They still called it Johannesburg, a city of dreams. I thought it was nothing but a giant monster that swallowed people, digested them within its pit and spat them out as nothing but slaves of its evil system. At times, my grandmother would tell me tales of how vibrant it was once. She described it as the soul of the country. The streets were always vibrating to the footsteps of rushing people, the pavements packed by stalls that were jammed too close to one another but had everything. A place of dreams.

It is different now. Watching it from a crack in the far corner of the roof in an underground room I shared with my grandmother, it looks dead. I could tell it was early evening by the twinkle of city lights flicking on amongst the clouds. I sat at my grandmother’s feet listening to her mumble about the past. A time before me, I am only 18. In her stories, she says that it all went wrong nearly 27 years ago when the people overthrew the government and decided that they could do without any leadership.

At the time it seemed like a good idea. But as I watched the concrete wasteland crawl into the night through the crack, I could see that they were clearly wrong. There has been some advancement; technology had allowed people to build houses in the sky. One would think they were standing on metallic stilts above the roads that pass underneath them. Only the rich live up there, the rest of us are thrown into small, cramped-underground rooms and killed daily when we fall sick. You will hardly find anybody in the streets. People hide away from each other now. The rich don’t want to catch the sicknesses of the poor and the poor don’t want to get caught sick.

Hunger pangs caused my stomach to grumble, snatching my attention away from the crack with the view of the houses above us. That was when I realised that my grandmother had stopped talking and had begun coughing once more. I sprang up to my feet and rushed to get her a glass of water from the one tap we had in the far corner of the room. Everything was squashed into our room. A toilet in one corner, a tap in another and a table with mismatched chairs in the middle.

When I returned and handed her the plastic glass, she drank quickly. I sank back to the floor and waited for her to finish. After she lowered the glass back into my hands, she leaned into her wooden chair and closed her eyes.

“They will be coming for me soon, Anima.” She mumbled, I sat close enough but I could barely make out her words.

I wasn’t paying enough attention; my mind was troubled by the thought of another night without food. No sooner had the words left my grandmother’s lips; a bang came at the door. My grandmother and I looked at each other. The banging became louder and faster until the door burst open. I could not get to my feet fast enough to try and hide my grandmother from the man who stood at the door. I jumped in front of her with my arms spread out.

“Leave her alone!” I cried at the sight of the gun in his hands.

The man was here to kill her. A freelancing agent who made money by selling bodies to those who wanted them, those who used human parts for sick experiments. Men like him scavenged through the underground rooms and killed off the sick, disabled and mentally unstable. He took giant steps towards us. I threw the plastic glass I had in my hand at him, it landed at his feet and he kicked it aside.

I screamed for the life of me, but no one came to help. No one ever helped anybody else in the underground rooms. The man reached us and pushed me away from my grandmother with ease. I stumbled over my own feet and fell over. Something flashed in his green eyes before he pointed the gun at my grandmother and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening. My grandmother’s body slumped on the chair and the printed wrap she had around her waist was darkened by blood.

***