Cordelia comes to us one sunset in June. She comes with a winter evening’s biting chill and the grumbling of a truck. Noku (my only friend) and I watch Cordelia arrive from behind my wire fence. Our hands, mud-caked and cold, clasp tightly the fence’s rusting iron mesh. Off-white is the truck, though patches of rust mired the entire contraption. Silhouettes of various household furniture sail past me: jerry-built      settees, a ’70s refrigerator, vegetable racks, buckets of cutlery and crockery, one leaning wardrobe with a cracked mirror, and a worn mattress with a great dip in the middle. Set atop a cupboard is Cordelia. Her feet are shod in blue Made-in-China mapata-pata, and her crepe dress snaps softly in a wind howling down the street. She has small breasts. She could be anywhere from nine to sixteen. Cordelia is a new neighbour. I feel she’s been delivered to me like an ice cream cone on an afternoon ablaze with heat.

       Cordelia will replace my old friend Yesterday. Yesterday was a compulsive bed-wetter, made to sleep on the floor of the one-room lodging her family of five was renting from a sick nurse who lived and worked in England. One night, Yesterday drenched the floor so much that piss crept on an exposed wire. The next morning, Mutsonzowa Road, the street I live on, woke to the sound of soft keening. A motley crowd had gathered at the gate of Yesterday’s house. They witnessed grimacing police ferry a long, tin coffin into the back of a police Land Rover. Yesterday’s small wet corpse slid down the tin coffin whenever it was tilted slightly. The more superior of the police officers screamed into his cell phone.  

        “Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, I said death by electrocution! Electrocution! E for Elephant, L for Lion, E for eh”