How is it that one can wake up and discover that you are sharing your bed with your enemy? Sarah Gaden felt soft rays of sunlight stroke her pixie-like cheeks as she lay in her bed.Next to Sarah lay a great big breathing figure. She didn’t look at it, or even think of it. Sarah had become tired of thinking, and of feeling. Finally, she had collapsed into the mould that was waiting for her. Now she was, basically, a doll. She was trapped in her own body, but she didn’t want to think about that. The usual familiar admiring glances from strangers no longer irritated or escaped her mind. She embraced them. They had become her greatest pride at last. Of course, The Thing didn’t approve strongly, but Sarah had been adamant…that she would dress as sexily as she wanted to. It is a form of art, she told the Thing. It had then narrowed its eyes at her suspiciously as she said this until she moved closer to its neck, and made its eyes go misty with desire. It had a very powerful figure; it was tall and tanned. That was probably the only aspect that made it attrative to her. It got that tan from no sport other than horse-riding. She had seen endless amounts of pictures of The Thing sitting, grinningly, on spotted horses. Its height made it so easy to handle them. Sarah never liked horses. She now disliked them more than ever. Thoughts were beginning to enter her mind, so she decided to get up and make coffee. No sooner had she begun to wrap her gown around herself when her partner’s eyes also found the daylight. It whispered to her to go back to bed. She declined. It grinned and cracked a joke or two. Brilliant jokes. Its wits were unrivaled. Curse those wits. There should be a special section in hell reserved for intelligent demons. As much as that creature could inspire love, it could generate hatred. She was sure its wicked grin wouldn’t leave its lips during the entire day. She knew, unfortunately, that the Thing could love no other being but her. In a way it made her feel good, special. She still remembers the first day that she saw it, the day that she first understood what evil is. Or, perhaps, what desire can become. How far it can remove us from ourselves. The Thing had hunted her, like an animal. It was sort of kinky, for about five minutes. Then it became a puzzle, and also sort of a nightmare. She tried to get people to help her, to understand, but no one did. Everyone was too stupid. The Thing knew this. Eventually it showed her this, too. These were the words that were never spoken but only too harshly understood: "You see that? That’s our society. We are alone little one, you and I, we are alone."It’s hatred for humanity had grown so vast, so scathing, because of its mental superiority. In me, it had found a mate. In it, I had found understanding of some sort. As I brought it its morning coffee, I saw it bending over a book. What I never saw was its lean figure lying on the Karoo desert’s surface.I didn’t see the horse running away, far away over the hills, leaving clouds of dust but taking its sanity with it. Jingles came back, eventually, and nudged its owner, probably for water. Concussions cannot identify themselves, and so the thing had bounced up again and concerned itself about the health of Jingles, and never again about anyone else.What I did see, as I looked at the Thing, was a man emerging from the layers and layers of pretense of that powerful woman’s body, only to be squashed again by my knowledge that Man lies not in body nor mind, but heart.
x x x
Sarah died of a morphine overdose at the age of 23, two months before winning the BH Bevelyn prize for literature.
The Thing died less than a year after it had begun the affair with Sarah, after its husband had found about about the affair and shot her.
Jingles outlived them all, and still feeds on the bushes of the Karoo
The community of Dovertin continues to flourish from ignorance, but some citizens eventually began to organise a society for gay rights within the community.
