cassidy 
He’s writing about storytelling, about nostalgia, about the passing of time, about families. Personal things edged with poignancy. But it’s not until I read the defining line that I realise the relevance
The road before me was slick with mud and steeply cambered on either side. I turned off the radio, suddenly too loud; tightened my grip on the steering wheel, suddenly too smooth; and licked my lips, suddenly too dry.
Seventeen-oh-two. Seventeen-oh-two-twenty-seventeen. Ones and sevens and zeros and twos. Numbers I’m familiar with: they’ve designated my birthday for 31 years. 17 February 2017. I woke up early this morning at home with Almond cat
To get here, pick up the N3, heading east from Johannesburg towards Durban. There are shortcuts that bypass the tolls, but if the traffic’s not too bad, it’s easiest just to stick to the highway. Depending on the season, the road is flanked by mielies, sunflowers
Not long after I moved into my first house – my own house, one that was neither my childhood home nor the university residence I shared with other post-adolescent girls – I found a running route I loved. I would turn
No one knew where I was when I fell asleep that night, alone in a green tent in a small village with a name I couldn’t pronounce. I’d spoken about going south, but the rain was torrential, visibility nil, and after 35km and some map-and-soul
His voice pulls me back from the depths into which I am sinking: “Is she gone?” My eyes snap open, the edges of my vision feel blackened and blurred, and I have the sensation that the rest of my body is submerged in a dark, bottomless ocean, with only
Another warm, blue-skied autumn day swallows Johannesburg whole. I have been back in South Africa for two weeks and it has been a little over a year since I first arrived in Toronto – on a similarly warm, blue-skied day. Johannesburg’s autumn and Toronto’s spring
From the top, the world is two-tone: blanketed by the whiteness of snow, ice and clouds below, an inverted bowl of the sharpest blue above. At the back of my throat, a cough-inducing coating that, to my mind, has the colour, consistency and taste of