Horrible Memory

It won’t leave my head. Maybe writing it on here will give me a bit of a rest.

Before my neighbours eventually managed to finally kill my brother, they had been trying for a few year.

In 2013, after yet another harassment from them when I was coming back from school, my mother told my brother about it. Of course, it pissed him off. He decided to confront them and ask them exactly what they wanted from me.

I was not home that day. When I got back, things were upside down, and there was so much blood. My parents were not at home. They had taken my brother to the hospital because during that confrontation, they hit him on the head with a machete. He survived that attack. I don’t know how. He surely should have died given the amount of blood he lost.

It was a Monday when he was attacked.

Friday of that same week, I was studying late at night in the living room. It was raining and a bit stormy. Then there was a knock on the door. It was my brother. When I opened the door, he looked like hell. He was beaten, bloody with a broken arm. A very horrifying sight.

Here’s what had happened. On his way home, he was stopped on the road by cops (My neighbours have police buddies. That’s what made it hard whenever we tried to report any of their harassment.)

They took him to an abandoned flat, 4th floor, placed a bag over his head and binded his hands together with rope. They sat him on a chair in an empty room. Hit him on the head with a gun. Wounds from the Monday incident were still fresh in that moment.

They took his phone from him and called his girlfriend by mistake, at which time he shouted for her to call my mother. She did. My mother didn’t know what to do. Whether to call the cops or what. My father was not home. He was working a night shift that night.

He said after the call, they were discussing who would kill him. At which time, they took off the bag over his head. He saw a window, managed to fight them off I don’t even know how, and ran for the window while his hands were bounded together. He jumped out of the window, from the 4th floor, hit a tree on his way down before he landed on the road, and broke his left arm.

He was helped by some people on the road and managed to make his way back home.

His arm was never the same after that. I remember chasing him around one time when he came home from work last year, a few weeks before he died, and I played too roughly with his arm.

This was not the only time they tried to kill him.

I hope to get a rest from all these memories now. I want to remember the good. Only the good.

Ngiyakukhumbula Mthombeni. Lala uphumule.

NNM