the photo is in my pocket

I bit a man at the Caltex and I am not sorry. I want to get the order of events down in case I lose them by morning.

He put his hand near my waist. He was trying to tuck the envelope in. He said warm handling like it was a job description. I have had buyers grab at specimens, buyers use the word keeper, buyers imply things. This one said it out loud and his driver was already lifting my tailgate. So I bit him. I saw the blood on his cuff. A used hundred stuck to my wrist — somebody else's transaction — and I scraped it off on my work shirt and left it on the forecourt.

I refused the photograph. I said it out loud. And then somehow it is in my jacket pocket, folded once. A 2026 photograph of my father. Someone went and stood near him this year. Someone clicked a shutter to hand to a man with a Patek so the man could lean on me at a petrol station and I would feel something. I have not spoken to my father in years. I owe that photograph nothing. And I have not thrown it away. I have been turning it over on Karel's stoep with my taped hand like a coin I am deciding whether to spend.

Yesterday Naledi. Today the assistant with the watch. Whoever is running this is rotating handlers the way I rotate collecting sites. They are not buying scorpions. They are buying the version of me that signs things.

Karel's coffee was black and hot and his wife was already asleep. I walked the female into the rack and signed chain of custody for the second time in two days. I am tired of signing things that say I am the keeper of someone else's property.