The Promise

by Damon Galgut

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.

Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.

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.

Why does furniture always look innocent, no matter what happens on it?

They’ll be drinking and making bawdy jokes soon after you go too.

I hope they do.

And all of them are different, of course they are, time has played its tune on all our faces.

You come back after long vanishment and the surface closes as if you were never gone. Family quicksand.

Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out. Hello, Pa, he says again.

She has learned, or perhaps has always known, that if you want to move forward it’s best not to look back.

she likes the feeling of being between two places, recently departed and not yet arrived.

You understand, he says, people don’t always take what you give them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time. Yes, she says. But a promise is a promise.

Though I’ve loved a few in my time, when I was able. Who, Amor? Some men, some women, along the way. What does it matter, bodies, names, I am alone now. Hard enough to keep loving yourself.

Eaten too much childhood, thanks, I’m full. The room you grew up in is a room you never leave and Amor has been living here for forty-four years.

The rain has no prejudice. It falls without judgement on both the living and the dead and continues to fall like that, for hours through the night.