Embrace by Mark Behr

room one day — the huge birds by then eating from my hand — Bok, whom I didn’t know was in the house, snuck down the passage and, before I knew what had struck me amidst the fluttering of hornbills, laid into me with his palm until I was screaming and begging for him to stop.
    I’ve told you a hundred times not to feed wild animals.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Bok,’ I hollered.
    We fine tourists for feeding them and here you sit! The game ranger’s son, feeding them in your own bedroom!’ I looked at Bok with pleading eyes. ‘How long,’ he growled, ‘before you have the elandeating from your hand! Until they gore a tourist, or one of your pet baboons rips out an old lady’s throat!’
    ‘I’m sorry, Bok.’
    ‘And the lying? How many times did your mother ask you whether you were feeding the hornbills? How many times did you lie to her?’
    ‘Twice, Bok.’
    ‘Twice too much! You never lie to your mother or to me, do you understand me? Do you ever, ever hear Lena or Bernice lying to Bokkie or to me?’ Licking the salty snot and tears from my lip, rubbing my bum, I shook my head.
    ‘This pot cannot be sold without a handle,’ Bokkie said in front of me in the footpath. ‘That’s one rand gone, flushed down the toilet. One rand that I don’t have.’ By now I felt sorry for her but could not imagine recanting and again being exposed as a liar. Later, I thought, if she was safely back in the house, I’d go and fetch the handle, say I had found it somewhere on the side of the path where we hadn’t looked.
    ‘Your father earns a hundred and twenty rand a month,’ she spoke from ahead of me as we made our way down the path. A rand is worth ten loaves of bread. That’s one-third of our bread money for the month.’Trailing a few steps behind, I cast a glance into the grass patch by the wayside where I had thrown the handle. Every now and again she stopped, turned over a fragment of wood or a stone with her sandal. Eventually, close to the gate and seeming near tears, she gave up, ‘I’ll just have to make two hundred extra surgical masks.’
    Instead of listening to the afternoon wireless serial with Bokkie, I returned with Suz to the grass along the footpath. I went through, inch by inch, trying to get Suz to help. There was no sign of the handle. I had cost my mother the equivalent of ten loaves of bread; had caused the labour equivalent of making two hundred surgical masks. In the long grass — now become sprawling fields where before I had seen only patches — every pebble, twig or piece of dung seemed for a second to be the handle, but was useless other than to fling in anger at thehornbills that now seemed set on tormenting me from the branches. The loathsome object was nowhere. I searched, eventually convincing myself that it must have been in a vast stretch of grass higher up, near the camp. I combed that. The handle had, I felt in despondent certainty, simply vanished. Maybe the plot of land where it had been flung was cursed by the Zulu witch doctors in the olden days. Maybe it was an old kraal or a burial ground and my tossing the handle onto the sacred ground had disturbed the ancestors.
    The wireless was on and Bokkie was listening to Die Geheim van Nantes. The one iron rested against the gas flame and with the other — a wad of cloth around its handle — she was pressing the tissue of another surgical mask. I waited for a commercial break.
    ‘Bokkie,’ I said, on the verge of tears, ‘I’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone.’ She kept her face averted, pushing down hard on the tissue in a deliberate movement that made the ironing-board tremble on its thin wooden legs. She nodded her head, rigorously.
    ‘I’m sorry I lost it, Bokkie,’ I said.
    ‘What?’ She asked, turning to hear with her good ear.
    ‘I’m sorry I lost it, Bokkie,’ I repeated, almost whispering from the lump in my throat.
    ‘It’s nothing, Karl. It’s nothing. What is an extra ten hours breaking a back