Everything Lost Is Found Again

At what point does perception become reality

At what point does perception become reality?

But that lavish sunset is lighting the world on fire, so we scramble on undaunted, hoping to leave our incomprehensible tracks for whatever beasts come after. We’ll leave them hypothesizing about our glorious unimaginable plumage, guessing all our colors wrong.

I ask him, thinking about ‘M’e Khauhelo and her willow switch—prized for its thin, elegant form, its superior firmness, its tightness of recoil—which she slices down across the open palms of small girls who have violated the dress code

A darkness crept over the surface of the mountain, engulfing shrub and gulley, plunging shepherd and flock into gloom and swallowing our hut. Deliberate and sentient and enormous.

Across the gorge, we can see dark torrents of rain moving inexorably toward us. The setting sun lights up the storm clouds with gaudy, spectacular color. Rainbows span the entire breadth of town, and up ahead that familiar sign: Kena ka khotso.

I stare dumbly, then walk home with my ice cream melting in the sun.

Soon Limpho is not gaunt but wasted, her health bending exponentially in the wrong direction

When I come in the following week, she can barely walk across the room, her face drawn, her eyes absent their color.

But tonight we are walking out along the gorge, watching the sunset soften the jagged clefts of the earth, the falling light now charging the landscape with strange cryptozoological power. Across the river, the hills have taken on the appearance of massive beasts slumped against the land, dozing in Mesozoic slumber—fantastical creatures with thick furred hides, no known kingdom or phylum.