The Math I Refuse to Do

The insurance bounced on the third and I paid it from the venom float like it was nothing. Like that money was always meant to be split three ways: snakes, me, and whatever keeps the bakkie legal. I keep a separate float for drops because I do not trust the bank accounts to stay clean when a job goes wrong and I need to disappear for a week into the Tankwa. That float is the only honest thing in my financial life. Today I dipped into it for a bounced debit. I am calling that a lesson instead of a failure and I am not going to think about why the lesson keeps arriving in the same shape every few months.

The Durbanville Spar parking lot. I sat there and read the SMS and thought: he is not here. The silver watch man was not at the Bellville job and he was not on the way to Durbanville and I drove two hours today in clear Karoo light and nobody watched me kneel on a kitchen floor holding a dead brown snake while a man I had never met filmed me laugh at myself. Nobody. That is a sentence I am going to need to keep saying until I believe it.