Free Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry

Dora gets to sit on those sunny Matsunyane floorboards without her shoes on. Bryony wants to be the one invited into that room; she aches to bask in Lesedi’s perfect-toothed smile and be privy to all the secret goings-on next door.
    She clambers down from her spying post, skinning her knee on the edge of one of the wooden planks. She crouches, eyes squeezed shut, and tries to swallow down the pain. “Shit,” she says, and she can suddenly understand why Tyler swears all the time; it seems to lessen the sting.
    Bryony inspects her injury: the wrinkled skin on her kneecap has been scraped white, with little speckles of blood welling up in patches. Bryony touches the red beads with her tongue and tastes metal and dust.
    If Dora can be Lesedi’s friend, then why can’t I? She stands up, testing her knee as she straightens her leg. I’m going to make her like me. She strides back towards the house, newly resolved. Something good has to happen soon.
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    As much as I want to have Lesedi look at me so that I can feel complete and deliciously empty all at the same time once more, I pull away and up into where the story noise is solid sound. Down below, suburban Johannesburg sprawls beneath me like a forest. In amongst the dense green I spot the bright red baubles of the flame trees and the first jacarandas in vivid lilac bloom. I remember what it was like to drive on the streets beneath the jacarandas, where the tar was carpeted in soft purple trumpet-shaped fallen flowers. If your car tires crushed them from just the right angle, the trapped air in their bases would escape with a glorious popping sound. It was like driving through a giant bowl of Rice Krispies.
    Adele hated jacaranda season because of all the bees that would hover over the flower-coated ground. They hid inside the blossoms until disturbed by your footsteps, when they would zoom out and zip around your ankles. Adele always felt ambushed by the bees, as if they were lying in wait for her instead of just going about their innocent, pollen-collecting business.
    Once, Liam picked her up to carry her over a jacaranda-strewn bit of road. I was so busy staring at the way her hands clutched on to the back of his brown neck, her fingers so carelessly rumpling his hair, that I forgot to look out for bees myself, and was stung in the soft curve at the back of my left knee. I cried out in surprise and pain, but they were laughing too much to hear me. I had to bend and contort to scrape the pulsing sting out of my reddening flesh with the edge of my student ID card. It ached for the rest of that afternoon.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    THIS TIME, when Gigi wakes, she knows that there’s no going back to the numbness. She clutches the empty pill bottle so tightly that the plastic warms, almost seeming to become a part of her hand. She listens to the morning birds outside the window. No more dullness; I can sense all of her.
    At home on the farm, the dawn chorus had been a symphonic riot of sound, but here it is sparse enough for my daughter to make out individual calls. Wood pigeon, bulbul, weaver, hadeda, lourie . . . she forces herself to focus on identifying each bird, but, despite her efforts, her mind begins to slip, gathering speed as it plummets towards the thoughts she can no longer hold at bay.
    Gigi sees viscous blood, like ink leaked from a red pen, pooled around the scuffed wooden legs of the kitchen table. She can smell it now, too, just as she could then (just as Jemima could, from her enclosure outside). Gigi remembers sitting on the kitchen floor and listening to the cat’s frantic pacing and scratching as the meat-and-metal scent of blood overwhelmed them both.
    â€œGigi?” She turns her head to see that Bryony is awake and staring at her from the bed on the opposite side of the room. In the dim bronze light of morning, her young blond cousin looks strangely featureless, nothing but pupils hovering above a pillow. Gigi closes her