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Nobody is dead. It’s a word, that’s all. She looks at the word, lying there on the desk like an insect on its back, with no explanation.
The older woman’s disappointment is almost palpable, like a secret fart.
her voice low and confiding, full of diminutives, even though her motives are not benign.
She feels ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open, and thinks that she must get away, away from this horrible little room with its parquet floor and barking Maltese poodle and the eyes of her aunt and uncle sticking into her like nails.
A big mishmash of a place, twenty-four doors on the outside that have to be locked at night, one style stuck on another. Sitting out here in the middle of the veld, like a drunk wearing odd bits of clothing.
The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends. But in the meantime there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it, the thing that reminds everyone, even people who didn’t care for the dead woman, and there are always a few of those, that one day they shall lie there too, just like her, emptied out of everything, merely a form, unable even to look at itself. And the mind recoils from its absence, cannot think of itself not thinking, the coldest of voids.
The mental correction is satisfying, like a stiff joint clicking into place.
What’s happening now is that somebody else is climbing the hill from the other side. A human figure approaching, filling itself in slowly, putting on age and sex and race, like items of clothing, till she’s looking at a black boy, also thirteen years old, wearing ragged shorts and T-shirt, broken takkies on his feet.
Sweat sticks cloth on skin. Pull it loose with your fingers.
Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.
Out the corner of her eye she thinks she sees Ma’s face appear in the mirror, but when she looks directly it’s gone. Instead she can smell her mother, or a mix of smells she thinks of as her mother, but are actually the traces of recent events, involving puke, incense, blood, medicine, perfume and an underlying dark note, perhaps the smell of the sickness itself. Exhaled by the walls, hovering in the air.
Oom Ockie is by now listing a little to the right, weighted perhaps by his uneven smile, hitched up only at one end.
It is night, the same night, but later, the stars have moved on. Only a cuticle of moon, casting the faintest metallic glow onto this landscape of rocks and hills, making it look almost liquid, a mercurial sea. The line of the main road is stitched out now and then in slow motion by the headlamps of a car, carrying its cargo of human lives, going from somewhere to somewhere.
Ockie, who lies twitching beside her like a hit-and-run victim, waiting for medical assistance.
Her husband’s foot touches hers, she pulls her foot away. Terrible to flinch from what you once, briefly, loved, or thought you did, or wanted to think you did. But are shackled to, regardless, for life.
A bubble rises from the seabed, becomes a breaking of wind against the flank of his wife, who stiffens and flares her nostrils in protest.
His fastidiousness is pleasing to his patients, but if they only knew the daydreams of Dr. Wally Raaff, few would submit to being examined by him.
the dead are frequently unable to accept their condition, they resemble the living in that respect, but they have forgotten what they’re nostalgic for, much is lost in the crossing over, and when they see you they do not know you.
How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.
Let it go, or else sigh and redo it. Much of life consists of sighing and redoing,
Patience is a form of meditation.
All human life is like grass upon the earth.
Eros fighting Thanatos, except you don’t think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement. Torment of the damned, the fire that never goes out.
Why does furniture always look innocent, no matter what happens on it?
The threshold seems like the place to be, not here or there, not one thing or another.
The house is empty at this moment. It’s been deserted for a couple of hours, apparently inert but making tiny movements, sunlight stalking through those rooms, wind rattling the doors, expanding here, contracting there, giving off little pops and creaks and burps, like any old body. It seems alive, an illusion common to many buildings, or perhaps to how people see them, filled with mood and expression, windows like eyes. But nobody is here to witness it, nothing stirs, except for the dog in the driveway, leisurely licking his testicles.
You can’t puke up the thought which pains you most,
Yet the colours pierce her, as if they’re sharp, and the sky is huge and unmistakable. Below her, the farm itself spreads infinitely away into hills and folds and fields, merging with a brown distance beyond, and she does feel the world as big, very big. She has seen some of it herself. 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
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His vest and his underpants are too tight, which shows as a tiny, vexed frown between his eyes.
Fred Winkler keeps his head down, looking very intently at the screws as he unwinds their thread, anticlockwise, turning back time.
rise out of nature into culture, but you have to fight to keep your lofty perch, otherwise nature pulls you back down.
Father Batty is pallid and lightly freckled, but his imagination has its vivid patches.
Something awful about being the messenger, you’re always tainted by the message.
Time passes differently for those who’re shut out of the world. It travels past like traffic at certain points in the day, or like a particular shadow inching across the ground, or like your own body, signalling its cravings to you. It seems to slide by slowly, but the days flicker fast and soon your face is different, not quite yours any more. Or perhaps it is more like you than ever before, that is also possible.
Truth is, for him marriage has been like two people coming together to make a third, a mischievous extra presence working against them both, cooking up trouble, subverting his good intentions.
