Biller Shed

By Rukudzo Onai

The woman behind the till is so tall
If she stands up she might swallow the lights.
A garbageman leans into an impulse basket
To steal a sideway glance at the name on her badge
But her tortoise-shell Hallmark diva glasses
Looking up from the checkout monitor
Start him off the scoop with a random energy attack.

Both her breasts, big as elephant ears
In the illegal structures of her OK Mart t-shirt,
Debate which twin saw the sun the first.
None of this helps matters for the man is very shy.
He looks hard for her name on the screen
While she slips into a customer’s groceries
A Watchtower magazine about green days
Before Adam and Eve ate a poison Valentine
In the garden of ambrosial delights.

Bad days are following him
The way success podcasts follow new cheese.
He has spent the better part of the year
With one foot in the eviction truck.
He has burnt through his last social credit,
Crashing floors and begging for change.
He must want to send it all to the devil
And be an anonymous stillbirth under the sun
But starvation diets knows his address
More than the dead know angel choirs.

In better harvests, he was a man to hold his floor
In the cash-and-carry rites of city passage.
These days harvest is garbage run on garbage run, Cartload on cartload of plastic refuse
Traded nightly for a lousy plate of rice
At the biller shed behind OK Mart.

Every day ends with a rough and rowdy queue
To exchange plastic garbage for rice.
A dead smell sits behind the supermarket,
Something of shadow relish, maybe,
For the lousy plate of plain and cold rice.
But taste means nothing to the garbagemen.
Battle scars from their biller shed queues
Are God’s handwriting on Cain’s forehead –
Equal-parts preservation and bare life.

Our man of the garbage trolley
Was driven from the countryside
With eight million other villagers
To make way for oxygen farms last year.
There were few lootings –
Obscene noises about drunken comrades
Who spit where the peasants eat.
But the politicians put paid to the matter
With water cannons and overnight abductions,
The usual return envelope, really.

Qatari oilmen were casually rolling caterpillars
To replace the villages with oxygen farms –
Carbon credits to give back to the climate –
When the lands minister at the tail end of News Hour
Announced the sale of half Zimbabwe’s land mass!

That green colony is newly home
To a special tree species called the mailflower.
You may have heard about mailflowers
Hoarding oxygen instead of giving it off
In the fashion of regular plants.
Thanks to the doomsday shrub,
Zimbabwe will be the last oxygen resort
For billionaire who’s whos
When earth finally winds down
To inhospitable centigrades.

The year was 2018.
The garbageman was dreaming on his feet –
Green days in the village rain –
From the overgrown privacy of the deserted
Parktown cottage he was crashing lately,
All along the purple jacaranda trees
Whose branches lock overhead 4th Ave –
Green days before the demolitions
Drove the peasants into hungry Harare,
And life kept up with the damned and the despised
Between black jokes and fertilizer-distorted ganja.

He was repenting to the beat of thunder,
For thunder claps are the church bells of heaven.
He was ready to leave in a ball of lightning
His lean and lonesome corner in the world.
He wanted to rest in heaven
Seeing as hell had finally worn him down.
But thunder only claps
When lightning has already missed you.

No; he could never have foreseen
A woman umbrella-walking him
Home to his deserted cottage
In the illegal structures of her OK Mart t-shirt.
But, there, she came to him in the rain,
Greeted him like her own reclusive cousin,
And burned a let’s-keep of the Harare skyline
Into his weather-beaten heart of a garbageman.

A year has since passed.
All of 2019, he hasn’t quite broken
The spell of bare life to spend a dollar
In her presence at the supermarket.
And yet he has never been without
Rain-blurred visions of tender time
Under her red-and-white OK Mart umbrella.

And now he makes a shy retreat from her till,
Unworthy of her Ini Edo glory.
He makes a show of taking a second look
At his shopping list of crumbled yellow paper
But he must walk back to rehearse
His long alibi for her number, really,
Before matters proceed out of turn
At the umbrella woman’s checkout counter.

He wants to look her up on Instagram
But how does he get around
The small matter of not knowing her name?
There is nothing for it but to ask the web chat.
He is all that spiked for this new opening
But it’s just like holy-holy AI
To swear him off reading anything personal
Into a shop assistant’s smile.

A till operator is paid to be nice to everyone –
The finicky chatbot puts it to him –
Especially to lowlifes who see her as a refuge
For their want in life, hungry days
And loneliness in the city blah blah!

These days every chatbot
Really thinks it’s Pope Francis, no?
One day, maybe, the prefects of virtue
Will even begin to suspect
What ambrosial breadcrumbs
The till operator fed him under the umbrella
With a smile that could only have been for him.

He is sneaking back to her till
Between water and glassware shelves,
If he must only wash his heart
For visions of her Ini Edo glory.
But the dark and mooshy woman finds him out.
And her mothering smile,
Shining through uneven coffee teeth
And big eyes under her tortoise-shell glasses
Unscatters him back to the business at hand.

“Is this all for you?” she asks
As she feeds his groceries,
All of coarse salt and soya chunks,
Into the point-of-sale machine.

“Yes! How is work today?
This place is really a dream.”

“A dream?” she is less convinced.
“If you mean it like a girl is trapped
Inside too many customers’ dreams.
You know men who randomly throw names
From food shelves at a shop assistant.”

Every day, her queues are the longest.
Customers get gimmicky
To stretch their time at her counter
For she is very beautiful.
Wheelchasing stories with the left hand.
Business cards casually signed
On a random Benjamin with the right hand.

If this is her show, she is a tad removed
Like weeping angel looking down
The cornerstones of a God-forsaken city
Just to shake off the dust of her wings.
She tells on these narrow customers
To the urban peasant whose dirty sack,
At least, suggests someone different.

For her part, a faux-girly-girl
Amy Winehouse tone gives indifferent,
Some kind of frozen attitude
To keep things of the heart
From going bad in a place like this.
But the peasant might be convinced
The woman is flexing pretty privilege at his expense.
He is that man who is convinced
People speak at him rather than speaking to him.

The woman’s customers migrate to other tills,
Their silent treatment for a shop assistant
Who makes free with characters from the biller shed. Just as well, our gentleman of the garbage trolley
Wishes he had left his sack outside
But knows leaving it outside
In he reach of other plastic scavengers,
Would have certainly cost him
Tonight’s ticket to the biller shed.

Have you ever walked the night
Halfway-to-black on your last kombucha,
Only for someone to jump you
Like a bomb out of the blue with bloody intent?
You turn around with a hard shiver,
Seeing as too many lumberjacks are only happy
To mistake a head for a cabbage after-9.

But you find nobody out here,
Only your mind fabulating on situations,
Which may even be a good thing,
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time,
And the death jolt hadn’t already shaken you sober,
And your last dollar wasn’t already lining
Some dirty bar safe at Parktown Shops.

When the biller shed quota can’t be met,
And sleep won’t be gamed
Off a cup of fertilizer-distorted water,
The peasant sniffs black secrets
Of the streets for a primal spike
But only comes home to find his hunger
Doubled from adrenaline withdrawal.
Deflation, when you can no longer
Go lower for a cheap high
Grosses out the unnameable in all of us.

“Hmm, does that sound right?”
The peasant protests convenience-shop reduction
Of our lady’s divinity to food porn.
“I guess that’s why you got to
Beat them around with church magazines.
I couldn’t help but notice.
You must be Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“My old man is a pastor,”
The till operator says.
“At his age, memory is no longer
One of his stronger areas.
Both my parents haven’t been well lately.
So now, the literature evangelism thing
Has fallen squarely into my hands.”

“Well, well, if it isn’t the famous
Herbert Armstrong’s Plain Truth magazine!
I had really mistaken it for Watchtower,”
The peasant lights up with high-school nostalgia,
Looking at a copy on the till,
But immediately sours, as if on prompt.

“Say, that apartheid church is still
Teaching about colonial blessings in this country?”
The undercover evangelist, though,
Charms him to patience
With a faux-girly-girl Brother Stalin salute.

“Truthfully, more like Brother Swaggart,”
He politely declines trench cred.
“I didn’t go far with school
But I read enough church magazines
To be some kind of village preacher.”
Back issues dumped by the truckload
Month after month until classroom libraries
Had to be arranged church by church.

“I was more Rhapsody of Realities myself,”
Says the till operator, lighting up in turn
With the shine of green days by the river.
Plain Truth littered every corner of her childhood
And never registered as a separate fact
The way camels in the sand never registered
For all that familiar writers of the Koran.

Her headmaster policed book donations.
Some halfway-to-decent Shona novelist,
He felt a tad unsure about church magazines
And all that jazz about the laws of success
Taking over Zimbabwean libraries.
At least that’s how she had explained things
To her old man, the good village pastor,
Each time she brought back his book donations.

The missionaries gave us
The Old Storytellers Department
To feel the roots of their writing system –
Recalled the pastor without offense each time –
They never felt we should forget our culture;
Only, that we should misremember in print.

Memory is a mountain
Without a path to ancestor caves
So we bomb with it with totem graffiti –
That’s how the good village pastor
Saw the likes of the headmaster-novelist,
Graffiti-bombers mapping grey on grey
A form of life that was no longer available.

The fate of totems is to be
Bound to city coordinates –
Princess Mononoke shall herd
All her animals back to Iron Town,
Not as gods but as plastic avatars,
Copper bangles and missionary alphabets. –
Even if the trees come back,
The forest is no longer his.
The great forest spirit is now dead –
Memory’s eternal sunshine, lived on paper
As it disappears forever.

“The till is for buying and leaving,”
Says a bush lawyer from the trenches.
“You’ll propose our girlfriends there!”

“Don’t flirt, Baldy!”
The till operator snaps back.
“If I sat on you once,
Do you think you would ever wake up again?”

“At least one member won’t sleep again.
You say I drive your mhene away
But that’s just your cougar mouth, hehehe!”
And now boxer-walks with a little dance,
Around our gentleman of the trolley.

“Come here, wife-snatcher!
Now you don’t want to get into it, huh?
You see a wild bird perching on this till
And suppose she is for the likes of you
Church brothers who couldn’t tell
Which direction men climb their women.
Leave her to Baroka; nobody gets hurt.
Don’t say nobody warned you
About watching the pot that’ll defeather you.
Every cuckoo has its day, my boy,”
He says, adjusting yellow court papers
And letting others fly from his armpit
Onto the checkout counter for effect.

“Chineke! You not only feel
Like a lawyer in your head;
You must also feel like Peter Edochie?”
The till operator looks him up and down
And suddenly shouts into the supermarket:
“Somebody come and take away
This rusty old pipe for me woh!”

All this, of course, piles on
The feeling of slipping out of your shoes
For our church brother and garbageman.
Mellowing into her faux-girly-girl voice,
The umbrella woman stretches a hand up
To extend her seated height:
“Don’t mind him, Brother Swaggart!
You’re looking at two meters of wife material.”
“Just not yours, rusty Baroka!”
She snaps at the bush lawyer.

“The order, please!” the old boy sours,
Scarcely holding his floor
In this new battle of wits.

“Pwoda, pwoda,
Watch it, boy!” the bush lawyer barks.
“You sneak in here
Smelling like a dead man
And now you order my wife around?”

When he walks the rain,
Lifting the veil of the clouds
In the anonymity of the storm,
The man of the mountains
Is a farmer not a garbageman.
In the supermarket, though,
His grassy smile is vanishing
From the vacuum of his wishful bride’s eyes
As she shouts for a colleague to void his transaction.

Between his only dollar
And smoking-blue hunger,
Between the salt and the chunks
He may only choose but one item.