(Bed-Time Short Stories… tangentially delivered.)
The solar inverter hummed its low, monotone hymn against the wattle-and-daub wall of the kitchen. The house had long since forgotten the sound of the Eskom grid. Outside, the weeds had fully devoured what used to be Main Road, pushing through the cracked asphalt; what’s left of it anyway; with relentless, defying force.
Joseph smoothed his calloused thumb across the edge of his old workbench, watching the afternoon light dwindle. He was seventy-six… perhaps seventy-seven… Birthdays used to matter more; nowadays the calendar mattered very little, considering there was no longer a post office to deliver birthday card, or restaurant to go celebrate at.
It had not ended with a big bang. The delusion city people held about dead towns is that a fire came, or a mine dried up overnight, or a flood washed the foundations away…But the truth was never that simple. Definitely not here anyway.
It began the year the Ratepayers’ Forum split into three separate factions over a street-lighting contract…Joseph remembered the meeting in the church hall – the stifling heat, the vein throbbing in the Forum’s secretary’s forehead, the bitter accusations of backroom favoritism… all over three kilometers of copper wire. At least that’s what he thinks it was about.
He had sat in the back row, exhausted after a full day in his workshop, yet there, at the church hall, attending the Ratepayers’ Forum AGM. Finding himself listening to neighbors he had known for twenty years, trade petty insults like currency. He had built the town market stalls… pro bono; he had organized the winter firewood drives; he had spent his weekends clearing stormwater drains and donated veggies from his garden for every soup kitchen event over the last 20 years. Enough was enough.
That night, walking home after the meeting, a quiet, cold realisation settled in his chest. Why bother? Every effort was met with suspicion…every sacrifice of time was carved up by newcomers with grand, competing visions for tourism revenue, aesthetic guidelines and self-serving logistics. It was a war of abrasion and the prize was merely the right to be exhausted, whilst witnessing the decline.
So, he pulled back. He resigned from the board. He shut his door, tended to his own garden, focused on his own business and locked his gate. He wasn’t the only one.
One by one, the original ‘caretakers’ …the quiet, practical souls who actually fixed the pumps, organized the relief funds, stirred the soup and held the fabric of this town together… simply stopped showing up. They had been thrice bitten and now shy. They retreated into their private sanctuaries, leaving the church hall and all it’s committees, to the loud, the ambitious and the uncompromising folk who refused to listen to the founders.
Without the steady hands to keep it grounded, the town fractured entirely. Each small faction pursued its own blinkered agenda. The tourist committee fought the commerce coalition; the heritage group sued the infrastructure board. Decisions stalled, meeting after meeting, issues placed back on the agenda for the next meeting. Public works withered, the road repair budget was swallowed by legal fees. When the main water line failed five years later, there was no longer a functional council to authorize the repair… only three competing sub-committees arguing over who held the legal liability and why it’s not their fault or their job to fix.
Fewer visitors meant the kind of economic strain that turns every 5th guesthouse owner, into an estate agent. For Sale signs decorated these streets, like Christmas lights once did. By the time Eskom went off for the final time, there was no town left to fix it for. Lack of infrastructure makes for a hard sell…People cut their losses and simply packed their cars and drove away, leaving behind ghosts of past glory and unread meeting minutes.
Only a few die-hards remained…the ones with deep wells, thick garden beds, solar panels mounted to their roofs… and nowhere else to go. Old man Mercer had died in his cottage two winters ago, buried by the three remaining residents under the Witstinkhout he had once fought the council to protect.
Joseph stepped onto the porch, looking out over the quiet valley. The forest was reclaiming the empty storefronts, green vines swallowing the rusted signs of boutique cafes and rival tourism offices.
He knelt by his cabbage patch, pulling a stray weed from the dark earth. The isolation was peaceful, yes…without a doubt, peaceful. His garden flourished; his solar batteries were full; his life was entirely his own. But as he looked at the silence stretching across the dead valley, the old question returned, like it had many times over the years…cold and persistent.
If…. If he had stayed in that stifling church hall… IF he had absorbed the insults, swallowed the pride and kept fixing the drains despite the noise… would the lights still be on?
Or had their quiet retreat merely accelerated the inevitable?
He dusted the soil from his hands, offered no answer to the empty street, and went back inside to lock the door.