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at ShelleyDavidow.com
The Eye of the Moon - by Shelley Davidow
Available from Rainy Nights Press: http://elohigadugi.org/rainynights/
An extract...
 It is true, that no matter
which hemisphere you are in, no matter which way up the moon is, its face is invariably sad. In the northern hemisphere, it appears that tears have carved into the moon's left
eye, gouged furrows down the left hand side of its face. In the southern regions, the moon's right eye weeps, tears seem to have been blown up over the forehead by some
cosmic wind and the traces can never be wiped from the surface, because they are not surface tears.
After it is rumored that Nelson Mandela will soon be released from prison, South Africa is euphoric. I am just
finishing my degree. The transformation fought for at university, in the streets, in homes and lives, through wars, is at hand. The South African President, F.W De Klerk, a balding dyed-in
-the-wool Afrikaner, is of a new and different breed. He has plans to negotiate himself out of power, and there is cause for hope and optimism. But
the beggar who sat bent over on the corner of Jan Smuts avenue and Jorrissen street, with his hand held up to the sky, is there still. The children in
their rags who once broke the skin on my hand as I offered them a coin, are still there. And there is death everywhere. There are bullets and knife wounds,
and high walls with broken glass around the rich homes in Hyde Park and Sandton. There are thirty thousand deaths from violent crime in a single year. "I'm leaving this place," I say.
*
I was the girl in class who always had a cold. I never breathed through my
nose. My mouth was constantly open. The one with the mucousy voice who was teased however hard she tried to be like the others. "I'm sorry," she
would say if she bumped someone's desk, and they would smirk. "Oops," she'd say as she tripped over a foot deliberately stuck out from under another desk.
She'd smile at the sniggers, try to merge with the class spirit. But she was set apart because her parents were not rich enough to buy her a new tennis
racket. The one she had was bought for two Rand from another girl in the class. There was a hole in the racket, which could not be fixed, and to top it
all, the racket was warped. "Sorry," she said on the court to the harsh voice of the tennis instructor. "Missed again."
"Move those legs," the instructor shouted, and so she would run, wiping her
nose, wiping it and wiping it as it dripped so that she could not see - felt only the burning green floor of the court and the harsh sun at its zenith in the eternally deep sky.
*
It was hardly surprising then that she began to write. Furiously. And it was
hardly remarkable that she fell in love, became obsessed with a man more than twice her age, who had once been a prominent journalist for the Star's
Africa News Service. What was surprising and astonishing to her, was that the journalist himself became obsessed. That the girl with the infected sinuses
could become a symbol of lust and desire, an image of femininity, a fantasy of perfection in these older, piercing eyes. That was as jarring as Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory.
*
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