The Trouble with Tamarind

Three gunshots were fired early this morning. They weren't gunshots so much as cannon shots. Heavy artillery fire followed by a sinister whirring sound, that of an old plane, and someone on a loudspeaker. The shots were loud and resounding and charged the air with an impending sense of doom for five minutes. How does this coincide with the dream I had in the early hours of this morning; where I was a train conductor on a shoddy looking train? Where my thumbs were blackened from the work, which was my only means of getting back home to South Africa? And when I got home, my mother, who is also my sister in Christ, or my sister who reminded me of my mother, or no sister at all; just a friend who was very close, was making fun of how forever blackened my thumbs really were. In the icy freshness of my room, it took a while to muster the courage to go outside and see what was happening out there. Fortunately, the third world war hadn't come down yet.

Little things strengthen me. Little charming moments release a new bout of courage from my bone or my nervous system, or soul, or whatever it is that you might consider to be me. Yesterday it was the firebug. The bug flew around like it was the last ember of a dancing-ritual at the edge of the world. Here we are, at the frontier of civilization. There is very little which I know or understand. And yet here was this bug with its softly-glowing abdomen that recalled to me all of the magic of the world. It settled on my pair of swimming shorts and it had nothing to say to me. Then it was off. I tried to use my hand as a ceiling to stop it from climbing the air, but it was too late, and my hand was no more than the hand that tries to stop a rising bubble in turgid water.

And then of course there were the dreams. I don't correctly remember them, they're all a jumble of confusion, but on my train; on that train which I had come to call my own, I had been sleeping, and when I awoke I had not really returned to South Africa at all. I went over to the sink after setting my alarm to snooze,  and there I realized, before the artillery shots, before I had really woken up, that it was the tamarind that had given me such strange feelings and such strange dreams.