The Promise

by Damon Galgut

Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she’s afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.

The countryside looks the

same but the laws piled on top of it, the invisible, powerful laws that people make and then lay down at angles across the earth, pressing down heavily, all those laws are changing now. She can feel, almost as if it’s part of the picture in front of her, that she has come back to the same place, but it isn’t the same place any more.