The Night Veld

outside, on a spread of lawn behind the fishpond, the thick heat of the day finally lifting. tender pepper chicken, a splash of water, the old man talking in his low, gravelly drone. the same stories I’ve heard all my life, looping in the quiet air.

dinner with grandfather.

pockets of cropped moonlight break along the brick wall, and the fish move slow in the black water. Somewhere a cricket starts up, then the whole night takes over. for a moment the yard feels still, isolated, and quiet under the southern sky.

but then the Ridgebacks erupt, a savage snarling at a snake in the black Kikuyu grass, sudden, wet violence in the dark, flashing teeth, a sharp hiss, grandfather half-rising and swearing into his napkin.

and just like that, the gate opens.

the night veld slides right into another night veld, a patch of dark ground far away on the border. Garth, gone since ’81, dropped in an instant, arriving in an instant, the way he always does, the way he always will.

National service,
his name was Garth Henderson,
a single bullet.