Josephs studied the photograph. He hadn’t seen it in fifty years. It still had the power to reduce him to a jabbering wreck: it was a chink of light on a dark secret.
It showed himself among other prefects with their headmaster at St. Vincent’s School, Johannesburg, South Africa in 1970. They stared impassively in their smug, privileged world.
The photo came in an email. They were getting together for a reunion. Josephs was shocked; what was there to celebrate? He stared intently into the boys’ faces; finding not a flicker of emotion in any.
What had they become? He knew three had taken their own lives, consumed by their own internal terrors.
Others had deserted the country after Mandela was elected, fearing the end of White privilege.
Josephs’s trembling hand deleted the photo, but he would never erase the guilt of that summer day in 1969. He and the boys, bored at a party that had grown dull, called a Black man to their cottage. He thought he was being hired to cut wood. Then just for the fun of it, one of the boys – it wasn’t he, Josephs, his conscience was clear to that tiny degree – had a rifle. For no other reason than for sport, he shot and wounded the Black and the man plunged madly through the woodlands like a wild animal trying to escape.
The party hunted him down, shooting him to death. His body was to be later found with eighteen bullets in it.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 