The Moonshiner’s Burden

My first brush with the uncanny occurred when I was twelve, and it has never fully released its grip on my mind. I am now twenty, and the terror of that night remains as crisp as the autumn air that carried it. But to understand the weight of that fear, you must first know what befell my older brother, Caleb, and my cousin, Mara.

Caleb had always been the steady one, the one who could fix a carburetor or soothe a spooked horse. He was sixteen, and we lived in a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of the Kruger National Park, where the bushveld sprawls in a tapestry of thorn and shadow. One evening, he came back from a hunting trip with a strange, nervous energy. He claimed that while waiting for a kudu near a watering hole, he saw a man in a too-large khaki suit, carrying a gnarled walking stick topped with a brass serpent. The man stood perfectly still, watching him, and then, without a word, snapped the stick over his knee as if it were a dry twig, and vanished into the acacia scrub. Caleb laughed it off, blaming the heat and the whiskey, but his laugh was hollow, and he never went hunting alone again.

Mara, who was a few years older than me, shared a room adjacent to mine. She was pragmatic, a nurse-in-training, and she scoffed at superstition. But one morning, she burst into my room, her face ashen, her breath ragged. She had left her window open a crack, as she always did, and in the dead of night, she had seen a figure crouched on the low-hanging branch of the marula tree outside, its face a pale blur, its hands clutching a bamboo fishing rod. It mimed breaking the rod over its knee, and then, as if aware she was watching, it slowly shook its head and dropped out of sight. When she finally dared to peek, the branch was empty, and the window was shut tight, the latch firmly in place.

I tried to dismiss their stories as nightmares, coincidences of sleep and shadow. But I was about to become a part of this grim pattern. It was the dry season, and the heat was oppressive. I had taken to sleeping on the veranda, where a thin breeze might find me. The moon was almost full, casting a silver sheen on the dusty yard and the rows of mealie stalks that bordered our land. I was drifting off, listening to the distant chuckle of a hyena, when I saw him.

He was standing at the edge of the yard, just beyond the thin strand of barbed wire. He was tall, impossibly thin, and wore a shapeless hat pulled low. In his hand, he held a long, slender object—not bamboo, but something that glinted, like polished bone. He didn’t move, just stood there. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. I tried to scream, but my throat seized. He raised the object—it was indeed a bone, perhaps a human femur—and, with a deliberate slowness, he bit it in half. The sound of the snap was like a gunshot in the still air. He then dropped the pieces and pointed a long finger at me, and I swear I saw his mouth move, forming words I could not hear: ‘You are next.’

I fled to my parents’ room, my heart pounding. They dismissed it as a dream, but they noticed the sweat that soaked my nightshirt. The next morning, I walked to the spot where he had stood. There, on the hard, red earth, lay two shards of bone, bleached white by the sun. And upon closer inspection, I saw they bore the faint, unmistakable etchings of old Afrikaans text, a date, and a name—my father’s name. I shuddered, for I knew that the Moonshiner’s Burden, as the locals called it, was not a mere ghost story. It was a promise.

Weeks passed, and we tried to forget. But the memory of that figure, that snapped bone, clung to me like a burr. My father, a stoic man, grew paler by the day. He confessed that he had seen the same figure in his youth, a tall man with a bone, near the old cemetery. He had always thought it a hallucination. But the shards I had found were real—I had hidden them in a tin box under my bed. One night, I heard a rhythmic tapping at my window. I didn’t need to look. I knew he was there, with a new bone, ready to snap it. I felt a presence fill the room, a cold that seeped into my bones. The tapping stopped, replaced by a low, guttural laughter that seemed to come from inside my own head. Then, a voice, clear as a bell, whispered, ‘You must finish the story.’

I turned, trembling, and saw him standing in the corner of my room, his face hidden, but his hands holding a long, splintered bone. He broke it over his knee with a crack that echoed in the silence. He then pointed at me, and I felt a searing pain in my chest, as if something were being torn from me. I blacked out. When I woke, the sun was up, and the tin box was empty. On my bedside table lay the two halves of the bone, now joined by a sinew, forming a crude circle. My sister and brother, upon seeing it, turned ashen. We knew what it meant. The burden has been passed. It is now my turn to watch the horizon for the Moonshiner, to wait for the day when I must carry the bone and find a new keeper. For the story does not end; it merely finds a new voice. And I know, with a certainty that chills me to my core, that one night, I will stand at the edge of a field, with a bone in my hand, and I will break it, and I will pass on the curse. But until then, every night, I check the locks, and I listen for the tap, tap, tap of bone on glass. And I remember the Moonshiner’s Burden: to see, to break, to bequeath. And I wonder, as I shudder in the dark, when the story will come for me again.