He’s lying on his side, snoring with his mouth wide open. She shrinks away from the stench of it, and her elbow connects with the empty Black Label bottles standing sentry next to the mattress on her makeshift bedside table, a milk crate loaded with books. Their clinking wakes Ace up and he grumbles as he glares at her. “Why are you making such a noise?”

“Sorry,” Zodwa whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

Zodwa checks to see if beer spilled on her books. Since she doesn’t have a proper fixed address, she doesn’t qualify for library membership, not even in the new South Africa. Instead, she begs and borrows textbooks from Mr. Tshabalala, her old high school English teacher who’s taken pity on her, and then buys the others if Mama Beauty isn’t able to source them for her.

Since Zodwa considers the books necessities, as essential as food and water, she doesn’t feel guilty about the money spent on them. Besides the math, science, and biology textbooks, which she’s studying from so that she can write her exams to finish high school, she also has Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, The Communist Manifesto, and three books by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The only fiction books Zodwa owns are Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan and Beloved by Toni Morrison. She’s read both books multiple times and often looks at the author photographs to remind herself that black women are fit for more than labor, that they can have ideas and thoughts and dreams worthy enough to be committed to paper, compelling enough for strangers to read.

Assured that her books are fine, Zodwa checks her wristwatch and curses, stands up, and then curses again as her toes sink into mud. It must have rained during the night because the shack has partially flooded. Zodwa doesn’t want to think about how drunk she must have been to have slept through the drumbeat of rain against the roof. She sighs and lights the primus stove to put the kettle on to boil. She missed the appointment she had at the children’s sanctuary and now may even be late for work, but she can’t leave without making Ace his usual breakfast: kota and sweet tea to wash it down with. Zodwa pulls the loaf of white bread toward her, cuts it in quarters, and then scoops the guts of it out.

She fills a quarter with some fried cabbage and then reaches for the Vienna sausages and chips left over from last night’s meal. Waiting for the kettle to boil, Zodwa looks at the newspaper that had wrapped the sausages. It’s a luxury she can’t usually afford and so she skims through one at every opportunity. These pages aren’t articles or anything interesting. They’re just legal notices in the classifieds.