Eva Jackson: 0014

Durban remodelled: one huge hill of suburbs, long grass, strong winds, silent streets. Your family's house was halfway up or towards the top of the hill. It was built on a pronounced slope, a deck, a tree, and many cages with poultry birds inside. They moved, white, orange parts, spattered the mesh, looked at home. You came back and graffitied the cages, with words suggesting to the birds that it was about time they left. The cages or the city, not clear.

There was a party, I lost my phone, I bargained with a petty thief on the road to get it back or a similar one.
Higher up on the hill, J had also come back, his family lived there. His face scrunched up when he smiled at his mother. They tore up a log for firewood and found a corpse. As the question unfolded of how it had gotten there, a river opened up, flowing down from the top of the hill. I looked out over the slow drop and realised that it was an effort to stop denying, and to look at the sea. When I did, I was aware that I was meant to find it beautiful, or to be in awe. But I felt fear. Of falling, of being swallowed up, of the inconvenience of wet feet, of the breakers. They were encroaching on the land now, and the river leading down was rimmed by rushes, lying flat in the flow. The waves so distantly below were enormous, dark green, foaming and rolling.

When I was in Grade Eleven I met a girl at a poetry competition. She wrote of a feeling of cuspness, of waiting to meet, greet and taste "all the shades of the bitter sea".

At some point I was in the river, moving towards the sea, turning shallow corners.