Read Memory Wall: Stories for Free Online

herself up on her elbows from the bed and gives him a groggy smile. He sets still-sleeping Temba on her couch and the boy’s eyeglasses on the table beside him.
    On the walk to the Site C station Pheko sees a line of schoolgirls in navy-and-white uniforms, queuing to climb onto a white bus. Each wears a paper mask over her nose and mouth.He climbs the ramp and waits. Down in the grassy field below them forgotten concrete culverts lie here and there like fallen pillars from some foregone civilization, spray-painted with signs:
Exacta
and
Fuck
and
Blind 43
.
Rich Get Richer. Jamakota dies please help
.
    Trains shuttle to and fro like rattling beasts. Pheko thinks, Three more days.
    C ARTRIDGE 4510
    Alma seems more tired than ever. Pheko helps her climb out of bed at 11:30. A clear liquid seeps from her left eye. She stares into nothingness.
    This morning she lets Pheko dress her but will not eat. Twice an agent comes to show the house and Pheko has to shuttle Alma out to the yard and sit with her in the lounge chairs, holding her hand, while a young couple tools through the rooms and admires the views and leaves tracks across the carpets.
    Around two Pheko sighs, gives up. He sits Alma on the upstairs bed and screws her into the remote device and lets her watch cartridge 4510, the one he keeps in the drawer beside the dishwasher so he can find it when he needs it. When she needs it.
    Alma’s neck sags; her knees drift apart. Pheko goes downstairs to eat a slice of bread. Wind begins thrashing through the palms in the garden. “Southeaster coming,” says the kitchen television. Then ads flicker past. A tall white woman runs through an airport. A yardlong sandwich scrolls across the screen. Pheko closes his eyes and imagines the wind reaching Khayelitsha, boxes cartwheeling past spaza shops, plastic bagsslithering across roads, slapping into fences. People at the station will be pulling their collars over their mouths against the dust.
    After a few more minutes, he can hear Alma calling. He walks upstairs, sits her back down, and pushes in the same cartridge again.
    C HEFE C ARPENTER
    Friday Roger shepherds Luvo up a sidewalk in front of a different house than Alma Konachek’s, on the opposite side of the city. The house is wrapped by a twelve-foot stucco wall with broken bottles embedded in the top. Nine or ten eucalyptus trees stand waving above it.
    Roger carries a plastic sack in one hand with something heavy inside. At a gate he looks up at a security camera in a tinted bubble and holds up the sack. After perhaps ten minutes a woman shows them through without a word. Two perfumed collies trot behind her.
    The house is small and walled with glass. The woman seats them in an open room with a large fireplace. Above the fireplace is a fossil of what looks like a smashed, winged crocodile spiraling out of a piece of polished slate. All around the room, Luvo realizes, are dozens more fossils, hung from pillars, on pedestals, arrayed in a backlit case. Some of them are massive. He can see a coiled shell as big as a manhole cover, and a cross-section of petrified wood mounted on a door, and what looks like an elephant tusk cradled in golden braces.
    A moment later a man comes in and leans over the collies and scratches them behind the ears. Roger and Luvo stand. The man is barefoot and wears slacks rolled up to the ankles and asoft-looking shirt that is unbuttoned. A great upfold of fat is piled up against the back of his skull and a single gold bracelet is looped around his right wrist. His fingernails gleam as if polished. He looks up from the dogs and sits in a leather armchair and yawns hugely.
    “Hello,” he says, and nods at them both.
    “This is Chefe Carpenter,” Roger says, though it’s not clear if he is saying this to Luvo or not. Nobody shakes hands. Roger and Luvo sit.
    “Your son?”
    Roger shakes his head. The woman reappears with a black mug and Chefe takes it and does not offer Luvo or Roger anything.