The Unquiet Bones

by Loreth Anne White

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. —W. H. Auden

Within about three hours of rising, our cartilage settles and compresses and decreases our joint spaces. We end up shorter at the end of the day than when we started.

But in ’66 it was declared a whites-only area. The apartheid government swept in and forcibly removed more than sixty thousand people, pulling apart homes, communities, schools, places of worship, families. The evictees were resettled across the Cape Flats, conveniently far away from the white city. People had to catch crowded trains and ride for hours into town every day to service the whites. Me and Mimi came to Canada before that happened, but my sister, Darryl’s aunt, her family was evicted. Their home was demolished to rubble. That medallion was so Darryl would remember his roots.”

“Emotion is not weakness, Jane. Empathy is not soft. It’s what makes us most human. Most strong.” She pauses. “It’s why I loved your father. And you are his daughter. Just as strong. Just as kind. And being a woman doesn’t mean you should fight harder to appear cold and professional. We need to change perceptions about what is powerful and strong.”