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was spilt – but the vividness of the colour (Fresh Crimson), like leaked oil paint – it was as if it had come alive and advanced on her, misting her vision and strangling her: and that unforgettable assailing metallic smell. An avalanche of a thousand copper spheres.
    ‘Nothing? Not one lead?’ presses Keke.
    ‘If they have one, they’re not sharing it. All I know is what they said upfront, that it looks like it was a house robbery gone wrong. Looks like it was two guys who broke in. Something about bullet trajectories and blood spatter.’
    Keke frowns at her. She knows it must sound bizarre to hear someone talk so technically about the murder of her own parents. But Keke knows that Kirsten doesn’t cry. She describes Kirsten as ‘immune to face-melting.’
      ‘There will definitely be some kind of … forensic evidence. Crime scenes of botched burglaries are usually teeming with the stuff.’
    The bodies had looked like jointed paper dolls, the vintage ones you dress with paper clothes, 2D. Her father’s body drawn as if he were a runner in a comic book.  A big red bloom over his heart. Her mother, unusually pious, hands secured in prayer position with a bracelet of black cable-tie (Salted Liquorice). A small hole in her head. Both lying on their sides, their waxen faces resting on the dull, dirty carpet.
    There is a cool palm on Kirsten’s arm and she flinches, looks up and blinks past the pictures in her head.
    ‘Are you okay? I’m sure you’re still very shaken up, it hasn’t even been –’
    ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’
    ‘You shouldn’t be alone. Where’s Marmalade?’
    ‘It’s been long enough.’
    ‘Long enough? It hasn’t even a month, Kitty Cat. The last time I saw you was at the funeral, for God’s sake.’
    They sit in silence. The funeral: twin coffins and the cloying scent of lilies. Pollen stains on white tablecloths. Clammy hugs.
      ‘Zim,’ says Kirsten. ‘James is in Zimbabwe, at that new clinic.’
      ‘Then who is all this healthy food for?’ she asks, motioning at the toppling fruit bowl and vegetable stand.
    For thirteen years James has tried to stud Kirsten’s junk food diet with healthy alternatives. If she was going to eat that CaraCrunch, then she should have a low-fruc Minneola, too. Slap chips? The mitigating snack was a handful of edamame. He would tempt her with fresh chilli gazpachos, honeyed veg-juices spiked with galangal, wild salmon salami. He ate as if he could reverse the diseases he saw in the world.
      ‘He always stocks up the house before he goes, hoping I’ll run out of junk and resort to eating some kind of plant matter. He says we should buy shares in Bilchen and then at least we’ll have money for the double bypass surgery I’ll need one day.’
    Bilchen is the Swiss-owned megacorp that produces the majority of processed food in the world: cheap, tasty, and full of unpronounceable ingredients. In addition to their plants in China and Indonesia they own hundreds of factories in SA, producing mountains of consumables, from food to hygiene products to pet snacks.
    When James sees her eating something like her staple Tato-Mato crispheres he would say to her: ‘You know that there is no actual food in there, right?’ and she would laugh her fake laugh to annoy him, and lick her fingers. Point at the pictures on the foil packet and say: ‘Tato-Mato, Doctor Killjoy. It’s made out of potatoes and tomatoes. A vegetable and a fruit. You heard it here first,’ and he would shake his head as if Kirsten was beyond help.
    Bilchen was perennially in the news for one scandal or another. Anti-freeze contamination in their iguana food, horse-DNA in their schmeat rolls, sweat-shopping kids in Sri Lanka, big bad GMO. They owned so many brands that they could just kill whichever had caused the controversy and re-label their product, market it as ‘new’ to hook the early adopters, and deep-discount it to the couponers. The leftovers would feed the