Well, 2019 happened, but it was before midnight when I hit Publish. So here it is, for your enjoyment, 100% free of charge, my short story, Feast. 

Feast ePub Download

Scroll to the bottom for a link to my personal playlist that I listened to while writing it, great for listening to while reading it.

Writing Feast the first time was a fantasy. 

Writing it the second time was a catharsis. 

In a bout of pre-traumatic stress, I wrote a mystery story set in South Africa, after I had booked tickets to go there. A lot of the initial place descriptions were drawn from Google street view and tourist Flickr accounts. After completion of the first draft, I saw that the Google street view at a lot of the points of interest in the story were taken in 2009, and I was due to fly out in early August 2019. Fair to say, there had been a lot of development and expansion in ten years, even in such a rural area, so parts of my narrative were laughably inaccurate. 

And after my return, I knew I had to write a full second draft of Feast, both surprised by what I had gotten right and shocked at what I had gotten wrong. 

To be clear, in this post (or in the answers to any comments or questions) I will not describe nor confirm nor deny anything that occurred during my stay in South Africa during that week in August 2019, save for two details. 

One – JD accidentally leaving a massive tip because of his lack of understanding of local currency. That was in the first draft, and was strangely prophetic. When time came for me to pay a bill in a Pringle Bay cafe, my local guide was in the restroom and was not there to help me with the alien notes in my wallet. My total came to 107ZAR, I handed over a 200ZAR note and walked away. Simple maths caught up with me later, at which point I thought back to the part in the first draft I had written with JD’s near-identical goof, and laughed aloud. 

Two – although it was the most emotionally significant week of my life, I will disclaim here to the best of my ability that my expressions of the events and people and businesses in the places described are merely a product of artistic license. The physical places (Hangklip mountain, Porter Road, Stony Point Penguin Colony, et al) ARE real, everything else is fiction. Got it? Good.

If, by pure happenstance, you read this story and at a later date find yourself in Cape Town, and then are visited by the compulsion to get in a car and take the hilariously hazardous drive to Pringle Bay / Betty’s Bay / Kleinmond, do NOT expect to see these businesses or meet these people. These characters are a work of fiction, and any real-life inspirations of these fictional characters and businesses are purely coincidental. There ARE amazing, quality, well-run businesses in these areas staffed by incredible, hardworking people, and are well worth the visit.

You SHOULD expect to see the most gorgeous mist-capped mountains and ancient beaches you’ll ever see in your life, and get an amazing bag of koeksuster from a little shop off of the main road in Kleinmond, near the Spar supermarket, which are far superior to the Woolworths ones. The pineapple konfyt is to die for as well. 

Just please, don’t go looking for satchels full of bills on any protected nature reserves.

That’s MY retirement plan.