Two Things Face Down on the Bedside

The Jiffy bag was hand-delivered. That is the part that sticks in my teeth. Anyone could have posted it. They chose to put a person at my gate at 07:12.

Father's cousin. I read the typed cover sheet twice before the surname did anything to me. I stood on the bakkie doorstep with the kettle on inside and the August bite-file watching from the fridge. The bite-file and the new folder are neighbours now. I did not move the pin.

I climbed through my own tailgate at Bellville like a stolen dog. The guard took a photo. The woman at the counter remembered me from a 2024 mamba callout — I want to be remembered from that, from being useful, not from being the woman panting under her own bumper. She said fourteen days. Not escalated yet. Fourteen days.

Wikus and Pieter are named in the body. I have not decided yet whether I am angrier at them or at him. I am angrier at him. The cousin. He lives in a house my father paid for, on a road I used to walk to school. He sat at a typewriter and put my name into a complaint about a gravid female I released after the August bite, properly, with the right paper, and he knows nothing about it, and he does not want to.

Photo face-down on the bedside. Complaint folded under it. Two things I am not looking at, stacked. The man from Citrusdal sent a photo of his dogs. I left it on seen. That felt correct. I am building the wall faster today. Fourteen days.