The Reactive Read Online Free

thing to me. He gets up to take a thin book from the counter and flops himself down on a torn bean-bag. Then he starts reading the book—
A Happy Death
by Camus—from the back, his eyes training the sentences inward, as if the French author had written a Japanese manga.
    Cissie just says her word again.
    Slavery.
    She raises her hand and waves the gooey ladle in a small circle above the bowl.
    You know what I mean, she says. The three of us, we’re basically slaves.
    From my side, I remain quiet. I just watch them like I sometimes do. I mean honestly. It’s Ruan who usually brings us all this pathos.
    The three of us aren’t slaves. Ruan, Cissie and I each wrote matric in the country’s first batch of Model C’s. In common, our childhoods had the boomerangs we used to throw with the neighborhood kids, the rollerblades and the green buckets of space goo. The Sticky Hands with their luminous jelly fingers, each digit rumored to be toxic, which we clotted with wet earth on the first day back from the store and threw into our green pools for cleansing. The Grow Monsters which we watched expanding inside our toilet bowls with awe, and the tracks we dug for our Micro Machines before the day ended, when the orange light would come down and tint the neighborhood roof tiles the color of a lightbulb filament.
    Ease. Everything my little brother Luthando never got to have.
    For all that time, I remember LT topless in denim shorts and wearing a thin silver chain. Luthando played marbles, that’s what he knew most of all to do with his hands. My brother wasn’t tough, but he fancied himself a township
ou.
I remember how he didn’t know what a spinning top was before I gave him mine. We used the laces from his Chuck Taylors to spin it, and later that night, I was quiet when he refused to drink the water my mother poured for us at the dinner table, telling me later that he’d wanted to preserve the taste of beef in his mouth.
    Inside the kitchen, Cissie tries to drive home her point. What if babies cry because birth is the first form of human incarceration? What if it’s a lasting shock to the consciousness to be imprisoned inside the human body? If the flesh is something that’s meant to go off from the beginning, doesn’t that make it an ill fit, since the consciousness, naturally amorphous, is antithetical to disintegration?
    Still stirring the glue in her yellow bowl, Cissie asks if we understand.
    I can’t really tell.
    I don’t think LT is still around. Maybe it’s because my body’s breaking down that she’s speaking to us like this, or maybe it’s because her own body’s fading away from her. You can’t always tell with Cecelia. It could be everyone’s body that’s bothering her.
    I walk back inside, anyway, and take the spoon from her. She gives me a mock head-butt with her match head, and then she sits on the counter to light up a cigarette. Sighing with relief, she closes her eyes to suck in the carcinogens.
    From behind his book, Ruan tells us we aren’t selling enough pills. He places the book aside and looks up at me. Of course, this isn’t really news to us.
    I tell him that my case manager said she’d give me a call. For months now, I say, my insurers, I think they’ve been holding out on me.
    Ruan sits up.
    Jesus, Nathi, he says, don’t tell me they’ve started reviewing your case. He pulls his computer onto his lap. Quick, dude, he says,
gooi
me her name and email.
    This is Ruan’s solution for most of our problems. Mention something to him and he’ll ask you for a name and an email address. Right now, I shrug, since I don’t have either one.
    I guess I could find out, I say.
    I keep stirring.
    I tell myself this is what’s important.
    I wipe my brow like I’ve been watching Cissie do all morning. When I look up, I find her closing her eyes, leaning back on the kitchen counter. She