Short Stories

A collection of short stories
      by Willem van der Walt

This collection of stories will be of interest to publishers, compilers of anthologies, reading and /or writing circles, lecturers and teachers.  Most of these stories have been broadcast by the SABC on Safm.  They are presented in thumb-nail summaries.
 
 

A much-anthologized, light-hearted story about Kassiem who suspects that his wife is trafficking with the devil and tries numerous ways to stop this.  For some reason he does not really get good advice from his friend Abduragmaan and when he follows her secretly up the slopes of Devil’s Peak one afternoon he makes a momentous discovery.
 

A surreal story about a young man who is on the verge of exposing his shocking suspicion about his mother. His fear is that no-one will believe him, but at last he has the evidence he needs.  Or does he?
 

The two elderly ladies, Irmgard and Christa, living upstairs in a small block of flats, are concerned about the man who lives downstairs in number Six, an artist with a toothbrush moustache about whom the police have inquired, especially after some trouble at a beer hall.  He is cruel to the cats of the tenants and their concern grows when Kringelschwanz, their princely Burmese, disappears.
 

With a mix of expertise and mischief, Melvyn creates a female for Compu-Date, an on-line dating system, fooling the many desperates that seek their ideal partner.  The created persona is spectacular in all respects; the responses are legion.  One response, however, prompts Melvyn to come clean and reveal the subterfuge.
 

The hunters hear that giants from the North will soon overrun their territory.  They are harmless people and leaving their ancient encampment, they trek through the wastes, like the first people, to another desert. Here they will be able to continue their time on earth.  A sketch of the earliest South Africans.
 

In his father’s cupboard, a boy finds the belt of a German soldier, which was brought back after the
campaign in the North African desert during World War 2.  He speculates about the object wondering about the soldier’s life.  Is the man he meets many years later in a campsite at Lübeck, Germany, the one who wrote his name in that belt?
 

In the first Gulf War, an American pilot is shot down over the desert.  Alone in the vast landscape, he sees in the  distance the enemy approaching.  He flees.  His journey through the all-absorbing silence takes him into a strange dimension.  Years later he is found living in the ruins of Al Machmi. 
  

Through the wall of her semi-detached house, the old woman can hear her neighbours, the people who live their lives blissfully unaware that they are giving meaning to another sitting at a crack in the wall.  When they move out, the changes are difficult for the old woman to face.
 

The two men who come to Dr Castaño’s apiary on the outskirts of Colombia seem to know what she is really doing.  She is passionately determined to carry out her ingenious plan working against the cocaine factories in the jungles.
 

A young woman hears the sounds of children playing through her own longing for children, but her husband, an engraver of glass goblets, has other plans as he keeps finding reasons to thwart her wish.  He has also disciplined both of them to a diet of nuts and lentils.  Then something in her snaps. 
 

Lors and his Uncle Sork, two Catalan ship rats, have ended the epic journey of their lives on the ships of seven seas and are trapped in the backyard of a suburban house.  Lors councils his ageing uncle who philosophizes about life. The old one cautions his nephew about the hazards that face their species.
 

Dante Pretorius, an avant-garde play director, chooses an old WW2 bomb storehouse in the grounds of the Goodwood prison to stage his play, one that will trans form  the history of theatre. This will happen symbol ically in the final nights of the century.  He could not have predicted how his play would be affected by the prison break.
 

Within 11 days she will be married to a man she is fond of.  She meets someone who is very special and the attraction is instant.  He leaves her his telephone number.  She burns it.  But long after her wedding day she can still remember that number.
 

A husband-to-be watches the way his partner deals with her daughter’s unwillingness to eat her spinach. The memory of his childhood is triggered, how his father took a different stance and how the eating of spinach became a nightmare.
 

A young man returns to an office where an old man gives him another placing in a life of his request.  They review his other lives in various places and times on earth. He now chooses the southern part of Africa for a specific purpose.
 

A poetic sketch of the nature of dust, its personality, the playful relationship it has with the wind of the plains and over all its awesome age.
 

An art therapist who has worked in a prison is visited by one of the ex-inmates, a gifted man who created a work that she now has in her lounge.  Once he is in the door she is grasped by fear:  was this a wise thing to do?
 

Danie Visser who lives under the bridge must find a way to get the love of Sophie who lives in a shack.
His Zulu friend advises him that money is the key, but the chances of getting a job with the new owners of the farm are slim.  These owners, it seems, are up to no good and are involved in something shady.  In an unexpected way they become the solution of Danie Visser’s problem.
 

The bee in the car on the way to work in dense traffic is something of a problem.  It keeps bumping against the windscreen and does not want to fly out.  The situation in some way mirrors a domestic quarrel - the pain of two partners not understanding their sources of dispute.
 

Floating a paper boat on a pond in the park, a young woman comes to see that her communication with her boyfriend is dwindling, something that he, knowing all about these things, does not seem to recognise.  She takes a ferry to the far side of the lake.
 

Flying saucers have a special mystique for Gertruida - space travel in general, as a matter of fact, especially  when she shares her interest with Floors. Together  they enter a flying saucer that lands in the garden while her parents are away.
 

A story about an ecstatic state and a heart attack of a man during an evening of dance therapy - the kaleido-scope of music, the journey of the body and finally the treeless promontory.
  

It is the fin de siècle.  Mr Lucien watches with horror as the interest in a new-fangled fad drains the audiences from his theatre, here where melodrama is the last bastion of great art.  But: there will be revenge.
 

A man reminisces about growing up assisting his father in breaking into cars. In the forest carpark where this happens the entire family is involved, acting as a warning system.  But the end of it all comes unexpectedly. 
 

The community at last revenges itself on the daily cruelties of a gang.  Death, they feel, is too kind to a gang leader who has sown so much misery in their streets.