#SayTheWord
SAY THE WORD
By Zakes Mdluli
Nomfundo Xaba is twenty-two, buried in admin at an insurance company in Sandton she can't stand, and holding her entire life together with a colour-coded calendar and a spreadsheet for everything. The day she loses the promotion she planned her whole year around is the day her boyfriend goes to the tavern to watch the football instead of coming home — and tells her, on his way out the door, that she suffocates everyone with her need for control. Half a bottle of red later she is online in her pyjamas looking for a stranger, mostly to prove him right. She finds one. He is older, unhurried and entirely uninterested in her body until he has finished asking about her mind. He wants to know why being in charge of everything feels safer than being happy. He wants to know whether she has ever found out what she is like when she stops holding on. And then, in a voice she can't place and can't argue with, he offers to show her.
5 chapters · 2 hr 33 min
