A collection of stories from South Africa
A collection of stories from South Africa
"I can only tell you things that happened as I saw them, and what the rest was about only Africa knows." – Oom Schalk Lourens
I use my dad’s step ladder to peer over into our neighbour’s garden. It is beige, like ours, and there are children, too. I tell them my name is Caitlyn because, at 5, I figure I can be whatever I want, which is to co-pilot a stealth helicopter that lives in a mountain and be in a fake-platonic relationship with an ex-army guy called Stringfellow.
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It’s dry and dusty. Volumes of mining waste rising and falling across the otherwise flat horizon, like great burial mounds; a piloerection of rubble surging in reflex to the fall of industry on the East Rand.
They stood hand in hand and looked at the dump. The history teacher with the clear blue eyes, one that skewed under stress, and the art curator with the soft cheeks and big beard. A dump for sure but their dump nonetheless.
The stars of a summer sky, the long grass rustling in the breeze, my best friend sitting next to me…and PJ Powers.
If you fell on the ice, you had to make fists because some super-jock speed skater would almost certainly skate past you at that exact moment and chop your fingers off. Everybody said so.
Her friends walk past, in and out of the red, giggling. His friends stand clear. Bomber jackets, L.A. Gear. It’s Friday night.
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He stood day-in-day-out peddling reality to cynical commuters. I’d roll by with my window down anticipating the familiar greeting, ‘Hullo Mees Unives!’
The Queen is dead. I’m in church. We rise to sing the national anthem. God Save the King. I’m ready… I can’t do it.
Picking pieces of dry grass from her school jersey, the girl braces as she bites. Butter overload (a sort of PTSD). But, you know, mom wouldn’t be mom if she wasn’t hacking a block of unsalted cooking butter and depositing the wedges onto brown bread with marmite…
Often young children would run up and down the gravel on the side of the busy rural roads, their fresh produce lifted above their heads, displayed proudly in the air.