Daria's day

She took the Noordhoek barn call at five in the morning with the new housing still screaming and her left hand still taped. The boomslang was in the rafters above a stack of hay bales and she should have cleared the floor first, but her boot caught the back of a rake someone had left leaning against the wall and the handle swung up like a pendulum and cracked her across the taped left hand, splitting the wound the Day Hospital had been waiting to drain and spraying a thin red line across the hay and across her cuff. She did not stop to dab it. She kept the hook up and talked it down in a voice she had not realised she remembered — `staan stil, klein ding` — until the bag was over the head and the second clamp was on. She sat on the hay bale for six minutes, blood dripping off her wrist into the dust, and the farmer's wife handed her a flannel she did not deserve.