Daria's day

The Sea Point bachelor pad was on the fourth floor and the three men inside had been drinking since noon and the Cape cobra was under the bed. They did not stop talking while she worked — comments about her shoulders, her calves, the way her shirt pulled when she counted under her breath, the kind of comments that would have been over a beer in a bar and were not. She did not look up. She slid the hook in slow, eased the bag over the cobra's head on the third try, and the scale clip on the third ventral row told her it was one of Tertius Joubert's lost relocations — his mess in another man's flat. She clipped the second clamp with a click that sounded like the end of a sentence she had been writing in her head for an hour. Her phone lit up on the bed as she stood — a WhatsApp from a number without a name, three words: `i know where.` She took the cash the nearest man pressed into her hand, walked out past the third flatmate snoring in the corner, and did not exhale until the lift doors closed.