We Are Not Such Things by Justine van der Leun

at the truck, which was shaking. In South Africa, as in the U.K., people drive on the left, so to Amy’s left was a sidewalk, and to her right was a line of bumper-to-bumper cars traveling in the opposite direction. Ahead, they could make out a group of young people, some of whom seemed to be pressing against the truck.

    A man from that group turned and zeroed in on Amy, her pale face shining. The man yelled out and the other young men swiveled around. There is a word in Xhosa, iqungu . It’s similar to the English term bloodlust. It means “the joy in killing.”
    The men and boys were speaking Xhosa, yelling to each other. Amy and her friends sat, paralyzed and uncomprehending. One man held in his hand a cracked brick, tan in color, plucked from construction refuse on the side of the road. No, many of them had bricks, almost all of them had bricks or stones clutched in their hands. Now Amy and her friends could see that up the road, ahead of the truck, the crowd was moving, chanting. That first man raised his brick and hurled it toward Amy, fast and straight. The force shattered the windshield, which exploded with a loud cartoon pop. Droplets of glass flew across the car’s interior, coating the seats, the floor, wedging in the clutch, getting stuck in clothes and hair and shoes. Later that night, when Evaron took a bath, he found shards of glass nestled in the seams of his underwear.
    Unthinking, disoriented, Amy drove onward. Another brick came, this one on a perfect trajectory, with no windshield to break its flight. It connected with Amy’s face, hitting her square above her right eyebrow. Her head snapped back and then forward. The brick cracked her skull easily, like an eggshell. It left a three-centimeter-long piece of bone, shaped like an arrowhead, hanging loose. The arrowhead bone briefly pressed against her soft pink brain, now exposed.
    Blood poured from Amy’s forehead, drenching her hair. She drove a few more yards down NY1, her right arm dangling from the window, before she stopped. A skinny young boy popped up near her. He looked at the four of them sitting there, slipped the watch off Amy’s limp wrist, and melted back into the crowd.

    From inside the car, it seemed that the sun had disappeared and the sky had gone black. The stones hailed down. In the backseat, Sindiswa and Maletsatsi began to scream. Evaron pulled Amy onto his lap.
    “Oh dear Lord, help me,” he whispered.
    There were people all around, shouting. Now you could make out the words, if you listened.
    “One settler, one bullet,” the people chanted.
    “Africa for Africans.”
    “Kill the farmer, kill the boer.”
    “Boer” is the Dutch word for farmer. In South Africa, farmers, primarily Afrikaners, grabbed swaths of land that previously belonged to indigenous people and then employed blacks as sharecroppers or low-paid laborers and kept the profits.
    A woman stood on the sidewalk across the way. She yelled at Amy and her friends over the slogans.
    “Get out!” she implored. “Run, run, run!”
    “Run,” urged other disembodied voices, locals standing at a distance who had seen this grisly show before, though never starring a white woman. If a mob surrounds you, you only have one sorry choice: Run, run, run.
    More young people were pouring in from NY109, where a path from the train station met NY1. Others were already ahead, blocking traffic. There seemed to be more than a hundred of them, or perhaps it was just eighty. They were engaged in a toyi-toyi , a beautiful, terrifying march-dance originally from Zimbabwe, in which a coordinated group of people lift their knees up high and wave their arms above their heads as they chant and move in protest. As Amy lay on Evaron’s lap, the chants grew louder and clearer and some kids began to lift the car up, hoping to roll it.
    “One settler, one bullet.”
    Amy, bewildered, her blood-soaked shirt sequined with glass shards, opened the car door and stepped out onto the