The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

“Walaikumsalaam,” Doctor says, turning his head to see who is talking as he pushes himself out of that other time, sets his mind like someone adjusting his watch to the current time zone.

IN THEIR APARTMENT Sana feels squashed and caught in corners. Walls present themselves to her suddenly and thrust her into the bedroom or toss her into the kitchen, or sometimes she finds herself being pushed and pushed until she is out of the apartment completely and standing in the original house. It is there that the pushing and pulling abruptly

In an old wardrobe a djinn sits weeping. It whimpers and murmurs small words of complaint. It sucks its teeth and berates the heavens for its fate. It curses the day it ever entered this damned house. It closes its eyes and tries to imagine a time before it came here, before it followed the sound of stars from the shore, before the world turned dar

Eventually she begins to disappear into furniture, against walls, her bare ends blending into things like the end of a brushstroke. Perhaps this is the reason they begin to forget that she is there; they cannot find her edges, the parts of her to pull out from the background to identify her by. They walk past her, talk through her, and are surprise

No one in Durban remembers a Christmas as hot as this. The heat is a living breathing thing that climbs through windows and creeps into kitchens. It follows people to work and at queues in the bank and on trains home. It crouches in bedrooms, growing restless until at night in fury it throttles those sleeping, leaving them gasping for breath. It sw

She accepts many things about him, like the fact that he lives by a collection of axioms of his making: Home can be a memory, rivers are more reliable than roads, and the ground keeps problems in. She accepts he will never be like the fathers she reads about, strong-minded and determined, wearing suits and cracking knuckles. She accepts that withou

She tries to smooth down the creases in her shirt with her hand and for a moment through the thin material she brushes the uneven skin of the scar running above her right hip. She stops suddenly then, and cautiously looks around, but nothing happens and, relieved, she leaves the room and enters the kitchen.