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Sailboat
What if you die? What if you die before I die? I asked him. That’s when he decided we should drive to the bank. He took the bottle showing the percentage of the ingredients; matcha, ginger, kale, pear, spinach, banana and apple. A green smoothie bottle full of coins. He is the one who chose the smoothie, he is the one who transferred the coins into the bottle. At the Stadtmitte, the personal banker threw the coins into the counting machine. 750 ml of coins worth 79.80 Euros. He told the banker to deposit the money into my account. He told the banker we needed a Visa credit card in my name, linked to my debit card account. Told her, as I had told him, that the MasterCard debit card was useless in most places outside the continent. We had to wait ten minutes while she tried to pull up the card designs. “Slow connection”, she told him. “She can choose any when the connection is back,” I told him. “We have to wait, the design choice step precedes all the others,” he was right. She kept looking at the computer screen, looking at him, apologizing. The card designs were many. Overwhelming. Sailboats at sea, the Petronas Towers, Burj Khalifa, Eiffel Tower, winding paths with greenery on either side, slanting wine fields, BASE jumpers free-falling off dizzying cliffs and some already drifting away under colourful canopies, Swiss cows with full, pink udders threatening to burst open, and various flowers in various colours; pink, violet, yellow, red and more pink. I felt stressed. What I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t choose flowers, let alone pink. The woman doing yoga, I will go with the woman in the lotus position even though she is white. I giggled, the thought of walking around with a white woman doing yoga in my wallet, inserting her into POS terminals, handing her out to waiting staff. Don’t they have black ones? “Do you have black ones?” I asked her in English, pointing at the design. “Unfortunately not, but you can upload a picture of your choice and email it to us,” she answered in German, looking at me out of good manners and at him for translation I didn’t need. Sometimes, understanding was easier than talking. “Go for the one of the boat on sail,” he said. “The sailboat please.” He was right about the sailboat. It was my second preference after the yoga lady. But I had wanted to voice the choice myself; tell the banker my requirements myself.
About Mildred H.
Mildred H. is a Motswana living in Germany. She studied in Botswana, USA and Scotland. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Aberdeen’s MLitt Creative Writing programme.
