Finally, tonight, the first black has come.
 
His body broke an invisible beam, lighting a single red bulb on a security panel. From a dark window, Jani now follows the faint human outline as it crouches low and crawls through the night. He could kill the black now but he waits, his trigger finger twitching but abstaining from a pull.  Jani wants him closer.

The dark window is cut into one wall of a guard room sitting high up,atop Jani’s house. A three-blade fan hung from its ceiling cuts the air with ponderous strokes, churning the heat to a point just bearable to the sole occupant of the room. A firing position is moulded into the wall below the window and opposite an armoury of polished weapons stands ready in a grey-steel gun rack. With windows in each wall the room holds a full vista over the cleared ground stretching in all directions to the perimeter of Jani’s estate.  A dry moat protecting him from the dark roast that is Africa.

In his late teens, Jani is both disturbing and handsome, the impact of his toned, clean-shaven features offset by the colourless eyes he crawls over faces, like a shark about to kill. His body, lean and tall, simply adds to the cold power he portrays to the world.
 

Before the red bulb lit, Jani had been thinking of his mama. She’d taught him this vigil as a young boy. “We must keep them out Jani”, she told him as he studied her, “the blacks out there who come hunting”. Nightly she perched like a hawk owl, feral eyes scanning the ground for movement. “They’ll be back soon Jani. Tonight, tomorrow. Some day”.
 
When he was ten his mama told him about his father. How he had been a good man, how he had died protecting her. “They burst in one day Jani, three of them, like wild animals they were. Big, frightening,drugged to their pores. They were looking for me boy, wanting a white woman”. She had paused her eyes glazing as he watched his mama trying to take in her own words. “I remember their rabid breath on me, remember the stench of them. Then nothing else until your father came crashing in. He reached his shotgun before they took him, blew a hole in one of them but another crushed his skull and he fell. The sheriff said they probably fled after that. You were safe Jani, you were inside me, see. But your father died at their hands”.

When he was old enough Jani took over the watch himself, proud to stand like his father. “Look out for those blacks Jani. Shoot to kill”. Her words rang through his head. “Don’t worry mama, they won’t get in. Not past me”. His gaze would never leave the night.

Mama was physically gone now, taken by old age and cancer rather than the blacks, but her whispering spirit lived on, soaked into crevices between the ageing bricks of the walls.
 
Tonight however the red bulb lit and all thoughts of mama, gone. The night air is deathly still. The adrenalin surge of the impending kill has cleared the extraneous for Jani, his senses tunnelling into only the necessary, the relevant. Nothing exists now, except the black.

He is close enough.

Moving his eye tight to the sight of his rifle, right cheek pressing hard against the worn comforting butt, Jani feels his heart pounding beneath his shirt. Without shifting from the firing position he slides his right boot over a switch on the floor. In an instant the estate is ablaze with light, the coverless ground thrown into turmoil, rodents and insects a blur as they scurry for their lives. And in their midst, exposed under the sudden injustice of the light, an obscene black shape remains.
 

Time is a powder. Jani waits on how the creature reacts but there is no movement, the shape simply sagging flatter as if the dusty flat ground can swallow it up and hide its glaring presence. The face is up, looking at the house, eyes frozen.
 
The telescopic sight falls onto the black and now Jani can see his features. His skin betrays his youth, fourteen, fifteen maybe. A boy, but he carries the withered eyes of an old man. His face has been partially destroyed and then healed, his black skin cut into like a carcass.  Whatever hit him left his mouth a gaping hole rather than
something fashioned by nature. Jani knew him. Another child soldier returned home to find nothing.
 
Suddenly the boy stands and Jani’s finger tightens on the trigger ready for the kill. But once upright he doesn’t move, standing stock still, arms by his sides. Jani once again trains the cross hairs on the face. The eyes are filled with defiance now, his chin up. The boy slides his feet together then, slowly, lifts his arms out from his side, holds them wide and open, palms forward. A smile breaks on his face and he

lifts closed eyes to the black sky.
 
Jani lowers the rifle from his shoulder and watches the boy, stood alone and tall amid the cleared ground. The floodlights throw shadows round him, his body a compass shedding darkness to the north and the south, the east and the west. Silence. Save for Jani’s wristwatch which echoes from wall to wall, tearing the moment into seconds.

Kill him Jani, kill him. A whisper.
 

Slowly, without other movement, the boy now lowers his face from the sky. An aura of light envelops his body, circling his blackness like an eclipse of the sun. He is feeding on the radiance, sucking it into him, sanitizing. The boy opens his eyelids and Jani draws a breath. Penetrating the glare and the darkness of the window beyond the boy is staring directly at him, challenging, pleading for life.

Go on Jani, kill him. He’s one of those blacks came hunting me.

As Jani watches he realizes they are suddenly wrong, the boy’s eyes. They are thoughtful, religious now, full of grace. Like the eyes of a white man.
 
Shoot boy, kill him.
 
The movement of the boot is slight, but with it the ground crashes back into blackness. The dark is total and impenetrable to Jani, his constricted pupils unable to distinguish even the faintest outline.  He waits, relieved the purifying force for the boy is extinguished. Now he must stay black forever. He listens for sounds of movement. “Run boy, run”.
 
You fool, Jani. After everything I taught you.

Silence reigns. As his eyes adjust Jani looks for movement, but sees none. “Where are you boy? Run, give yourself a chance”.

Can’t you hear? He’s running towards you.
 
“No mama. He’s running away. He’s leaving”. The words stick to the roof of his mouth.

You’re a fool. I can feel footsteps Jani, closer, closer. Kill him

Jani strains to see. Faint outlines appear. A tide of heat sweeps over him, a bead of stinging sweat dropping into the lashes of his right eye, smudging his vision. “Where the fuck are you boy? Don’t make me do this”. He wipes his sleeve over his brow.
 
He’ll get you Jani, like he did your father, you’ll see.
 
“Shut up mama, shut up. Five, four, three, two…..”

A second later Jani’s right boot finds the switch on the floor and the ground is once again flooded with light. Under the glare his eyes struggle for a few seconds as he searches. Then, as the black of his pupils dilate, he finds the boy. He is rooted in the same position, unmoved, his arms held wide, gaze locked on the window. Mama was wrong. Still, he stands.
 
“What you doing here, boy? Get off our land, clear the fuck out”. Only his mama hears. Jani wipes his sleeve over his brow, pulls the rifle to his shoulder and slowly squeezes the trigger. The noise cracks the night like an egg shell . The ground between the boy’s feet explodes, dust and debris rising up and showering his calves with splinters of reddish earth. No movement. Still, he stands.
 
As the silence returns the boy once again points his face to the sky and closes his eyes. This time Jani can see the scarred flesh of his jaw stretch with the movement, the black of his skin reddening as wounds on his neck are exposed. Even through the barrel of the telescopic sight the next move is faint. The boy’s torn lips begin
whispering something like a prayer.
 
This boy longs, just a little bit, to die.
 
Jani waits for the lips to be still. Then offers a prayer of his own.
 
The next bullet hits the forehead of the boy, splitting apart as it enters, splattering bone, tissue, killing him instantly. Tentacles of blood run down his cheek but he remains upright for a few moments, eyes still skyward. When he eventually goes down it is as if a towering tree has been felled, his body rocking back on its heels and falling in one movement, arms still asunder. On the ground the dead boy lies almost as he stood, his legs twisted in the fall, head to one side, arms stretched wide. Like Jesus on the cross.
 
For a five minutes Jani watches the boy. He wonders if his father would be proud. His mama had kept a photograph at her bedside, his father as a young man, powerful, strong. Jani often thought of him on that night fighting to protect his family, dying at the hands of an intruder, and he did so now. “He wasn’t like all the others Jani”, mama would say, “he was proud, good, aiming to better himself”.
 

With a movement of his boot Jani kills the floodlights, pitching the estate into darkness, hiding the boy.  Rising, he crosses the guard room and switches on the internal lights. Insects scamper and the sweat on Jani’s forearms glistens gold under the glare. Rifle in hand, he moves to the armoury below the south window and slides the weapon back into its slot. He looks up. The reflection that echoes from the window pane in front of him is sharp against the backcloth of the night. Jani is suddenly repelled. He bears mama’s white genes like a trophy but betrayed by the coarseness of hair, the dark tone of his skin, his father’s roots are also clear within him. A blend of colour. Grey flesh stretched over white bones.
 
Tomorrow he will bury the boy. Then he will clean these walls, wash deep the crevices between the ageing bricks and silence his mama’s whispers.