[Chapter 1]
~~Dlamini Zithulele~~
The sea here did not care about anyone.
Dlamini Zithulele had understood that since he was nine years old, when he watched the water take Zithulele's boat and give back nothing — not the boat, not Zithu not even a sandal.
The ocean off this stretch of the Eastern Cape was grey more often than it was blue, and it moved the way indifferent things moved. steadily, without apology, with no awareness of the small lives arranged along its edge.
He was standing at the window when he thought this.
Not a real window — the glass had cracked two winters ago and his mother had covered it with thick plastic sheeting that turned the morning light the colour of old paper. Through it, the sea was just a dark smudge at the bottom of the hill. But he always looked anyway.
"Dla."
His mother's voice from the kitchen.
He already knew what it meant.
He pulled on his shirt and went.
Aziwe zithulele was a small woman who moved like a large one — all intention, no wasted motion. She was standing at the stove with her back to him, stirring something that smelled like it was doing its best with very little. She didn't turn around when he came in.
"Sisi's uniform," she said. "The hem came out again."
"I'll fix it."
"You said that yesterday."
"I'll fix it today."
She made a sound that wasn't agreement but wasn't argument either.
Dla sat down at the table and looked at the uniform folded on the chair beside him — his little sister Amahle's school dress, the hem loose on one side, the fabric gone thin at the elbows from three years of wear.
Amahle was twelve. She needed new shoes too but that was a conversation for another time, maybe another year.
He picked up the dress and started folding it along the hem, trying to remember where his mother kept the needle and thread.
"There's a box," his mother said, without turning. "Top shelf."
He found it. Sat back down. Started to work.
Outside, the town was waking up in the slow way it always woke — reluctantly, like a man with nowhere to be.
He could hear the Mokoena boy next door arguing with his father about something, their voices carrying easily through walls that had been built without much ambition.
Down the road, the spaza shop would be opening. The same men would stand outside it by eight o'clock. The same conversations would happen. The same afternoon would come.
Dla was twenty years old and he had watched this town run the same loop for as long as he could remember.
He was not ungrateful.
That was important to him — he was not one of those people who looked at their mother's house and felt contempt.
He knew what his mother had held together with her own hands and nothing else after his father died, he knew the cost of every meal, every uniform, every school fee paid three weeks late with a note of apology. He did not take it lightly.
But he was smart. That was the problem.
Smart enough to see the loop. Smart enough to know what the loop meant— that you stayed until you couldn't, and then you found some worse version of staying, and the town absorbed you the same way the ocean absorbed everything else.
Without ceremony. Without acknowledgement. Just gone.
He finished the hem. Held it up, inspected it. Passable.
"Ma," he said.
"Mm."
"Molateng said the fishing cooperative might be taking on workers again. For the processing side."
Silence. She turned down the stove.
"Molateng said that three months ago."
"I know. But—"
"Dlami." She said his name like a full stop. "Eat something before Amahle wakes up. She'll want the last of the bread if she sees it."
He put the dress down. He was not hungry but he ate anyway, because refusing felt like an argument he didn't have the energy for.
Outside, the grey light was turning gold at the edges, the sea becoming more visible now, wide and flat and utterly unconcerned.
He watched it while he ate.
He was still watching it when Amahle came out of the back room in her nightclothes, sleep-creased and suspicious, scanning the kitchen immediately for food the way hungry children did.
"Is there bread?" she asked.
"There's bread," he said, and pushed it toward her before she could check the quantity.
She sat down across from him and tore a piece and chewed it with the particular contentment of someone who expected less.
She had their mother's eyes and their father's stubbornness and something entirely her own underneath both — a sharpness, a brightness, a quality Dla thought of sometimes as potential, the word sitting in his chest like something he was keeping safe for her.
She deserved the good school in Mthatha.
She deserved new shoes and the dress with the hem properly intact, not held by his uneven stitching.
She deserved more than this loop.
He looked at the bread. He looked at his sister.
He thought—something has to change.
He just didn't know yet what it would cost.