The Other Side of the Sky - Part 2

Tino shook his head, climbing stairs that wouldn’t end.

“I don’t understand though...”

“Hm?”

“How can there be another side to the sky? It’s above us, how can it have two sides? It’s one thing, so it has one side!”

“You're so silly, Tino, soooo, soooo silly...”

“I am not silly!”

“Many things have two sides – you have two sides!”

“I have many sides.”

“No – you have two! A front and a back! Just like the sky!”

Climbing stairs that wouldn’t end, Tino shook his head.

“I don’t understand though...”



Around and up,

                   around and up,

                                       in the same spot. 



The stairs were the same to him – the same wobbles, the same dirt stains.

Oh. Maybe not.

That one had a gap. That one had a brown stone. That one had pebbles in between the stones.

But it felt the same. And if it feels the same, why bother calling it different

The steps slowly got warmer. Along each few, there was a hole in the wall – three bricks in a triangle, like tiny windows right by their noses.

Shaking noises came through those holes.

Tino peeked.



         It was green, in many many many many slices.

         The world drawn with leaves.

                   At first, dark and green.

         Then lighter          and                    lighter.

                   And then, the lightest thing: air.



They were above the trees now, where birds flew and walked around, like people do on the ground.

“...Is this where the birds live?”

Kudzi was tracing her hand along the walls, looking out the holes too. She danced up some steps where Tino only walked. “You thought they lived where? The sky?”

“O-of course not! Nothing lives in the sky!”

“But are you sure about that? Are you really, really-really sure about that?”

“Why would I not be?!”

“We all come from the sky, you know?”

“Huh? My teacher said we all came from the water.”

“And the water came from the sky!”

He groaned, “Sometimes...you make no sense.”

She giggled back, “But can you really say that the sky is the sky?”

“What? What now are you talking about?”

“The sky, Tino! Nekuti...”

She gasped and bent over, still walking up smoothly. Standing up with a stick, she started tracing lines on all the walls now.

Tino frowned looking at it, it was a very good stick.

She held up a finger, "...if you are on the ground, and you look up, isn’t everything the sky? The trees push the sky. But now we’re here, where even the trees cannot touch, heh? Aren’t we—Ah-rant-we!"

She snickered, peeking back.

He snickered too, “You’re being Mr. Samukange again!”

And now she held up her stick, “Now! Me, I know I'm not a teacher! This I know, this you know! But for now, you are all my class! So, class! Answer me this! Ah-Rant-We-Not! A part of the sky? Even right now? If we took our shoes off and slept here, don’t we live in the sky, like clouds?”

He laughed a bit more, letting the playful echoes bounce off the walls into silence. Then he took a breath, taking in her words too, and shook his head again, “Ahhh, whatever! Whatever! It’s all whatever! I don’t care!”

She sliced lines through the air, “...if it all feels the same, why use different names...?”

He leaned forward, only catching a slight whisper, “Heh? What was that?”

“Look out there! We’re almost halfway!”

He crossed his arms and mumbled to himself, “...first you go ‘there are sides’, now you go ‘it’s all the same’.”



The staircase was getting hotter again.

Wind whistled through every invisible crack in the wall. And every visible crack was yellow, leaking sunlight.

Everything below was now far below, Tino almost fell back surprised by how tiny everything was.

How many steps had they taken? The staircase only let them see a few steps at a time. He could blink twice and tell himself they never moved. But they did. Around and up, around and up.

Once, he had peeked at his sister’s exercise book when she was gone. Maths. There were squares, but inside the squares nothing made sense. They used letters and numbers. Even though he recognised the letters, they were in the silliest sentences – making numbers instead of sense.

Looking out, looking down, it was the same feeling. He knew their area by heart, but from here it was all nonsense. He knew the trees and the rocks and the buildings were bigger than them. But they looked like shrubs and pebbles and playhouses.

He could pick out his school just from the soccer field: light and thin with grass. Dots passed an even smaller dot on it. But even this far, he knew it was Rufaro and his friends. Always playing as though they lived there. He saw the tuck shop with the red sign, sitting on the side, barely bigger than his shoe from here. He saw the classrooms, their roofs he had never seen before, covered in dirt.

It was a whole world for him, but up here, the world barely noticed it.