Inside Your Body There Are Flowers

What do I know?
I know white people. I know loss. I know arrogance and disaster, natural and unnatural. I know the mythical sometimes crosses in and descends on us in our extremity like heat mist, like haze.
Let me write my story about the man Malan, who is contracted to build a dam in Zimbabwe.
Let me write about the collapse of our projects, of our expectations and desires, and about the things that are given to us in their place. The gifts of suffering. The gifts of apocalypse. Let me write about his little boy who died before him, about mermaids and sour worms and the great snake, Nehushtan, about all the creatures who crowd around us unseen on the earth.
All you red-faced men of my youth, with your moustaches and your beer boeps and your vulnerable eyes: here is your story.