The Funeral Register

Lwazi recognised Amahle's handwriting before he saw her.

The funeral register lay on a folding table outside the church hall, its pages lifting in the January heat. Beneath his own name, someone had written Amahle Dlamini in the same careful slant she had used on school notes, birthday cards and one letter he had carried unopened for eight years.

He looked up.

She stood near the jacaranda tree speaking to Mrs Nkosi's daughter, dressed in black and holding a bottle of water she had not opened. Her hair was shorter. Her face was older in ways that made her look more like herself, not less.

Lwazi had imagined this meeting often enough to be embarrassed by the versions. In some, she apologised. In others, he did. In the cruelest ones, they passed each other like strangers and proved the whole thing had meant less than he remembered.

Amahle turned.

Their eyes met across a courtyard full of people who had come to mourn the woman who taught them English and once wrote, in red pen at the bottom of Lwazi's essay: You are both too proud to be this bad at speaking.

Amahle walked toward him.

"Hi," she said.

Eight years reduced to one syllable.

"Hi."

She glanced at the register. "You still press too hard with a pen."

He looked down at his name, the letters dug into the page beneath.

"You still notice things you pretend not to care about."

For half a second, the old Amahle appeared—the one who would have smiled and pushed his shoulder.

Then the church bell rang.

"We should go in," she said.

They sat three rows apart.

During the eulogy, Mrs Nkosi's daughter spoke about how her mother kept boxes of old student work. After the service, anyone who wanted theirs could collect it from the classroom.

Lwazi nearly left.

Then Amahle appeared beside him holding a yellow envelope.

His name was written on the front.

In Mrs Nkosi's handwriting.

"She kept this," Amahle said.

Lwazi took the envelope.

Inside was the letter he had never opened.

The service began under a white marquee that trapped the October heat. Lwazi sat three rows behind Amahle and spent most of the hymns looking at the back of her head, ashamed of himself for noticing the same small details he remembered from school: the way she touched her left ear when listening carefully, the way she folded a programme along an existing crease instead of making a new one.

Mrs Nkosi had taught English as if every sentence carried a moral responsibility. She crossed out lazy adjectives, distrusted exclamation marks and once kept Lwazi after class because he wrote “I couldn’t say anything” in an essay.

“You could,” she had told him. “You chose not to. Those are different stories.”

At seventeen he thought she was talking about grammar.

After the burial, former pupils gathered beneath the jacaranda tree. Amahle was laughing at something Themba said when she looked across and caught Lwazi watching her. The laugh disappeared, not dramatically, just enough for him to feel eight years return to the space between them.

“Hello, Lwazi.”

“Hello.”

The word sounded too small.

They spoke about Cape Town, her work in Gqeberha, his mother’s health—careful updates from lives that had continued successfully without each other. Then Mrs Nkosi’s daughter approached carrying a worn blue exercise book.

“My mother left some things for old students,” she said. “This was inside yours.”

An envelope slid out.

Amahle saw the handwriting at the same moment he did.

Before they went to the classroom, Lwazi spent ten minutes helping stack plastic chairs because he needed a task that did not involve looking at Amahle. Themba joined him without being asked.

“You two finally spoke,” Themba said.

“We said hello.”

“For you two, that is a summit.”

Lwazi slid a chair onto the stack. “Did you know about the letter?”

Themba’s hands stopped.

That was enough.

“You knew?”

“Not exactly. Mrs Nkosi once asked me if you and Amahle had ever sorted out ‘that foolishness’. I thought she meant the way you stopped speaking after matric.”

“When?”

“Years ago. At the alumni day.”

Lwazi felt an irrational anger toward everyone who had possessed even a fragment of information he did not. Then he remembered he had spent eight years refusing to ask the one person who could have answered him.

Amahle approached carrying two bottles of water. She handed him one.

“Your mother still in Polokwane?” she asked.

“Most of the year.”

“She used to send us those biscuits in the blue tin.”

“You hated them.”

“I hated raisins. Your mother treated that like a character defect.”

They both smiled. The memory was small, harmless, almost more intimate than the questions they were avoiding.

Lwazi realised then that missing someone was not one feeling. It was an archive. Some files hurt. Others simply waited to be opened.

Amahle's letter.