Born a Crime

To this day, nobody can explain
what happened. Even the police
didn’t understand. Because it
wasn’t like the gun didn’t work. It
fired, and then it didn’t fire, and
then it fired again for the final
shot. Anyone who knows anything
about firearms will tell you that a
9mm handgun cannot misfire in
the way that gun did. But at the
crime scene the police had drawn
little chalk circles all over the
driveway, all with spent shell
casings from the shots Abel fired,
and then these four bullets, intact,
from when he was standing over
my mom—nobody knows why.
My mom’s total hospital bill
came to 50,000 rand. I paid it the
day we left. For four days we’d been
in the hospital, family members