Three short and the joh

The assistant's hand was on my waist for half a second longer than a count and I stepped out of reach without turning my head. That is the only move I made right today. Everything else I either survived or got wrong.

I am three animals short. Hendrik paid me anyway, in cash, blue ink on the slip, and the cash is on the kitchen counter under the kettle because the photograph is still there and I am not moving it. I have not looked at him properly — at Wikus Smit, at the man in the frame. I keep meaning to. I keep reaching for the kettle instead.

The sentence that is running is this: your pa used to bring snakes through here, joh. Twenty years on a CB and the buyer said it in my father's old radio voice, like Wikus Smit was still on air somewhere in the Northern Cape and the signal had just come in clear. The joh. The casual joh. Like the door is still open and I am still someone's kid and I did not spend a whole life learning how to close it.

The buyer knew. That is the part I cannot stop chewing. The buyer watched me unload two gravid cobras in his parking lot and his assistant put a hand on me while I was counting and the buyer said joh and I took the cash and drove south with the radio off and Wikus Smit's name running through every breath like a second pulse.

The bruise is darker. I looked at it in the bathroom. I do not want to do the arithmetic of whose elbow that was, mine or his, but I am getting good at arithmetic I did not ask to learn.