a van who was good and did this kind of thing. She spoke of a collection that the nurses took, a raffle, that wasn’t much but would be enough, and that they would give her some of that. To Kgomotso, who had been sitting quietly in the bed listening to her fate being candidly discussed, Sister joked that she needed to take a bath, that she was becoming lazy wasting her days away in that hospital bed. Didn’t she know a woman should be up before the sun? Kgomotso smiled a thin smile. I felt my eyes fill with water, but dared not release the tears. Instead I pressed my arm into Sister Lebea’s as we sat together tightly on that stool, shoulder to shoulder, pretending it was all I could do to keep from falling off. We got up together. She told me to collect the Refusal of Hospital Treatment form and sign it. I did, and gave Kgomotso a pen. Sister was quick to chide me. “No pen, Doctor, get ink for a thumbprint.” I did, and thanked her.

“Yes, Doctor,” was her response as she pulled a teabag from her large cooler bag and sat down for a cup of tea.

Kgomotso died that very afternoon, before her aunt returned with the man with the van, before Sister had fetched the money from the collection, before I had had an opportunity to complete her discharge summary. She could have waited. Dying people are selfish. She should have waited.

Nobody had bothered to tell me to my face that Tshiamo was dead. Instead Ma came into my room while I was pretending to sleep and whispered it in my ear. When I confronted her about this months later, she said Aunty Petunia had advised her that this was the best way to break difficult news to children, while their spirits were hovering over their bodies.

I emailed Tshiamo about that, too. I put a lot of LOLs in that email because I knew it would make him laugh. He’d always thought Aunty Petunia was a stupid old woman just waiting to steal the expensive plates Papa had left for Ma when he moved out.

Sometimes I can feel my lips curling into a snarl and my eyebrows burying themselves deeply to form a line across my forehead. When I catch myself doing this I quickly try to correct it, try to convince the muscles in my face to relax, the bones of my jaw to let go a little. I wonder how I look as my face contorts into an ugly knot. The anxiety in my heart is so full it brims over, seeping into my blood and poisoning even the hair that grows out of my flesh.

Ma called today. She asked if I was still living with “that Zimbabwean girl.” She wants me to come home and go to the cemetery with her this weekend. I lied and said I’d be on call.

Sometimes, in the very early hours of the morning when I’m driving home from a split-call and it’s just me and the night lights on the empty highway, I let go of the steering wheel just for a second and push down hard on the accelerator, and wonder, if I were to go fast enough, would I take off into the sky and soar like a plane? Disappear into the darkness of the night? And if I were to land on the other side, would Tshiamo be there?

This doesn’t interest You, does it?

I know, I know, You’re busy saving lives in Sudan. Never mind.

Part 2

The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Jeremiah 17:9

Last night Mamokgheti Sesing of Vukani News told the world that a mob of twenty South African men set a street of shops belonging to a community of Somalians in Sechaba township alight. In addition, three young Somalian girls were stoned to death, and many families had to flee their homes. They showed a woman who’d been beaten by the crowd crying outside her ashen store, her children staring wide-eyed into the camera.

I called Nyasha immediately, but she didn’t answer. It was perhaps a blessing, because I had no idea what I was going to say. When I went to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning, I heard her crying on the phone, telling her mother, far away in the UK, that she was afraid to open her mouth in public places in case people heard she was foreign and hurt her, too.

I was angry. How could we be so savage, so cruel, so inhumane? What kind of people are we?

I wanted to make things better. I set my alarm and resolved to tell Nyasha in the morning that those murderers didn’t represent the ordinary South African.

They were criminals, mobsters, lowlifes. But as the thought entered my mind, I knew it was a lie. I thought of Ma, how she frowns every time I mention Nyasha and refuses to try the food she’s cooked. Ma—church-going, God-fearing, people-loving Ma.

I remembered laughing myself in first-year varsity when Zanele called them all oorkants and refused to share a dorm room with one because she said they smelled of menstrual blood.

So when Nyasha walked into the kitchen this morning, eyes all puffed up, sclera bloodshot, I pretended not to notice. I acted like it was just another Thursday morning and played dumb.

Of course I’m ashamed. But it’s not our fault. It’s the white people’s fault, Lord. Everything is. They taught us to hate ourselves. They made us like this. We weren’t like this before they came. This is not the way we would have been if they hadn’t come and messed everything up for everyone.

Throughout the day the TV has been ablaze with burning shacks, burning shops, and burned people. The streets are crawling with bloodthirsty men calling for foreigners to leave the country. Nyasha came home a

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