Sabelo And The New Abilities

The first scream came from the taxi rank, not the beachfront, and it cut through the humid Durban noise like a wire snapping. Sabelo was halfway across the pavement outside the corner shop, balancing a packet of mielie meal against his hip, when a man in a bright green shirt lurched forward as if someone yanked a rope tied to his spine. His eyes rolled white. Then, without touching anything, his hands began to glow - thin lines of light crawling over his knuckles like ants finding sugar.

People froze for half a second, the way crowds always did when the body decided to turn into a problem.

Then the air filled with alarms. A car horn blared and kept blaring. Somewhere farther down Florida Road, glass shattered with a sharp, metallic snap. Sabelo’s packet shifted, grains rattling against plastic. He tried to look away - tried to treat it like a prank, a power cut, a medical emergency - but the green-shirt man rose from his knees as if gravity had suddenly become negotiable. His feet didn’t scrape the ground; they hovered a finger’s breadth above the tar for an instant before settling wrong, like he’d forgotten how to stand.

A woman near the taxi rank grabbed her child and pulled him behind her. “Don’t look!” she shouted, voice cracking. “Don’t look at it!”

Sabelo couldn’t stop looking. The glow around the man’s hands wasn’t random. It braided - thin strands tightening into a shape that looked like a small net, then loosening, then tightening again. Each time it tightened, the man’s breath hitched, and each time it loosened, his face relaxed as if he was remembering something he’d always known.

His own pulse began to answer the scene. Heat rose through his palms, starting at the base of his fingers, as if someone had opened a tap under his skin. He clenched his hands around the packet until the plastic crinkled. The glow on the green-shirt man’s hands pulsed, and in the same rhythm Sabelo felt his heat pulse back.

“Hey!” a shopkeeper barked from inside the doorway, her voice sharp with panic she tried to disguise as authority. “Lock the gate! Lock it now!”

The gate’s chain clinked as someone pulled it down. The metal sounded too loud in the thickening chaos, like a bell rung for people who didn’t believe in churches.

Sabelo wanted, in that moment, something simple and impossible: to get home without becoming the reason someone else decided to be afraid. He’d grown up in a city where violence travelled faster than news. He knew what happened when rumours got teeth. If abilities were real - if the world had been rewritten without anyone asking - then safety wasn’t a place. Safety was a performance, a story people agreed to believe.

He took a step toward the road, packet still digging into his side, and the heat under his skin surged. For the first time, he felt it not as a symptom but as an invitation.

A man in a white shirt stumbled out of the crowd, shouting, “It’s a hoax! It’s witchcraft!” He pointed at the hovering green-shirt man like the gesture could ward off consequences. The point of his finger trembled. “It’s - ”

A woman slapped his arm hard enough that he recoiled. “Stop talking like you’re still in church,” she hissed. “Look!”

The green-shirt man’s hands flared brighter, and a stray plastic chair from outside a nearby salon skittered across the pavement as if dragged by an invisible hand. The chair’s legs scraped, sparks spitting where metal met grit. The crowd shuddered back in unison, then surged forward in the next breath, pulled by the same hunger that made people stare at wrecks and storms.

Sabelo lifted his gaze from the chair to the man’s face. The man looked terrified, not triumphant, but the glow didn’t care about his emotion. It responded to something inside him, something he couldn’t fully control.

Sabelo’s own palms throbbed. He tried to tuck his hands into his hoodie pocket, tried to hide the heat like a child hiding a bruise. The packet of mielie meal slid a little as the ground vibrated under distant footsteps. Then a sound - high and thin - cut through the crowd: a baby crying, sharp with sudden fear.

“Please,” someone said, voice small. “Please, don’t - ”

A little girl had slipped out from behind her mother’s leg. She stood on the edge of the taxi rank, eyes wide, staring at the chair still skittering. Her mother’s shout came too late. The chair lurched again, turning toward the child with the wrong kind of speed.

Sabelo moved before he’d decided. He pushed through bodies that felt slick with sweat and panic, and in the heat of it his palms flared. The glow wasn’t as bright as the green-shirt man’s, but it was there - faint at first, then stronger as he reached toward the chair.

His fingers brushed the air just before the chair’s corner reached the girl’s feet.

The chair stopped.

Not slowly. It halted like a thought interrupted. One moment it was sliding, scraping sparks; the next it was suspended, held in place by nothing anyone could see....