Hi Kimmy!” shouted Uncle G as he descended the steps of the passage into the square towards the box office. Goolam Hussain was the night manager of the rink and on weekends he practically owned it. I was about to ask G about his day, but there was a tap on the front window of the register.
Telephone Tjoons
In a perfect world I would put the caller on a voice recording, get him off my hands. And if you're not careful, these blades will cut your foot down to size, whether it's big or small. I remained silent, said nothing, hardly breathed as the ice smoke swirled across the black rubber mats as the caller waited for the silence to speak.
Some Kind of Skate
Or you're locked in this little love cage with a guy like Tyrelle who calls you every five minutes when you're not with him just because of some insecurity floating around his head. I tried to hold on to hope, but it felt like when you're watching TV and trying to catch a new ad you heard someone talk about. Either you're afraid to change the channel if you miss it, or you can't stop flipping through all 119 channels just to be sure.
That Night
Randy tells me to turn off the car lights as we approach - things are going downhill. Mikey sits comfortably in the front seat, sipping a drink he pulled from the 80's, taking a drag. And with that Randy punched him in the face so hard that his head cracked the window.
Late Skate
G laughed and pushed Reagan and Kenny aside - G just realized that he didn't have the guts to make real first impressions these days. He said he would make it, that it wasn't a T-shirt or what he needed, just a sms - that's all. But oh god he kept messing up the prescriptive text; said he didn't like any machine telling him what he meant.
Every Rinkrat told every friend and relative, plus all the random contacts we talked to but didn't really know, people you'd only met in edited photos but felt like you grew up. The rink had become the center of the universe, even of the sky, when I looked up among the tall buildings; the moon seemed to be longing, longing to return home. It was our ice party and the plebs had to leave the ball before the ice melted.
And your body slowly grew cold against itself, the ice wet and slippery, the water kicking up, floating and creating shallow waves that splashed the others before you came to a sudden, professional stop. For most people, it was the ice cream (let alone the one couple who hid between the seats in the top row and made out like it was nobody's business). Meet Yurl there, Lukka.' And he dropped the microphone, kind of like his cousin Eminem does in 8 Mile.
Can't you fucking read?' Her mouth had a sort of rectangular shape, emphasizing that last word.
Short Cuts
And then, of course, Jane, standing in the middle of the main entrance, kisses her boyfriend goodbye like she hasn't had breakfast yet. Calvin split the lovebirds and pushed behind Jane, heading straight for his chair at the front. As they set up their chairs, I walked over to my radio on the shelf nestled between two potted plants.
Da ballie's got some groove ay Jo,” Calvin said laughing, but Jo was so fixated on the checkerboard that he probably didn't even realize his left foot was tapping the white ceramic tile in time. I spun around and the bum bounced all the way back to the counter where I flashed my lady in the gold frame, super smooth. Laaitie used to spend most of her time in the shop with me, like my personal dwarf assistant.
His skates were growing rust in the back room, and Goolam would probably sell them if he didn't show up soon. The conversation fell in the air like itchy clips and lay on the messy floor with the rest of the split ends. He pushed me back in and slammed the door, we both fell heavily on the briefcase.
Maybe in an apartment over there, that block with the blue dolphin mosaic on the front wall.
Two. Fr/agile
Then she wanted to see inside, so she poked an egg hard with a pencil and the snot came out on her fingers, white and yellow, like any egg. I carried her close all day, kept her safe and only let those who were genuinely interested get a taste. The figure skating club held their lessons every Saturday morning a few hours before the first public session.
Just before ten o'clock they dissolved one by one, all except for a little figure fairy who talked to me while she waited for her mother. Other times she would just hang at the main entrance with her backpack, quietly waiting for her mother. I often saw her from my spot at the checkout counter being friendly and polite, directing unknown customers to the restroom as they rattled shaky knives over the sodden rubber mats.
Some Saturdays, when her mother remembered to give her spending money, she would stay after school and skate during the first public session. After buying something from the milk bar, she came to me at the till, happy to share her chips and sweets. Amid the smiling, sharing and showing off, the child's thoughts always seemed to drift back to their mother and when I looked over, she was on her phone, dialing numbers over and over hoping for an answer.
I saw her mother on the side of the road waiting impatiently for the girl to come up the driveway after lessons.
Only Rinkrats
On such occasions I felt more crowded than ever in the box, like a prisoner who had to watch the guard make a casual show of making his rounds. Around one, Kaye and Lauren came up behind me at the checkout, "Boo!" and I could tell G's mean little mood had rubbed off on them too. Kenny and Reags, they sat there in the heat in those big hoods, smoking in the sunshine like all day.
We went on tensely, one after the other, playing follow the leader like ice explorers tied together on a slippery edge in the middle of a huge storm and your goggles are frozen and your fingers are frozen, but this time frozen from the dust, compliments of the. At first through cobwebs, following the tight circle of light of my cell, until I stopped at the end of the walkway and backed the boys up. To the left was a long bar where the ghosts, if they had been there, would have had their wild parties, the drinks flowing, the boy ghosts talking to the girl ghosts, a girl ghost trying to decide which boy ghost would come. be the one.
There were too many unanswered questions and in the eerie darkness my mind was too busy trying to answer them. And just then there was the terrible creak of a rusted doorway and a tall, hunched figure shuffled towards us, all dark and indistinct in the darkness. And if we had been stunned before, we girls, now we shouted and shouted and then the boys came running from behind, shouting too, and in the chaos someone let fly a water balloon and even though Kaye had left her gun behind, they paintballed on somehow pock-pock were fired entirely in the dark, the dense air rippling with each shot.
Boys, girls, everyone laughed and gasped as we stumbled through the little door back into the light of the world.
Cane Train
It looks completely new again, although everything from the past remains part of the ice forever. Relevant here are Sue Marais's comments on the “intrinsically ambivalent or hybrid character of the short fiction cycle”. She is particularly interesting on the issue of the 'short story cycle' (1992), which she discusses in relation to South African authors such as Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb.
At the very beginning of his article, James Cooper Lawrence (1917) reminds us of the basis of a short story. However, according to Reid, it is important to note that at this stage in the development of the short story genre, collections that emerged were simply combined to create a diverse grouping of works. First, the location-specific nature of the collection – the ice rink as a place that functions in the collection as a conceptual center, a place where the lives of the characters revolve, turn and return.
Often people come to the North Beach area from other parts of the city for an hour or two a day. It looks completely new again, because everything from the past remains part of the ice forever. And just as ice cores are broken up into different parts for analysis, each story in the collection can retain its individuality – yet another important feature of the short story cycle.
In the following section, I will continue to elaborate on the form, placing particular emphasis on regionalism as an important characteristic of the short story cycle, and a place from which a 'central' character emerges. Such confinement of space encourages a reader to extrapolate to the construction of the narrator-character's identity. Ivan Vladislavić's Re-vision of the South African Story Cycle", Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa.
