by Kingsley Alumona. Image source: zexy-zwcom, on Pexels. Two hours before Bayo’s wedding, he received a call that unsettled him. He’d just been invited for an interview for a job that he applied for, ten months ago, the same month he met his about-to-be...
Fiction & CNF
Wish
by Chloë Reid. Photo with Permission by Daniel Futerman. Josh would like to be swallowed whole, but not to be alive once swallowed. Or to go in his sleep. Emma would like to be sitting in a chair, engaged in a long ebbing and flowing conversation with an old...
Burden
by David Mann. Auguste Rodin. Marsyas (Torso of The Falling Man). Permission: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Image Library: www.lacma.org for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.– Rainer Maria Rilke It was a...
Relapse
by Thabiso Tshowa “I am sorry, Nkele, but we ran the test several times. You can’t have kids,” said Dr Mosala with a grim face, seated behind her huge pine desk in her office. Looking at her wedding ring and the pictures of her, and her happy family, I...
A Waiting Room
by Rory Kilalea. Rhodesia is to become Zimbabwe after a bitter bush war. Britain has sent personnel to join the Commonwealth Monitoring Force to oversee a peaceful transition. This is a story from the time. # The waiting room was packed with women. Some with...
Composer at Large – Fictional Diary-Memoir – Excerpt from Entry ‘Sex under Apartheid’
by John Simon My life at this time was a wild and exciting one. Johannesburg was a self-assured, if highly dislocated city, with a citizenry that talked only about money. Crime had yet to become a topic of conversation. In 1979 trams and buses set off en masse from...
Vice City
by Thabiso Tshowa “Hey, you, scrap boy! You’re dirtying our town,” said a teenage boy as he kicked my trolley, which tipped to its side so that all the scrap fell out. As I tried to pick them up, another one poured beer on my head. “Crawl back to whatever rat hole you...
Irony of Life
by Yandisa Krobani Captain Mthethwa gazed at Mr Bhengu, seated on the opposite side of the table, where he could see both of the man’s arms. He looked blanky at the captain. The walls of the interrogation room were cream and dingy. Its claustrophobic atmosphere could...
In the foyer of the Market
by Brent Quinn. Excerpt from Fade to Black, a memoir of sorts. South Africa – the eve of our first democratic election. It’s an epistemic shift. The liberation heroes are free, and instantly we’re in a new country. Apartheid’s curse has lifted and miraculously,...
Extract from “The Birds know the postman”
by Mxolisi Nyezwa The room at Livingstone hospital where I was now detained felt completely weird and exceedingly cold as if we – the doctor with a lisp, my mother who stood or sat in a chair nearby, the ill looking nurse, and myself – were all trapped inside a big...