ASHRAF JAMAL

When he clears his office he puts the videotapes in a black bag. The letters on the bag read CDG, a clothing company. He’d bought her a dress at the CDG branch in Antwerp when he’d stopped to see his mother and sisters en route back from a conference in Arles. Two years later he still has the bag.

DAVID MANN

On a Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in line at the Randburg Licensing Department, and thinking. I was thinking about ambition and about inertia. About how humans, like sharks and water and old cars, need to keep moving for risk of stagnating or expiring.

KELETSO MOPAI

The moment you take off your night gown at dawn, you know today is the last day at the market. No longer will you sell your mother’s tomatoes in the sun while women your age sneered and men bigger than your father whistled at you. You are leaving the country; you tell your family.

CHLOË REID

The key for the guardhouse is attached to the panic button in a mug in the top drawer of the dresser in the hall. You’ll need this key if you want to read the Business Day, which is delivered there every morning except on Sundays. If you don’t collect the newspaper, they’ll begin to pile up.

ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ

Isaac Mogale is seven years old. The other boys in the flats play soccer in the street, but they don’t want him to play because he cries when they knock him down. Of course, being younger, he is smaller, not as strong, not as fast as them, but, hell, they are making life hard for a kid who is keen.

MXOLISI NYEZWA

Saturdays we kids went to the downtown music shop to buy new records of our favourite musicians. I was not aware at that time how white folks despised us hunger ravaged
kids. I was always scared of white men. Something in their confident strides and the bulky swagger of their bodies warned me to keep my distance.

JARRED THOMPSON

It was still dark when Themba Modise woke up, entered the kitchen and found there to be no electricity to boil water for his coffee. He sat down at the kitchen counter and watched the morning light lap up the remaining puddles of night, knowing he’d have to wake his family up soon.

LINDIWE NKUTHA

My initial thought, and my impression when reading the anthology ‘Hauntings’ was that when most people think about hauntings, they usually think of the idea in the negative sense. As in one haunted by ghouls, or evil spirits, or sadness or a malady. The lesser explored form of hauntings, it occurred to me, was the idea of hauntings as positive sensation.