Womb City, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Sunday, August 2
05:00 /// Pure
Monday, August 10
08:00 /// The Black Womb
Wednesday, September 2
16:45 /// An Ocean of Shadows
Friday, September 4
09:15 /// Scream of a Siren
Saturday, September 5
12:55 /// Shipwrecked from Reality
15:40 /// The Wiretapped Ones
20:10 /// Scarred Region of Emotions
Monday, October 5
06:30 /// My Eyes
Thursday, October 8
10:40 /// Misogynistic Principles
Friday, October 9
04:40 /// Bloody Hell
19:40 /// God, I’m So High
Saturday, October 10
01:34 /// A Terrible Mother, a Slut, and a Murderer
04:44 /// The Devil’s Tongue
10:44 /// Iceberg of a Secret
11:11 /// My Husband’s Gun
12:44 /// Guilt Is a Guillotine
13:18 /// Eclipse Our Sin
13:53 /// Feet of Time
14:43 /// Bed of Bone
15:17 /// Death’s Abyss
16:29 /// Stalker’s Heaven
17:39 /// These Dark Thoughts
17:50 /// A Monsoon of Screams
18:23 /// Sharp Splint of Bone
18:33 /// The Dark Mouth
18:48 /// Trick a Devil
19:12 /// The Long Haul
19:22 /// Comatose Strangers
19:38 /// White as Clean Bone
19:49 /// A Museum of People
20:04 /// An Honor
20:54 /// Three Deaths
21:21 /// A Rabbit Hole of Terror
21:39 /// This Horrid Reality
22:25 /// Truth Bomb
22:53 /// Episode One
23:29 /// Episode Two
23:48 /// Episode Three
Sunday, October 11
00:02 /// What Kind of Mother Are You?
00:12 /// Murder, Godsent
00:26 /// Monster’s Pawn
00:37 /// Run
00:52 /// The Rope of Time
01:17 /// Sin-Fever
01:34 /// I Am Xem
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Content notice: Womb City contains depictions of blood, body horror, car accidents, child death, death, death of parent, domestic abuse, drug use, emotional abuse, gaslighting, gore, grief, infertility, infidelity, kidnapping, miscarriage, misogyny, murder, physical abuse, pregnancy, rape, sexism, sexual violence, and violence.
EREWHON BOOKS are published by:
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2024 by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Excerpts on p. vii © Nawal El Saadawi, 1975, 2015, Woman at Point Zero, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Portions of this book were adapted from the following works: “Behind Our Irises” (Africanfuturism: An Anthology, Brittle Paper, 2020); “Eclipse Our Sins” (Clarkesworld, Issue 159); “Murders Fell From Our Wombs” (Apex, Issue 107); “Dreamports” (Apex, Issue 128)
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-64566-056-9 (hardcover)
First Erewhon hardcover printing: February 2024
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
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Electronic edition: ISBN 978-1-64566-076-7
Edited by Sarah T. Guan
Cover art by Colin Verdi
Cover design by Samira Iravani
Interior design by Leah Marsh
He said to the police, “Don’t let her go. She’s a criminal, a killer.”
And they asked me, “Is what he says true?”
“I am a killer, but I’ve committed no crime. Like you, I kill only criminals.”
“But he is a prince, and a hero. He’s not a criminal.”
“For me the feats of kings and princes are no more than crimes, for I do not see things the way you do.”
“You are a criminal,” they said, “and your mother is a criminal.”
“My mother was not a criminal. No woman can be a criminal. To be a criminal one must be a man.”
“Now look here, what is this that you are saying?”
“I am saying that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps, the lawyers, the doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions.”
They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
“I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.”
—Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi
For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them. And truth is like death in that it kills. When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife. That is why they are afraid and in a hurry to execute me. They do not fear my knife. It is my truth which frightens them. This fearful truth gives me great strength. It protects me from fearing death, or life, or hunger, or nakedness, or destruction. It is this fearful truth which prevents me from fearing the brutality of rulers and policemen.
—Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi
Sunday,
August 2
05:00 /// Pure
In our city, everyone lives forever. But murder hangs in the air like mist.
The morning sun is a still-sparkling eye, blinking through our bedroom shutters when my husband shrugs me awake. “It’s time,” he whispers.
I toss and turn. Sleep slips, evades me. Eyes closed, the skin of my eyelids is tinged pink as the probing, UV-forensic sunrays seep into the darkest part of my mind, the part that wakes up with me every morning. Barren. Lonely. Desperate. I rub the heels of my palms into my eyes.
“Babe.” Elifasi’s lips nibble my earlobe.
I sit up as my microchip vibrates, sending quivers down my spine. It’s my daily reminder for my morning assessment. I already feel so incarcerated in my own bed that the government-imposed reminder makes me grit my teeth.
“I don’t understand why you always feel nervous about this daily routine,” he says, fluffing the pillow. “You always pass.”
“You don’t understand what it feels like to lose a body,” I bite back. “What if I had a child?”
Child. That grenade of a word in our marriage lands in his heart, blasting out pieces of sadness like shrapnel. The hurt in his eyes is too heavy to hold. But what if I bump into them at the market, and I can’t tell that I gave birth to them in my previous life? I do not say these things aloud.
His hand detaches from my face. The cold air fills his place, gripping me. The vast amount of space between us keeps us emotionally light-years apart. My fingers clasp his cotton shirt at the small of his back, where I often draw circles to comfort him, but he shrugs me off. “I’m sorry.” The wet whisper clings to my lips. “It’s just . . . I wish the Body Hope Facility had given me a body that was at least fertile, given the high premiums I pay.”
“We,” he says.
“What?”
“We pay, not I pay.”
I make more money than him, and he says I keep rubbing it in his face, and he’s wrongfully accusing me of doing so. I wish he would see past that because it makes it difficult to speak to him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s a waste of time to focus on the past,” he says. “The only thing we can change is our future.”
Sirens pierce through the silence in our bedroom. He stands, the bedcovers crinkling. His fingers tease open the shutters as he peers at our garden down below. “Looks like it’s about to rain.” The city sirens are hollow ghosts, fingering the city along the A1 highway, pulsing through our suburb, Tsholofelo East, toward a culprit.
Murder hangs in the air. The cold clings to my skin. Every Sunday at the cusp of dusk, each police tower in every district coughs up into the skies a puff of human-corpse-detecting chemicals. The rains will come, and the chemicals will detect homicide in our urban landscape. Through the sliver of window to the horizon, far out, is a scenic view of soft
“It must be the perpetrator they brought in last night,” Elifasi says. “He wouldn’t talk. Previous forensic assessments failed to predict his criminal intent. But the sun never fails us.” Its rays catalyze the chemicals into truth-seeking action. He directs this statement at me. The guilt, the anger bridling beneath all that muscle, those still-murky deep-set dark eyes. A ray of light knives its way across his light-brown skin, climbing up his sharp nose. His hand jerks; the wooden shutters jolt and flick open. The sun glares into my face. Guilty, it seems to say.
“Even if the sun fails us,” he says, “we can always rely on the Murder Trials to protect us.”
I tremble. The Murder Trials, heavily shrouded in secrecy. They’re a backup plan for our forensic evaluations and allegedly use horrid practices to catch criminals who go undetected by technology—practices I pray I never discover. They especially scrutinize microchipped people, which means a high majority of women, since female bodies are microchipped more often than male. But I’ve no idea what they do to people like us or why they target us. How can I avoid what I don’t understand?
The Murder Trials are based near Matsieng, a ritualistic site made holy by the surrounding folklore-riddled waterholes, where some crazy people drink its miracle water to solve financial problems, infertility, erectile dysfunction . . . I’m no atheist, but I can’t believe a whole-ass government would entrust our safety to supernatural gimmicks. How could crevices in the ground aid them in unearthing criminals? Yet even I can’t deny it’s worked so far, reducing crime over the centuries.
Elifasi pulls me to my feet. “Let’s get this over with,” he says. I lean in to give him a morning kiss, but he evades me.
“Sit.” He presses me primly against the armless cushioned chair. He walks behind me, footfalls softened by our lush bedroom carpet. Crouches by the bed.
“It’s chilly in here,” I say, bare-armed, bare-legged, in a light velvet camisole and pajama shorts, trimmed with satin.
His hands brush my shoulders, my neck, holding me stiffly. “Shit.”
“What?” I ask.
He fingers the Plasma hanging above our dresser. “Ran out of memory. It’s not automatically connecting to your microchip. Why can’t it find you? Told you we should’ve gone with a different brand.”
“Just plug the cable in,” I say.
He yanks an audio-video interface cable from the dresser, wraps it around my neck. “Been naughty or nice?” He chuckles and lets it fall loosely around my shoulders.
“Both,” I add for the fun of it.
Reality strikes me. I freeze, unable to move, as a cold draft of fear settles in my lungs, and I realize with rising panic that I will never escape this invasive ritual.
His thumb presses against my lip. “You taste like gunpowder,” I whisper.
He smiles, inserts the stiff, cold, serpentine cable into a slim port sitting below the AI microchip that’s fitted in the back of my neck. He inserts it the same way he uses his penis: mechanically, thoughtlessly. I jerk from the shock of the cable’s cold, abrupt slurping of my memories straight into our Plasma’s storage facility. Every morning, I have an AI assessment where my husband peruses my memory files. “That’s why I married you—to keep you in line,” he’d shoot off, laughing at his own joke.
The cable connects to the Plasma and transmits data recorded by my eyes from the past twenty-four hours, like Sunday movie night. He sits on the edge of the bed, gulps a cold beer, by the glow from the Plasma’s screen. He rotates his finger. A silver remote clipped to his index finger fast-forwards through the scenes, rewinds, freezes the frame of a man at a conference, sitting next to me: honey-gold eyes, bronze skin, crew-cut crow-black hair, a tickle of flirtation in his smile. Janith Koshal. A smoking hot motherfucker. I remember his tongue decanting orgasms from my body.
Fuck. I must not think of him or else a detection alert will prompt Elifasi of the memory triggered by a rising heart rate, dilated eyes, and whatever the fuck bio signals are currently being transmitted. I slow my breathing, quickly recall the most mundane episode of taking the trash out from the kitchen, focusing my mind’s eye on the garbage bag swelling with heaps of disposed food, the smudge of avocado on the sharp edge of canned beans, the stink of rotting meat—
“Nelah, who’s that?” Elifasi asks, heating the air between us with a smog of jealousy.
“Mm, don’t remember.” I curl and uncurl my toes against the woolly carpet. “Jan-something. VC investor in construction tech. Our firm’s using one of his entrepreneurs’ products.” Our usual chitter-chatter dinner of interrogation.
He follows my conversation with Jan, which echoes throughout our room like the pilot of a drama, cinematography crisp. Jan leans forward, caught in the golden dusk, taps his finger on my wrist, imparting a meeting into my calendar like nanobots into his bloodstream—it appears on the tiny screen on his wrist, and he smiles. “Then why does he want to meet you late at night?” my husband asks.
“Because I run an architectural firm,” I say, masking the memory of our rendezvous with the mental image of the garbage bag in our kitchen. Eli stares at me, waiting for more. “It was a meeting for a project, and it wasn’t late, it was at 5:00 p.m. He and his wife bought a stand in Mokolodi. They’re looking for an architect to design an eco-conscious home for their ever-expanding family. And since I won the Architect of the Year Award for world-class sustainable designs, I’m the best architect for the job. Hence . . .” I point to the screen, exhausted from the amount of labor it takes to hide a secret, and sighing at the effort of having to always ad-lib lies.
“Oh . . .” Thumb against the remote, he presses play.
“You’re supposed to scan my memory files for undetected infractions.”
Elifasi shakes his head. It takes two hours of him scrolling through my memory files as I pass time by fiddling with the hologram 3D design for a museum that my firm will be presenting to a client this week. But I can’t concentrate. I stare at him and wonder if every marriage is like ours: microchipped wives watching our husbands disembowel our thoughts and memories, dissecting our every infraction, interrogating us about our glances, our clothes, our conversations. Monitoring us for undetected crimes. Invading our privacy for the sake of public safety. My nails dig deep into my skin as a scream roils inside my throat—the scream, afraid to get out. We’re not only losing the power of our bodies, we’re losing the privacy our minds. What will be taken next for the sake of safety? This microchip protects our city, but it’s the husbands’, the city’s, the government’s tool to get inside us. My husband has the upper hand in our marriage, because I’m the one with a criminal body.
He stares at me, smiling, unaware of the volcano erupting within me. These intimate sessions mutilate my sense of independence; in this murdered church of my body, every molecule is a screaming prisoner.
I face our slim window. The horizon between the hills and sky is hazy as the sun continues burning like luminol through the city’s air, activating chemicals leading to an untold crime. Which murderers or buried bodies still hiding in the nooks and crannies of the city will be found today?
It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s nothing to do with me.
Sometimes it turns me on, the gluey mixture of fear and pleasure in the minimal tactility Elifasi gives me when he connects me to our home system. It’s our foreplay. After this, like always, we have sex. Pump, pump. Tap out in four strokes. Cum. Done. Unsatisfactory. My body’s sexually frustrated. Elifasi stands, shakes himself out. “Finished. So far, you’re pure.”
Mxm, bastard. As if it’s his dick that purifies me. No, I don’t hate my husband—I just casually and occasionally call him a bastard, with . . . love. My thoughts might leak into our home cinema, leading to a long interrogation by my husband, the formidable Elifasi Bogosi-Ntsu, well known at the force for his scathing ability to gouge out the truth from the mouths of perpetrators, and even his wife.
He pulls on a dressing gown. “Next task.”
We walk into our spacious closet, fitted with mirrored closet doors. A slim biometric scanner is embedded in one of them. I push aside my curtain of Senegalese braids, exposing the back of my neck and the microchip. He slides his hands down my bare arms, giving me chills, and presses my palm against the mirror. Its surface ripples, fibrillating into horizontal lines that break into patterns of sound waves as the AI microchip assessor’s disembodied voice echoes through the closet in a monotone: “Dumêla, Nelah,” she greets. “How are we feeling this morning?”
