July's People

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July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.

The knock on the door. Seven o’clock. In governors’ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses’ company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite — the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap. The knock on the door

no door, an aperture in thick mud walls, and the sack that hung over it looped back for air, sometime during the short night. Bam, I’m stifling; her voice raising him from the dead, he staggering up from his exhausted sleep.

No knock; but July, their servant, their host, bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedly-opened, specially for them, with a spoon in it.

— No milk for me.—

— Or me, thanks.—

The black man looked over to the three sleeping children bedded-down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirmation: —They all right.—

— Yes, all right. — As he dipped out under the doorway: —Thank you, July, thank you very much.—

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