blesstherains

“It was a fairy”
“It was a dragonfly, now will you hurry up”
My brother attempts to recreate the arms-crossed locker-lean of twelve year old boys everywhere against the pole that’s supporting the log bridge. It doesn’t quite work like it normally does, with the early morning sun already shrivelling his boy-band gel spikes and the grassland thrumming out to a hazy horizon far behind him. The damp grass patches at home seem a bit funny now.
I look back down at my glittery trainer and hop determinedly onto the next log.
I am six and a half, not a child Mum, who had covered my eyes as we passed a stall on the outskirts of Cape Town selling animal hides, the blood-raw power scraped from the revoltingly washed fur. Our first day here, the park ranger had pointed to the black wire fence that now framed my brother.
“More to keep the poachers from the lions than the lions from you lot” he had said, laughing throatily and stirring his Milo while a few elephants strolled miles behind him.
I had cried hot angry tears, wanted to conjure them back, let them face the unarmed poacher on the sun-rich dirt, beast to beast. See what happened.
“Come on!”
I hop again, head down and arms outstretched.
Clambering onto a boulder at dawn this morning, I had dutifully re-enacted the opening of The Lion King with my teddy but that didn’t quite work like it did at home either. Teddy could no longer substitute. A lioness had walked past our jeep just yesterday. Her bones and muscles rolled softly beneath her dusty fur in the same way that waves roll the surface of the sea before they come close to shore. It was mesmerising, that hidden force for the snarling knife-toothed flurry that had that morning left tiny red spikes of fur around her panting mouth. Her tail whipped unconcernedly against the flaking car door and she moved on, my dropped jaw suddenly filled with her hot sharp stench.
I hop and look up, downriver. The shimmering shape is still fluttering around the stones in the riverbed, warming sun reflecting white off its wings.
At home, that would be a dragonfly. Here, it is definitely a fairy.