Originally printed in Something Wicked Issue #5 and illustrated by Vincent Sammy
Author's Bio

In October of 1817, Lord Charles Somerset, Governor of the Cape Colony, dispatched a young Irish soldier, Captain Francis Faran, into the central Karoo to investigate the viability of establishing a town near the farm Hooyvlakte. Faran and his men never reached Hooyvlakte, and never returned.


Grant smiled as Shelley stopped the car on the shoulder of the highway. "Is this a joke?"
  Shelley smiled back, shaking her head. "No joke. This is the place."
  The place was expansive and empty. Five pm on a Wednesday afternoon, middle of the Karoo. Not a soul in sight, nor a town, nor a structure, just flat scrub-brush and sand everywhere you looked.
  "You're going to leave me here?" Grant asked, maintaining the smile on the outside only.
  "Do you want to see Sowan?"
  A minute later he was watching the little Corsa trundle away from him into the emptiness. He wanted to pretend, even to himself, that he could deal with this, but it felt as if his bones were shrieking silently. Just stay standing upright till she can't see you any more, he thought.
  It was a long, long way to the horizon, and sunlight still glinted off the tiny speck of the car in the distance when the fear overwhelmed him and he had to sit down.
  Grant had been on foot in the Karoo before, many times. Much of his military career had been spent out here, in the dark old days of Apartheid, training the country's white young men to hunt and kill. It was not the circumstance of being abandoned in the semi-desert that terrified him. It was the circumstance of being abandoned here on this particular night, October 31, by Shelley.