Capture by Roger Smith

vegetables and opens the fridge, sees the last bottle of insulin sitting in the door, next to two brown eggs.
    She told Vernon last week she’s running low, and he said, “Don’t fucken nag me. I’ll get it for you.” But he hasn’t and she’s scared to ask him.
    He gives her no money, keeps her a virtual prisoner here in the house. Takes her shopping for provisions once a week. Drives her to church and back on a Sunday evening. Otherwise she spends her life sitting in this house, staring at the TV, or gossiping with Mrs. Flanagan over the wall.
    She’s been holding off using the insulin but the room swims again and she knows she has no choice. She takes the cool little bottle through to the windowless bathroom, airless and stinking of mildew and urine that no disinfectant can erase.
    Yvonne places the insulin on the lip of the discolored basin, the enamel stained black and red beneath the faucets, pitted as old skin round the plug hole. Vernon’s toothbrush, dental floss and Aquafresh toothpaste lie beside the soap. He has always been proud of his white teeth.
    Yvonne prepares the syringe and, holding it in her right hand, lifts her dress with her left, the wet flab of her abdomen sagging over her panties. She uses an alcohol wipe to clean an area beside her navel, the heat drying the alcohol even as she rubs. She pushes the needle into her flesh, sinking the plunger all the way to inject the insulin into the fatty tissue, not even feeling the pain after all these years.
    Removing the needle, Yvonne mops up a few beads of blood with the alcohol wipe. She leaves the bathroom and puts the insulin back in the fridge, knowing she has enough left for maybe two shots.
    Yvonne walks through to the living room and sinks down onto the sofa, the sticky fake leather grabbing at the fat on her legs. She feels a little better now the insulin is working and thinks about what she’ll wear to church this evening. There is an old man, a very decent widower, Mr. Tobias, who has been showing some interest in her the last few weeks.
    He is new to the congregation, moved down from Paarl to live with his daughter when his wife passed away. Yvonne’s little fantasy of a life without Vernon ends with the rumble of the Civic, coming on fast, and the squeal of dusty disc brakes as his car stops outside, idling engine setting a teacup rattling on top of the TV.
    Even over the wind Yvonne hears the front gate screaming like a wounded animal and feels sick to her stomach, wondering what mood he’ll be in now, hearing the scrape of his key in the lock.
    Vernon bursts in, his clothes rumpled and dirty, his thick hair dangling over his forehead. “Get your ass up, we leaving.”
    She stares at him. “But church isn’t for an hour.” She flaps a hand at her sweat-stained dress. “I can’t go like this.”
    “Then fucken stay.”
    He’s gone, slamming the door, and she has to grab her purse and rush to catch up with him, barely in the car before he guns the engine and takes them off into the maze of cramped houses, sun sagging like a blood orange into the thick dust.
     
     
    Vernon hurries out of the pastor’s house into the hot wind that attacks the arriving worshipers, women tugging down ballooning dresses and older men holding onto their Sunday hats.
    The house, a two-level affair with barred windows, is joined at the hip to a squat pink happy-clappy church, the Tabernacle of Christ Our Lord, occupying a street corner in the middle-class part of Paradise Park, two blocks of nice houses with smart cars parked in the driveways, hidden behind high walls and fences. The houses of school headmasters and accountants and drug dealers, gazing hopefully toward distant Table Mountain but near enough to the landfill to catch the stink and see the useless people from Tin Town, the maze of shacks that grows out the side of Paradise Park like a disease, foraging for anything of value on the dump. The Tin Town Mall, the locals call it.
    As he fights