As surely as night follows day, she pulls on her cigarette. Tiny blisters in the orange, searching collar of her fag’s cherry crackle aggressively. In the far-middle ground, an unseen wisp of grey smoke begins to bisect the airless horizon line, straight as your misplaced metal ruler.
Once a guy came once and spoke to me for quite a long time in the parking lot. I guess he was tired and wanted a break. Most of what I am writing now I told him so it could be that this report is somewhere else.
He’d polished the iron of the grate strut directly above the spot where he stashed his Euros pouch to a sliver of silver leading-edge. This he had done by continually placing and retrieving the worn velvet sac with his burly hand as if the action would spark an accrual. He asked me to cash the Euros in the next big town. They weren’t Euros; they were all redundant copper cents amounting to R2,37. I sent him R300 via the Standard Bank app, which he never cashed. He has 12 days to honour the token.
The news headline, read by a gaunt, jaded individual in a toupe’, introduces an anchor standing in front of a fawn field of parched grass, temporary home to what look like mummies clad in black bin bags arranged in a blunt striation.
