyes. He fainted.
When he came to, he was lying in what he immediately surmised was a hospital bed. It was a far cry from what he knew, and everything looked even strange to him. The only thing that was familiar, was that hospital stench prevalent in almost every government hospital he had been to, an overwhelming smell this time around that instantly gave him severe nausea. He vomited, shocked that he even had something to vomit. A nurse came to his bed side and asked him a few questions. To his utter frustration, she didn’t even know who Stevie Sieve is and when he guessed her age, he knew she couldn’t possibly know him. He had no ID on him and amidst the chaos of all the people disgorged from the graveyards dotting the hospital campus, he was told he could leave as all his vitals were fine. He walked outside. The sprawling streets and the sheer number of people had him stumped all over again. As luck would have it, someone did recognise him.
“Stevie Sieve! Comrade, how nice to see you again!” and the stranger drowned him in a hug.
He mumbled his hellos and looked at the old man who had a vaguely familiar look.
“It’s me, Moffat the Slim! Come on man! You gotta remember me!” beamed the old man.
It all came back flooding to him. The year they had first met was 1968. His first day at the University of Zambia. The first friend he made had been a young man who trashed him about being the only 18-year-old to enter University at the time, Moffat Banda. They had similar interests and soon enough, they were a constant in a local band that would propel Musonda into the world of music, performances, money and of course, the trappings of that life. In the ensuing time, he met his wife to be, a medical student that Moffat would later tutor.
“Moffat!? What the hell happened to you!?”
“Well, young man,” he said with a chuckle, “while you were out there playing dead, some of us laboured on and lived. As you can tell, I am 79 now. And had you used your ears more than your pants back then, you’d be turning 74 in a few months.”
They embraced again and were soon chattering away because Musonda had a billion questions. Foremost of those was: “Where can I find Lutanda?”
Moffat realised his friend had taken in too much change in so short a space of time and there was yet more he had to take in. Instead of answering, he suggested taking his friend home to have some rest, leading him into the carpark and into what he indicated was his car. Musonda made a quip about the car, but rest was the last thing on his mind. Thirty-five years lying dormant and seemingly healed of all that had ailed him before death meant he was rearing to go.
“Where is my wife?” he asked again, sternly this time and as per past habits, with a clenched fist. When he saw the look on Moffat’s face, he looked down at his hand and apologised quickly.
The conversation would have continued till there was a bleep on the radio in the car signaling a newsflash. That a few people had spotted and identified Stevie Sieve at the hospital, was the news filtering through.
“You are still well known my brother. Soon people will start looking for you,” said Moffat. Just then, there was the sound of a ringing phone. It all seemed even stranger to Stevie how advanced things were, like a phone without wires!
“Hello.”
“Honey, where are you? Musonda has been seen alive,” said the excited voice.
“Yes love. And you will not believe I am in the car with him right now. We’ll see you soon.”
He cut the line. Musonda turned to look at his friend curiously.
Moffat could feel the look on him that Stevie was giving him. He knew he had a mine field to navigate around given the current circumstances. He had an ear on the ground, in a manner of speaking. It was for that reason that he had orchestrated a chance meeting with Musonda, something that would seem completely random. He was retired, but his reputation meant he was called in regularly for consultancy work. The moment he confirmed with the hospital that corpses were coming back to life in the morgue, his instincts immediately flew to his long dead friend. As luck would have it, Musonda made a beeline for the only place he thought he could find someone he knew from back then, the doctor friend who frequently visited him at his time of death. He cleared his throat. He had to get this off his chest, get ahead of it before things came to a head.
“Musonda, I married your ex-wife some years after you died.”
“What?”
“Look, you had been dead for a few years and the first thing that happened is that your relatives completely neglected your wife and daughter. Not that she wasn’t doing well for herself but with your death came an unprecedented interest in your music. In all of that, your wife and daughter were just not counted in. One thing led to the other and by the time we got to be together, my own wife had been dead for over a year.”
Musonda stared at him, a rage building in him that he knew would explode.
“Brother, let me explain. There is a lot I have done in my life for which there is absolutely no justification. I have no excuses to offer you, just the truth. We have been friends for so long, and all this while, I have done my best to be the big brother, the guiding light, the pillar, and I know you see me as such. You know how I was back in university, never really settled for anyone, yet always looking out for you, telling you never to hurt her but you were always stepping out on her, incessantly too. I became her shoulder to lean on, the one she spoke to about the things she feared most about you, the girls, the booze, how reckless you were with money. In my wisdom, I figured that if you got married, maybe you would settle down, do something different with your Economics degree and admit brother, there was no shortage of takers for your craft as you know well that you were among the best students. You could articulate the subject well. But you opted for the easy life – on the road every Wednesday, take in the sights, sounds and skirts of your destination. Meanwhile, I would be back here nursing the wounds caused by the women who would call your home and your wife would pick those calls. And she’d come crying to me. It was all so much work, man!”
He thought back to that one particular day. He had just come back from the hospital to find her sitting on his verandah.
“He has done it yet again”, she complained.
Normally, the conversation would pretty much go the same way; he being conciliatory and sticking unwaveringly in the middle, but show some semblance of leaning towards her side so she would not leave her husband, his friend. But somehow, her need for solace seemed to translate differently in his head this time around. Animal instinct took over, so to speak, and he broached a divide he had vowed never to – sleep with his friend’s wife. They both regretted it instantly and somehow, that built a chasm between them. For Moffat though, that led to his spiraling and despite the fact that he remained a ‘good friend’, he despised Musonda immensely! He kept the charade for only as long as his friend and his own wife were still alive.
“Stop the car!” Musonda screamed.
***
Moffat woke up from his slumber screaming. This was a very disturbingly wicked dream, another in a series of nightmares about his long dead friend. Why he kept dreaming he had married the widow blew past him, like a language whose words he didn’t understand. He sat up and looked over to his wife. She had horror written on her face as she stared first at him, and then at the radio, mouth agape.
“Reports reaching our newsroom, quite extraordinary in nature, are that people are resurrecting from their graves…”

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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