Zuko shrieked and cried and played with the light that appeared through the cracks above the door and where the roof failed to meet the walls of the house. Ash waited for his mother to silence the boy, to hold up her hand or to speak sharply, but Zuko was left just to be.
“Come here,” his mother told them. They stood and watched as she wrapped their sister’s stiff body in the red dress, covered it so her head vanished along with her arms, her legs, her little toes. It might have been a pound of potatoes she handed to Ash, or a drowned cat. “You carry her,” she said.
“Where to?”
Yanela remained silent, her mouth a line as she took Zuko by his hand and pulled him upright. She opened the door and led the boy out into the dry day. Ash followed with the weight of Honey’s body in his arms.
Yanela stopped at the small shed and opened it with her free hand. With the light that fell across the floor, the rats scattered. A spider’s web blinked. “There,” she said, “that spade over there, get it and we’ll take it with us.”
“But . . .” he held up the bundle that took up both of his arms. His mother looked at Zuko, and let his hand go for a moment. In one movement, quick and calculated, she entered the shed and grasped into the dark corner for the spade. Zuko didn’t try to run. She strode off towards the ground beyond the trees at the back of the house, determined, spade in one hand, while Zuko trailed like a small satellite at the end of the other. Ash followed with his burden to wherever his mother wanted them to go.
Yanela dug for the whole of the morning. Sweat dripped from her nose as the sun arced in the sky. She pushed rivulets from her forehead with the palm of her hand.
“Let me help you,” Ash told her.
“There’s only one spade. You might be growing, but I’m still stronger than you.” His mother glanced at him. “It won’t always be that way.”
“You think I’m slow?”
Zuko chased butterflies. He laughed at their wings in the light, and lay beside Ash on the ground to examine grains of sand between the blades of grass. Yanela dug.
“Why don’t we have a funeral for her?” Ash asked. His sister lay in a heap a way off, wrapped in the velvet dress, her hair spun out and mingling with the grass like dark cobwebs.
“There’s no money,” his mother said. “Funerals cost. All that food and drink. The whole community would want to come, or what’s left of it. I haven’t had work in months. I’m tired of talking to people.”
“You’re not like other people, Ma.”
“No, I’m not.”
“And we’re not like other families.”
“No,” Yanela said. “We’re not.”
Zuko approached Honey’s body and carefully pulled the fabric aside. Ash glimpsed his sister’s face, waxen and still and cold as a doll’s. His mother threw the spade aside, lurched herself out of the hole and grabbed Zuko by his wrist, stuck her finger close to his nose as if to chastise him, but then she stopped. She looked at him too long and pulled him to herself. She held him close and tight while Zuko’s forefinger wrapped itself in her hair, curling and turning it like a corkscrew, over and over until it was tight. He pulled his finger out and watched the coil bounce. He shouted and banged his head against her forehead. Yanela’s eyes smarted, but she swallowed her emotion for her child.
Zuko had been different with Honey. He had melted whenever she was near him. His cries would soften to a low-pitched moan, his eyes grew slow and sleepy. He liked to nuzzle his nose into her neck, or to lie with his head on her little belly. Now he looked at her body like a quizzical bird. Yanela sweated through her tears as she dug the grave a few metres away. “She’s dead,” Ash told him.
Yanela stopped. She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Quiet, Ash,” she said. “He doesn’t know what dead means.”
“Of course he does. He’s not an idiot.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“Maybe he thinks she’s sleeping.”
Zuko knelt, and stuck his face into his dead sister’s neck.
“Zuko! Don’t let him get too close, he’ll get sick as well. Move him away from there,” Yanela said. As quick as a hare, she was out of the hole. She dived towards his brother, scooping him up and carrying him across the pine needles and sandy floor to place him at Ash’s feet. Zuko laughed and flicked his fingers into the air, examining the spaces between. It was a game. He giggled and moved on all fours, pretending to be a monkey, back to his sister’s body. “For God’s sake! Get away from there. Ash, keep your brother away. I have to dig this hole.” There was no-one else to help his mother. When his sister was sick, Ash had cooked the rice and cut the vegetables from the patch outside while his mother had barely left Honey’s bedside. He’d dressed Zuko and combed his hair and kept him entertained outside to allow them both some sleep. He’d missed school many times. Then he stopped going altogether. Zuko did nothing but mess his pants and throw his food over the floor for Ash to pick up. Zuko was strong, too.
Ash moved with his brother to the base of a tree. He sat with Zuko as though he were a sack of corn, his arms across the boy’s chest, to keep him away from their dead sister. Their mother picked up the spade and went back to her hole. She dug. She looked at Ash and paused, mid-shovel. Zuko struggled to get free. “Don’t hold him so tightly – you’ll hurt him,” Yanela said.
Ash released him, and Zuko ran back to his sister. Their mother shouted at Ash and went to fetch the small boy and brought him back to the tree. The game went on, until the hole was dug. Back and forth, back and forth, Zuko and Ash, until their mother threw the spade across the ground and wiped her hands on the front of her pretty dress that was badly in need of a wash anyway. Ash noticed how the fabric fell on her legs and outlined them. They seemed too thin. “Come on, boys,” she said eventually. “It’s time to say goodbye to your sister.”
7.
The circle.
The circle was complete. It wasn’t one thing. The circle was many things in one, Zuko had discovered. CORN, OATS, RICE and WHEAT. If he had enough of them, placed them side by side on the table, they would go on forever. corn, oats, rice & wheat. Corn and oats the most tolerable, mostly round letters, but wheat! He couldn’t bring himself to look at that word too long. The spikes of the edges, the incompleteness, and where they ended in space. The circles that fell from the top of the box into the bowl, and the large splash of milk. The great big word across that meant “happy”. That made him happy, the letters mostly in purple, but the o was red and the i dotted with the circle of the cereal. And above it, his dead sister’s name. Honey.
“Those things can’t be good for you,” Ash said. Zuko turned the box to the side and stared at the small diagram of whole grain, with its labels of bran, endosperm and germ. By eating the circles, the germ might get into him and cause him some sickness too. But in the crunch of the circles that came from the packet there seemed to be no evidence of any kind of germ, or bran or endosperm either. Ash grabbed the box and looked at the price tag on the side. “Twenty-four rand! That’s crazy. Mal. You need to learn to eat toast.”
The day he realised he had no voice to speak with, no way to get what was locked in his head out into the world, was the day he realised too that any dream he might have was at risk of emerging stillborn. He gave over to the dreams that welled up from deep within him. He let go of the plans and hopes and ways of control. These, he thought, were not for him. At night, when the house was silent and he tried to sleep, the colours fell like arrows and