Impressions

I move through the world not as a knifeblade cutting the wind, or as a tower with eyes, like my father, but as a hole, a hole with a body draped around it, the tow spindly legs hanging loose at the bottom and the two bony arms flapping at the sides and the big head lolling on top. I am a hole trying to be whole. [...] I think of myself as a straw woman, a scarecrow, not too tightly stuffed, with a scawl painted on my face to scare the crows and in my centre a hollow, a space which the fieldmicecould use if they were very clever.

In the heart of the country, J. M. Coetzee