A double bill of short fiction.
Killed: Day after day, an involuntary blindness ensured Mrs. Tintoretto's sense of safety and security. As she moved through her everyday world, she made a habit of shutting out any disturbances which might upset her regularly patterned routine. It was not that she was callous, no - she was simply not equipped to deal with too much suffering. She certainly did not deliberately shut out the plight of the poor who lived on the streets of Pretoria; it was just that, to her, they remained inaccessible, invisible. But one day Mrs Tintoretto's son is brutally murdered, and she cannot ignore the people on her streets any longer. This is the story about Mrs Tintoretto's attempts to reconcile herself with grief, and, by means of compassion, transform both herself and her son's killer. The story was first published in New Contrast, July, 2010.
Sunnyside Sal: Pretoria, South Africa, 1987. Two 15-year-old schoolboys decide to gate-crash a neo-Nazi AWB rally on Church Square wearing bell bottoms and ridiculous wigs while hoisting weirdly worded placards. It's during the second State of Emergency of the year, the townships are in uproar and the border war is raging on. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing. The two friends are quickly picked up by the security forces and are interrogated in a bizarre episode which is equally frightening and funny. It's a peculiar episode which forms part of Anton Krueger's memoir Sunnyside Sal (2010 Deep South Books).
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