Lauren Beukes - Zoo City, 18 (part 1) lyrics

The healer's market is less popular than Faraday, which is conveniently close to a major taxi rank. It looks like a cheap tourist attraction from the outside, with its mud-colored walls and the spread of herbs drying in the sunshine on the pavement outside the main entrance. Under a thatched deck, a man crouches on his haunches in front of a little urn on top of an open fire. A German tourist emerges from the toilets, forgetting to zip up his fly, and stops to talk to the guy carving up pieces of old tyre to make sandals The sky has taken on that bright translucent quality that pre-empts a thunderstorm. The air pressure has changed. There are clouds rolling in on the horizon, cumulonimbuses that weight down on the city. My mom used to insist we covered up the mirrors during storms to avoid drawing the lightning, scrambling round the house with towels and sheets at the first sign of a puffy cloud. It drove my dad crazy. "Superstitious rubbish," he always said, sticking his nose back in his cinematography books. "This is what's holding the continent back." He was always way to narrow about his definitions about what modern Africa meant We never were hit by lightening. But all my mom's precautions -- slaughtering a goat for the ancestors in thanksgiving for the birth of Thando's kid, the ceremony when I got my matric sk**s, the stupid sheets over the mirrors -- none of it helped a damn against bullets