“This one? Or this one?” Jaco asked, paging between two pictures on his camera. The cheetah cub, curled up between his mother’s paws, was toying with a piece of dry grass.

“I don’t know, love. They look the same to me. You always know best.”

The electric-blue glow of the screen made Jaco’s beard and rugged features look alien against the warm glow of the fire.

He deleted the second picture. Maggie liked the second better.

Inside the caravan, the kettle steamed up the plastic windows. Maggie poured his black coffee and her weak English tea. The black leather notebook on the counter glared at her. The wind ruffled through the yellowing pages. She put the steaming mugs on the little plastic tea tray but left the notebook. She put a plate with a few cookies and rusks onto the tray and opened the door to take them out. She sighed and put the notebook on top of the plate.

Jaco thanked her with a smile. He huffed when coffee steamed up his wire-rimmed glasses. He eyed her notebook, took a rusk, and said nothing.

Maggie dipped a ginger cookie into her tea. The black leather notebook gleamed on her lap. It was more than paper and ink suddenly – it was an evil menacing thing, an omen, a demon. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, but she couldn’t look away.

The soggy cookie crumbled and disappeared into her murky tea. A stubby little pencil appeared from behind her ear. The pencil tap-tap-tapped on the worn leather, like she was the maestro and the crickets were her off-time choir.

“Aren’t you writing tonight?” her husband asked, trying to light his pipe. She bit her lip and slowly opened the book. The pages were scarred with ink and stains and secrets. The big messy letters leaped and curled across the page in a violent ballet. The white paper and the black ink twirled in that sacred dance of a poet’s musings.

But the white page was not holding out his hand to her, inviting her pencil to dance. It froze on the first line. Maggie’s words were dancing round and round her head in an evil game of ring-around-the-rosie.

“Magpie?”

She jumped. Jaco’s smiled endearingly. “What’s the matter? Writer’s block?”

She nodded and shut the notebook, relieved to have been supplied with an excuse.

“Don’t worry, love. We have enough poems for the book. I just need to get them and the pictures to the publisher so we can start laying them out. I hope this book does even better than the first.”

Maggie sipped her tea. A hyena cackled just behind the fence. The sinister sound echoed in the quiet bushveld night.

“These poems are even better than the first ones,” Jaco mused aloud as she took his empty cup. “I know it’s been hard on you, but at least some good came from…”

“Shut up!”

She had never spoken to him, to anyone, like this.

“Don’t even say it. Don’t you dare try to tell me that any good has come from losing our baby,” Maggie said quietly under her breath. She clutched the cold leather in her hands. It was only paper, but it weighed so much more. It was heavy with the words of loss; with a grief she’d tried to lock away.

“Maggie, we talked about this. I know you feel like your poems should be private. But think of the people they could help…”

“Why should I? Why should I let you put a price tag on the worst thing that’s ever happened to me?”

It was the same fight. She stared into the fire. She knew what he would say. It was always the same fight, again and again. They both said the same things over and over again. Yet so much remained unsaid. She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself, shielding her frail body from his gaze.

“I won’t do it. I won’t. I will not let you make a quick profit out of the death of my baby,” she sneered and turned away from him. A little kid in a fluffy nightgown was scooting down the dirt road on his black tricycle.

“Our baby.”

She snorted.

“What?”

“Nothing”

Jaco jumped up from his chair and stormed down the road to the ablution blocks. Light and laughter poured out of the tent next to her. Tired little voices giggled hysterically. She watched their mother’s shadow, huge and ghostly against the canvas, kiss them on their heads. The mother went into her own tent.

Maggie tossed the notebook into the fire. The flames licked the yellowing pages and gobbled up her words like an eager reader. She bit her nail, watching a years’ worth of writing burn. Every word was engraved on her heart. Every moment her pen had glided over the paper – tears and ink pouring out of her – was embedded into her brain.

But now no one could have them. They were her words. Only hers.

They lay awake in the caravan. Outside the other campers laughed and chatted. Maggie stared up the ceiling. A few paces away a piece of her was turning to ash. She had so much she wanted to say to him.

How could you just go on living? How can you talk about that damn book and these trips like they mean anything? How can you sit in a church and worship a God who killed my baby without letting me hold him? How could you leave me alone?

Jaco’s hand folded around hers. He gave her fingers a squeeze. She turned onto her side and ripped her hand away from his. He sighed.

“Maggie, please. You can’t keep doing this,” he whispered into the dark. “This isn’t you. This isn’t the girl I fell in love with. I want my wife back.”

And I want my baby back, Maggie thought bitterly.

“What do you want from me?” Jaco sat up in the bed and turned on the battery-operated light over their heads. “Was I supposed to stop living because we lost someone who was never born? How was I supposed to do that?”

It’s easier than you think.

He sighed, flicked the light off and lay down. He yanked the blankets off of her and rolled onto his side. Maggie lay quietly sobbing. The cold night air crept over her bare legs. She had so much she wanted to say to him. She was alone with her words, but now she had nowhere to put them.