Thembi caught him by the wrist, drew him back under the covers. She flattened his hand against her swollen belly. Their little watermelon was using his legs. “Close your eyes,” she whispered. “Can you feel him, Tata? Do you think he can hear the rain?”

The corrugated tin roof beat against the frame of their small shack. Sergeant Congo took a deep breath and then stood, ruffling the scent of lavender that sweetened the sheets. “Sthandwa, my love.” He ran the back of his hand along her cheek. “You are freezing”. He pressed the blanket into a cocoon around her body and blew warm breath into old socks before sliding them onto her feet.

“But your son is asking you to stay,” she told him. “There will be no work for you today.”

At the foot of the bed he strapped the laces of his black issue boots, slid his gun into its holster.

“There is rice from last night on the stove,” she said.

“The food is for the boy.” He kissed her on the forehead. “He must be strong and beautiful like his mother.”

Smoke rose from open windows under grey skies as a river surged through the streets, the third day of the rain. An agent in reallocation from the rubbish dump down the road. Sergeant Congo had never before seen such a thing.

First came the township contributions, the beer bottles and plastic packets travelling on the surface like mulch; then the city things, a broken toaster trailing the neck of a violin, the hairless head of a doll revolving in the swirls.

For two hours he’d been on duty when the first call came. “We are short,” The Captain said. “Be careful.”

Sergeant Congo drove to the location, parked his van and crossed the street. “Hayi togo,” he mumbled. His boots swelled with water. “Why must lovers fight in such weather?”

He entered the property through a wire mesh gate, careful not to tear his uniform, and banged against the wooden door, but no one came. With his hand on his gun, he moved back down the steps and looked down the road. Not even the dogs had stirred.

He pressed up against the cracked window at the side of the shack and cupped his face with his hands. Through the tattered lace curtain he could see a couch lying dead on its side and a television twisted in the floor amongst fragments of crockery split like shards of broken bone. A black foot stuck out of a doorway.

Sergeant Congo sucked at the spaces between his teeth. The pattern of dark stains on the beige fabric of the couch made him think of a cow and his stomach rumbled. It was his job to perform an inspection. It was his job to go inside.

The man hadn’t been dead long, just another picture of death, preserved in the moments before the flies came. Sergeant Congo listened to the rain on the roof and he was grateful.

The bed was ruffled. Papers and ball bearings lay strewn across the carpet from the upturned cabinet drawers. A woman’s clothing had been shoved against the baseboards. The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth hung open. Sergeant Congo kicked his leg. Nothing happened. He was careful not to leave footprints in the blood.

Through the window in the living room, Sergeant Congo looked out at the shattered street lights and the black spider web of electric wires, a broken image rambling in the rain through the cracks.

He was about to place a call to the station when from the kitchen he heard the clink of cutlery.

Sitting at a low wooden table was a young black woman eating a meal. She had a fat lip and blood on her hands. She looked up at him when he entered. Someday soon he expected a promotion. Not long from now he’d be a father.

The knife she was using to cut her bread was stained red at the handle. “Tamkhulu,” she said. She nodded her head and gestured for him to sit down though the only other chair in the room lay in broken arms and legs in the corner.

The smell of honey hung in the low ceiling. The phutu was still warm on the table. Sergeant Congo’s nostrils quivered. He holstered his gun, took a plastic bowl and spoon from the dish rack, and when he turned back around she was gone.

“Ndisisidenge!” he said, throwing the bowl onto the floor, leaning with both hands against the counter, cursing his stomach, a clattering fool.

The woman returned to the kitchen almost immdeiately. “Why are you making so much noise?” she said. She set a cushion from the couch on the floor. She went to the sink, fetched a clean bowl, removed the spoon from his fingers, and placed them together on the table.

“Sisi, don’t play games with me,” he said. She filled his bowl, disappeared behind the twisting steam, harmless as cotton wool, tissue paper. Sergeant Congo had to rattle his hungry head.

They ate in silence while outside, the rain continued to hammer into the earth. The young woman watched him finish the bowl of porridge, barely chewing, greedier than a dump dog, and then offered him another. “Eat,” she told him. “How are you so fat, but so starving?” She took up the knife, carved a slice of bread.

Sergeant Congo looked into her eyes, but found no humor there. Something else instead, hazy and vague.

“My name is Lihle.”

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

She fetched something from a drawer, sat back down. “Apricot jam?”

“Get back up,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand “Put that away.”

“But Tata, I made it myself.” She smiled. Blood spread from the corner of her mouth where she’d been hit.

“Why are you still here?” he asked.

“This is my home,” she told him. “Where else would I be?”

He cuffed her wrists behind her back and with a hand on her shoulder, guided her through the front room. A slow tide was coming in at the door, floating a broken teapot, ruining the carpets.

Sergeant Congo looked down the road and then up at the sky. The rain was vicious, unforgiving as thick leather. It lashed at his face while women and children across the street busied themselves with buckets at doorsteps. They cursed this weather, the slack foundations of their homes and the absent men who’d laid them. It could be days before sun broke the clouds.

Sergeant Congo stood for a moment. Then he turned back into the house. He un-cuffed Lithle.

In the bedroom, he took the dead man by the back of the neck and told her to hold his legs. They carried him out to the steps and tossed him into the rushing water where he swirled for a moment, as if in protest, before being churned out, face down, to follow an oven door and a birdcage and a rusted wrench, in a procession of thrashing things not even the township wanted.