Story of a Teacher’s Wife

Sunday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. Second to last single woman teacher at an all boy's boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons feel sorry for us. They come and shit by our doors. Yes, Mavala Shikongo has escaped Goas after only a scant three weeks. She's found a better posting at a junior primary in Grootfontein. But twenty-one days was enough for us all, single or divorced or wanting to be divorced, decrepit or spry, morally repugnant or generally decentevery last one of us-to fall in love with her. She ignored us, twenty-one and one-half days we were invisible. Long schoolday afternoons she never once stopped by Aunty Wilhelmina's fence to monger the latest lies, only went home to her books.She was studying for a...