Week Three 

The fluorescent bathroom lighting emaciates the instructions on the pregnancy test so viciously I must squint. It says to wait five minutes, so I start to make breakfast. I bash an egg on the corner of the table and frown when the yolk bleeds through my fingers. I’ve never been good with fragile things. Eggs, houseplants, overpriced canvases, egos, flowers, ceramic vases, porcelain, children. I ruined so many of my grandmother’s antiques when I was a child that my mother theorised that maybe it wasn’t all accidental bumping, that maybe I just liked the sound things made when they broke. I think that’s partly why Thando, my sister, bought me plastic wine cups for my 30th birthday. Jay and I were in the middle of a Shuga episode, the cadence of my neighbour’s mediocre rendition of a Violin Sonata No. 5 seeping through my ceiling, when it hit me how backhanded the whole gesture was.

“Does she think I’m a child? That I can’t be trusted with fucking glass? I can be

trusted with fucking glass, Jay.”

Before I could ignite it, he’d snatched the cigarette from between my teeth, crushed it between his fingers, and dusted off the tobacco breadcrumbing his lap. His father had died of cancer the Christmas prior. I told him not to father me and he countered with something along the lines of: Then don’t act like a child. The tiff avalanched into arguments about other things, like how jealous he gets over my Tinder notifications and how reckless I get with my drunk calls, until it all exploded into loud makeup sex.

When he left later that night, I watched him swipe my red lipstick off his mouth with the back of his hand as he got into an Uber that would take him to a nearby McDonald’s where his Audi was probably parked in a disabled parking spot because he believes having mild autism warrants it. Secretly, I enjoyed him showing in small ways that he was terrified to lose me. It was crazy to think how just a year prior he was calling me sis and giving one of his groomsmen a thumbs up while I got dipped to the serenade of ‘I (Who has nothing)’ at his wedding reception.

The soil on the tile evades the in-between of my toes as I flake the dust specks on each foot behind its opposite ankle, reversing to angle myself to picture the eggs and intentionally half-burnt Russian sausage. Lighting must be right. Must look natural enough to look effortless, but not effortless enough to look too natural. #Relatable #WhatAreYouGonnaDo #LOL #Englishbreakfast #DayInMyLife #Aesthetic. It takes three seconds for the picture to get its first like and I realise I’m full, so I stash the untouched plate in the fridge along with the rest. 

I grab the test off the bathroom sink and feel the pink line stiffen my body into a screenshot. Thumb hovering over Jay’s name, I convince myself that calling the person you’ve been sleeping with at a time like this seems like the natural verdict, that it’s the right thing to do. But then I remember that he’s married to my sister and nothing about this was ever ‘right’ to do. I lose by technicality. 

When I call the doctor’s office, I feel the receptionist’s smile and hear the humming of her AC as well as the cluster sounds of a toddler yet to find its vowels. Through my ‘Yes, tomorrow. 10 am? Perfect.’ I try to communicate so much: surety, casualty, and commitment, though her chirpy monotone offers no assurance that I’m successful. 

Week Six

Dr. Lombard’s words still hound me, relentless as a bounty hunter. They find me when I’m jogging, while I’m vlogging at Starbucks, as I finger the dusty edge of the Reader’s Wearhouse Y/A bookshelf, amidst my dissociating into the oil seething my pan and crisping the bacon, as I’m skimming YouTube comment sections, while watching red and blue News24 headline bands about stage 7 load-shedding swipe across my TV. 

What are you hoping for?

The question felt precooked, like something she dished out to all pregnant patients without much thought or genuine sentimentality. I said nothing; she looked up like this was the first time she was noticing me in her office. Moments of awkward silence soundtracked by the ticking of her analogue and the muffled screaming of a child I, for no particular reason, concluded to be teething, passed before she said I seemed like a sweet young lady that would make a good mother. She nodded a sensitive smile over her clipboard and mentioned weighing my options, the kind of nodding and smiling when you know you will never see that patient in your office ever again. She must’ve been surprised when I returned less than a week later, tail between my legs like a prodigal son.

Two days prior to this second visit, Jay had been taking the trash out when the bag ripped and sprawled a debris of used bottles, bubble wrap, eggshells, five positive pregnancy tests, shards of an antique vase, shabby PR boxes, and other garbage, all over my doorstep. He asked me if I did it on purpose and then slammed the door so hard on his way out that my windowsill peace lily flinched. 

That night, I drowned myself in the Cabernet Sauvignon he’d bought me for Valentine’s Day and wailed like a banshee, possible versions of our next conversation circling my head in a death march. 

I considered how he says grace when we eat, how he got married in a church, and how he recreationally reads me the Bible; I could already see him weaponizing Exodus 21:22-25 like a crucifix-shaped dagger meant to guilt me into motherhood. He’d make me sign an NDA and move me to another city, probably somewhere influencer-friendly like Johannesburg so I wouldn’t have to quit my job and be completely dependent on him. He’d visit thrice a year; each airport teddy bear bigger than the last. The three of us would go to malls and parks barbed with chains of hand-holding nuclear families and oak trees with missing cat posters. We’d take turns on the expression swings, flying and beaming like something out of an OUTsurance family cover ad. Jay and I would dote on the kid’s ugly wax-crayoned family portraits and get into fights whenever I tried to take pictures. We’d part with a kiss each time.

I also thought about how worldly and feminist he is and how I begged him not to marry Thando and threatened to never speak to him again, and how he did it anyway and called her the best thing that ever happened to him in his speech. I could picture him taking me to the abortion clinic himself, then. It would be one out of town. He’d be with me all the way, holding my hand partly for comfort, partly to be sure I didn’t run off. He wouldn’t stay for the aftercare, but he’d text frequently and let me squander his UberEats credits on comfort food. He wouldn’t say I love you but I’d feel it.

When I found blood in my underwear the morning after he left, I called an Uber immediately, suspicious the alcohol and 20-pack Stuyvesant had done what I’d intended it to. Dr Lombard complimented my pyjama pants and giggled when I apologised for looking like I’d just gotten out of bed. I thoughtlessly dubbed the dot on the monitor a ‘she’ and we exchanged a look.

“Maybe lay off the cigarettes and alcohol until you’re sure what you want to do,” Dr Lombard advised, cheeks pinched in a perpetual scarlet that paints her in a permanent state of embarrassment. “Everything looks fine though. She’s still there.”

When Jay called last night his voice was riddled with uncertainty, rife with worry. I could almost smell his sweat as though it were permeating the phone line.  It was comforting. A needed reminder that I wasn’t as inconsequential as your average mistress.

“Meet me at the park. Noon,” he finally said.

So now I wait on an aged bench stamped with dried pieces of gum. I can’t help but observe the beautiful little girl with pink pins studding her mane. Her mother watches on from a nearby bench; one hand gripping Love In, Love Out while the other gets its nails gnawed on like a chew toy. She flinches, soundlessly gasping as the child hops from plaything to plaything like a caffeinated bunny naïve to the breaking of bones and tearing of muscles. This little bunny reminds me of Thando way back when. 

When Jay arrives, it’s 12:45; he sits on the opposite end of the bench, eyes fixed ahead like everyone here knows we’re not meant to be talking. An unruly curl or two pokes out of his nestled hair as if conspiring to spring off and go rogue. He got teased for it in primary and high school. His mother refused to let him straighten, cut, or manipulate it in any way, because she said it reminded her of his father, whom Jay had never known beyond their living room pictures and the giggly, teary-eyed anecdotes when she’d had too much wine. Needless to say, the Jewfro was a hit in university. That’s how he got me. But then he lost me, or I lost him (for no established or verbalised reason). All I know is one semester we were talking about getting matching tattoos and the next we were dating and sleeping with other people, our interactions limited to cordial waves across campus and slight nods at parties. 

I like to think that he fell for Thando as a way to get closer to me. He’d been searching for me in every girl he met and thought he loved in the intervening years, and when he finally met my sister at a random aquarium, my sister who I’ve been told I bear resemblance to by two people (one, a pothead of a shopkeeper and the other, an aunt with Jameson-tinged breath), he thought ‘this is as close as I’m gonna get’ and settled. But if that were all true, I’d probably be the one with the ring on my finger. 

“What do you wanna do with it?” he asks. 

Hearing him say it sends a lump tumbling down my throat so hard it sizzles like lava on the frosted floorboard of my chest.

I’ve fantasised about him tossing and turning next to Thando, eyes raw and bloodshot, head heavy with questions no husband wants to have to ask themselves. I  dreamt of him noticing Pampers billboards, and finding a glint of me in every pregnant woman he sees. 

When Thando called crying this morning, I willed to have been a fly on the wall when that pregnancy test came back negative for the tenth time this month on the slight chance that I could’ve heard him mutter “why can’t you be more like your sister?” under his breath.

“I’m married, Karabo. To your sister”

“I’m aware.”

He crouches forwards and folds his hands as if about to sink into prayer. Our brief silence is barely fractured by the disembodied voice gently yelling instructions amid the fleet of downward-dogged humming yogis and the laughter of the little bunny and her new friend swinging on the monkey bars. 

“Look,” he says, “even if I did want it––”

“But you don’t.”

“I never said that.”

“It’s fine, Jay. I’m not delusional. I wasn’t expecting you to leave your wife—for us to run off into the sunset.” 

“If I hadn’t found out like I did, would you have ever told me?”

“I guess that would’ve been the right thing to do.”

He opens his mouth as if about to speak, but instead lets out what sounds like a sigh, or an exasperated chuckle. 

I clear the phlegm in my throat and dig a cigarette out of the pack in my purse. 

He plucks the cigarette from between my lips. I almost retaliate thinking he’s about to crush it, but instead he takes a drag and then passes it back. We do this until a huddle of cig buds are nestled at our feet, our shoulders barely kissing. As we savour the last one with smaller drags, I catch a glint of the sun pinching his peach skin a deep salmon, peppering him with chestnut freckles. 

God, he’s beautiful. I might miss us.

Week Twelve 

It’s Thursday when I go to the clinic. The lining of dirt under my fingernails looks especially repulsive under waiting room lighting, like I crawled over here. I bury them into my fists and catch the eyes of the flushed white girl sitting across from me. We exchange nervous smiles because hugging would be weird. She swipes away at her iPhone and picks at the bump on her chin, strawberry-blonde hair tangling her white headsets and the zipper of her brown jacket. It’s scorching outside; how did she know it would be cold in here? Maybe it isn’t her first time. I wonder if the antiseptic and metallic tang gets any less nauseating the more you visit.

It’s so quiet that not even the AC hums, it just rotates soundlessly, its breeze biting at the back of the receptionist’s neck. The walls here are bare and white. A starching contrast to Dr Lombard’s magenta waiting room decorated with portraits of spit-smeared babes with fists in their mouths, and a plump receptionist with a perpetual smile.

When it’s done, the crucifix dangling on the neck of the soft nurse with the name tag reading Bernice, gawks, accusatory as I reach over to help pick up the fallen empty kidney bowl and other instruments that clatter like cutlery. 

Bernice refuses to let me help and when she calls me selfless and puts her hands on my shoulders, I almost choke on her Pink Happiness body spray that slingshots me back to 2006. Ma coddling seventeen-year-old Thando like a baby after finding her curled up in a foetal position, fat shards of blood and placental tissue leaking between her legs, blotching our woven carpet. For a month after that, Thando spent nights weeping like a teething child when she thought we couldn’t hear her, only for her to be up by 7 the next morning, pouring soft porridge into three zinc bowls and being extra careful with the rusted teapot as per usual. 

Ma and I never interrupted her crying, nor would we dare to address it the next morning. We’d let the matter linger, never pausing from sucking the chicken scraps between our teeth or slurping the morning coffee steaming our mugs to acknowledge it. It crammed our house like an elephant that would later shrink and morph into another furniture piece; unregarded, like cheap perfume you eventually get used to.

When Ma had found out Thando was pregnant, she’d told her everything would be alright, cupping her shrill jaw as if begging to be cut. When she’d caught me kissing a boy behind the church at the unripe age of fifteen, she’d dragged me to get tested for every STD under the sun. The nurses were my neighbours and people I frequented the same taxis with. Their whispers returned to me as rumours that I had AIDS and bets placed over how long before I’d be seen treading township streets with a swollen belly and a baby’s clinic card where my matric certificate should be. 

I couldn’t lash out at Ma so I rebelled against her favourite in small ways. Like by not telling her she was spotting on her powder blue tunic, and letting her miss the alarm the morning of her English matric exam, and giving her the wrong varsity application due dates. When Thando introduced me to Jay at their engagement party two years ago, every ounce of nerve evaporated from my body. Not many things blister like the humiliation of realising you’ve lost a game to someone so seemingly unaware that they were playing.

When Jay pretended not to know me, like he hadn’t spent his first year studying my body like it was his major, like he hadn’t made plans to introduce me to his cousins, like we’d never used toothbrushes interchangeably, I went with it. I figured he wanted to spare Thando the awkwardness of it all. He didn’t know telling her would’ve made no difference. He didn’t know his fiancée treated my boyfriends like hand-me-downs to be colonised the second I wasn’t looking. 

If I’d told him about how her teen pregnancy had been by Lance, a boy she knew I was madly in love with, he would have laughed. If I’d told him said boy was twenty years old he might’ve dubbed her a victim. And if I’d told him she was the architect, that she’d sent me out on a falsified errand to get him alone, that the whole fiasco was an orchestration by a calculated temptress camouflaging as an ingénue…he would’ve called me mad. 

Once I’ve changed out of my green paper gown, Bernice calls me sweetie and recommends I call someone. “A friend, or family member––someone to just stay by you for the next 24 hours or so.” The warmth of her voice blunts the tense air. I envy her children. 

When I get home, I pause to take my shoes off at the door. This house looks like a cold, uninhabited clutter of immaculate white furniture when it’s clean. More viewing house than home. Thando arrives in mom jeans and an oversized Orlando Pirates t-shirt I recognize from Jay’s varsity side chair. Then I remember the last time we had a conversation in person was at her dress rehearsal when she called me fat for not fitting into the dress her seamstress had cut from incorrect measurements. I swore on our mother’s grave I wouldn’t attend the wedding. We barely spoke when I did. 

I don’t care anymore, but are we supposed to still be angry at each other? I’m unsure so I hold my hand out for a handshake like you would with a stranger. She ignores it and walks past me to wordlessly fluff the pillows on my couch before putting the kettle on. The grey clouds creeping up under her eyes make her look like she’s losing a battle to anaemia. 

Moments of her wordlessly bending down to look under the couches and the TV stand have passed when she  hands me a steaming cup of tea.

“How was the murder? I mean abortion?” she asks, the corners of her mouth tugging into a canine smile.

Catholic asshole. “Successful.”

“My husband’s not taking it well, if you care to know.”

A gulp of steaming rooibos halts in my throat mid-swallow, scorching me into a cough.

“What?”

“You didn’t seriously think I was that gullible, did you?” she says removing and replacing couch seats. “Random Tinder hook-up my ass.”

“How did you find out?” 

“Well, he always smells like you. That gross mixture of Kiwi polish and Glade strawberry air freshener,” Thando says. “Plus, I’ve been following him for months.”

I try to analyse her voice for any hint of fury, or sadness, or disappointment, but nothing.

She finally finds the remote and sifts through channels until she lands on Mzansi Magic. 

The leather of the couch clamps to my skin as I sit up to readjust myself. We watch Harriet Khoza wail a knife at Shaka and exhale tiny, synchronised giggles when she slashes his arm ever so slightly. Teeth churning like my insides, I play with the loose thread of the Guns & Roses crop-top I stole from her closet, as the episode ends in a shootout at a wedding. Thando notices my goosebumps and passes me a blue fleece blanket. 

“You done with that?” she side-eyes the empty mug I’ve spent the past forty-five minutes nursing. When I don’t respond she takes it from me and heads to the kitchen, returning with a 5 KG tub of blueberry ice-cream and two steel scoops in hand.

“You’re not mad?”

She pops the lid open and stabs into the tub with her scoop, tossing the other one into my lap. Her eyes carry the expression of a dead tv channel. 

“Such happens all the time with us. I should’ve thought of an explanation for it by now but there never is one, is there?”

“So, what now?” The walls of my throat are raw and dry, like I’ve been screaming or repressing a clawed thing trying to scramble out of my mouth. The ice cream eases it.

“I drain his ass of everything he has in court. The prenup calls for it,” she says. And then, as if able to read my mind, she answers, “I’m not sure how I’m gonna get back at you yet. I considered cutting the breaks in your car, but then I thought, ‘what if she’s a born again and goes straight to heaven?’”

I giggle then, a laugh so quiet and sharp it stabs at my abdomen.

“Is this how you felt when I got with Lance and them?”

“Probably.”

“I would’ve never known. You handled it well.”

“I guess repressed female rage runs in the family.” 

She laughs then, half-choking on a scoop of ice cream. I grab the remote and press until we decide on The Conjuring. 

“I can’t believe he actually made you do it,” she says. “Didn’t think he had it in him.”

“He didn’t. My body, my choice, remember?” The words come out garbled by the ice cream melting in my mouth.

Somewhere between Sadie’s death and Carolyn Perron’s possession, a What to Expect notification pings on my cracked screen.  ‘28 Weeks to go!’ Today my baby should’ve been the size of a lime. 

Limbs overlapping under the shared blanket, Thando and I hold it like it’s a grudge when the scenes get scary, gasps and screams of horror spilling out of mouths where apologies should be, because there’s no way to say I’m sorry when you aren’t.  

About the Author:

Matshediso Radebe is a South African fiction writer who enjoys writing character-based stories that explore interesting and often troubled relationships. She won the SA Writers College Short Story Competition in 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Instagram: khantri_xo

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay