When the Storm’s Over

By Lauri Kubuitsile

Kopano walks home along the dirt path from the power station through the staff houses, the whispers following him though it’s been a year already. When he comes nearer to them, the silence that ends their discussion is even worse. Sometimes he wants to stop and tell them everything so that the talk can be over once and for all. But he never does. What goes on in his house is not for outsiders’ ears.

He’s one of only two engineers in his department at the station and normally very conscientious about his job, but a storm is on its way and he must leave early.

“James, there’s a problem at home,” he says. He’s told the other engineer only what’s been needed, an outline, but James is kind and asks no questions. “We’ll be fine. I’ll stay, Kopano.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he says as he leaves.

At the gate to his house, Resego is waiting. “She’s …not good,” his daughter says.

He smiles to calm her. “I’m here. It’ll be fine. You go to Sophia’s. I’ll come fetch you when it’s over.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

She runs off to the house one over, her heels kicking out behind her awkwardly just as she’d done when she was small. He smiles watching the last traces of the girl in his daughter. He holds them in his heart for a moment; they’re rare now. Death and its aftermath have forced her to be an adult before she should have been. It’s unfair but he’s stopped tallying their losses, there no longer seems to be any point.

He turns towards the house.

“Thuto? Thuto? Is that you?” Mmaserame says, rushing up the passage from the back. Her uncombed hair not successfully trapped by the skewed yellow doek. She wears a bathrobe over the nightdress on its third day of being worn. He’ll need to see to that when the storm’s over.

“Oh…it’s you,” she says, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. “A storm is coming and Thuto is still out with the goats. I don’t know why you’re here. Do you care nothing for your son at all? Go! Go and find him!”

Kopano is used to her harsh words, when the lightning starts and the first balls of hail hit the tin roof, it will get much worse. In his youth the afternoon summer storms were welcome after the scorching heat of the day. The rain feeding the thirsty earth, as boys they would run out and be washed by its kind coolness.

The storms now were only to be feared: hail, from small pieces of ice to fist-sized weapons, lightning— angry and powerful— and wind that took roofs and plucked the oldest of the trees from the ground like flowers in a field.

Like the storm on that day. Thuto was nearly a man at sixteen so Kopano assured Mmaserame he’d be fine out collecting his grandfather’s goats. But he hadn’t been; a deadly miscalculation.

Gently, he takes his wife’s hand and leads her toward the sitting room just as the first drops begin to fall. The wind whistles through the edges of the badly fitted windows. It’s coming, it sings. It is coming.

“Did Resego make you something to eat, my darling?” he asks her.

She glares at him. “Are you mad? Can you not hear? Are you going to sit here and let it happen, you useless man? Go and find my son!”

She shouts but at least today he doesn’t need to care about his neighbours hearing. The hated storm is helpful in that way.

She snatches her hand free from his and paces in front of the window. The rain is beating the earth, the red mud knocked upward by the force. In minutes, small rivers form, before it’s over, the culverts will overflow, the roads flood, some cleared of the thin tarmac like an orange stripped of its peel. Hierarchies laid out clearly showing who holds the power, punishment for our hubris. Lessons, unfortunately, still left unlearned.

He takes Mmaserame’s hand again and leads her to the sofa. They sit together. She’s silent but seething. Her body quivers with the  emotions that have lost their mooring since that day.

“Thuto is not out in the storm, Mmaserame. Don’t you remember?” he starts yet again. “We buried him last year. He’s safe now, nothing can hurt him.”

Her face goes blank. Her eyes tear up, the only sign that she’s understood anything. She shakes her head; she pulls her hand free and shouts again that he must go find their son. She pounds at his body: his arm, his chest, his face.

He takes it, welcomes it in a way. He wishes that he could cross that barrier inside of himself and let his own pain out, for it builds and builds. He works so very hard to keep everything in place he’s constantly exhausted from the effort. He envies his wife in that way. What a relief it would be if he could do as she does. But he cannot.

She fights him until she’s exhausted. Outside, the hail has come as expected, stripping the trees bare of their leaves. The wind sounds like a train coming. The garden now a lake. He’ll need his rubber boots from work when he goes to fetch Resego later.

Out the window, the wildness persists and he thinks of one thing, a thing he thinks nearly constantly: what will become of them? He holds his wife in his arms as she cries her unending tears and they wait for it all to be over.

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Lauri Kubuitsile is a two time winner of The Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing, the
winner of the Botswana Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture’s Botswerere Prize for Creative
Writing, and a finalist for the 2011 Caine Prize, among others. She has more than thirty books
published both here and overseas with publishers such as Macmillan, Vivlia Publishers,
Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Penguin. Her books are used in
schools in South Africa and Botswana. She also has eight books in Cambridge University
Press UK’s Reading Adventures series, books that are read by children all over the world.
Most recently the series garnered a publishing deal in China.

Kubuitsile’s historical novel, The Scattering (Penguin 2016), won Best International Fiction
Book 2017 at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates, and was
recommended by the prestigious Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in the United
Kingdom in 2017. It has since been published in German by Interkontinental and republished
in English in Southern Africa by the Namibian Publisher Kuiseb Publishers. A new European
English edition will be coming out in October 2025 by DAS Editions UK. Her latest book is a
children’s picture book, Mr Fitchelstein’s Safari Company (Sunflower Books, an imprint of
Modjaji Books) which came out in July 2025.