Cape Town was stunning, the little I saw of it, but if I’d somehow missed noticing that a national election was going on, my ignorance began to fall away on my first walk around the city centre when I came across a street where all the buildings had been sprayed purple. It had happened just the day before, at an anti-apartheid demonstration where the riot police, in an attempt to tag the demonstrators, had added purple dye to the water in their water cannon – only one of the protestors managed to get at the nozzle and redirect it so that it sprayed all along both sides of the street …
Bio:
Joe Davies’ writing has appeared in the Dublin Review, Grain, the New Quarterly, the Manchester Review, PRISM International, the Missouri Review, and previously in ºÚÁϳԹÏ×ÊÔ´ Quarterly. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where much of the time he’s happy enough to stay put.