The dogs heard it first. Their desperate scurrying from the verandah instructed my ears to listen, and a second later, I heard it, too.
I glanced at the clock: 13:05; it was five minutes late. Unlike my father who is always punctual. Especially when it comes to lunch. So when I heard the frantic scurrying from the verandah followed by the low rumbling on the stony driveway, I automatically headed to unlock the front gate for him.
But something was wrong. Something about the way he was driving was…different.
It wasn’t at his usual ambling speed, which is why I wasn’t really sure anymore that it was him. Even the dogs were unsure. I knew this because they have two barks – one for strangers and one for my dad. The bark they reserve for my dad is distinctive – if love was a sound, that bark would be it. It’s piny, desperate, and it sounds like it comes deep from within – like they would give anything to merge their souls with his. But that bark didn’t come, nor did any bark at all. The dogs stopped halfway to the main gate, their ears to attention, but their tails were still unsure – they wagged half-heartedly, then stopped, then suddenly remembered they were tails and their job was to wag and wagged half-heartedly again.
The person hurtled down the driveway; their roaring vehicle sounded desperate to reach the main gate. Our driveway is long and is sandwiched between two rows of towering cypress trees, making it hidden from the house’s view at certain sections. The front gate keys waited in my hand in suspense while I waited for the vehicle to come into view. When the impatient vehicle halted at the gate, I finally caught a glimpse of the white bakkie*.
It was my dad. He was already tumbling out the bakkie and marching down towards the front door. I unlocked the front gate, not realising that my fingers were frantic.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked.
His left arm hugged the local newspaper, which didn’t surprise me because it was Thursday. My father was a poor man, but he always had R2,50* for The Herald.
I stared as my father marched into the kitchen without even bothering to close the gate behind him. Something was wrong if he didn’t even have time to close the gate; in South Africa the first thing you do when you get home is lock your gate. But I was mistaken – something was up, but not wrong. On the contrary, his face was lit up with the excitement of a kid on Christmas Day. His moustache jiggled slightly atop his smile before he yelled:
“KIM! Come quickly!”
I stared harder. Why did he so urgently need my sister?
“What happened?!” I asked impatiently.
“KIMESHA! Where is that girl? She needs to see this!” he shouted.
“Needs to see what?” I demanded.
“ALIENS were spotted in Oribi Gorge!” He couldn’t wait for Kim anymore; the words tumbled impatiently out his mouth.
“What?!” I asked incredulously. “Dad…I really doubt it…”
“KIM!” he bellowed, ignoring me.
Everyone knew Kim had a weird obsession with ghosts and aliens since she was young. Which is why he was desperate to share this piece of ‘news’ with her.
This time I could hear her shuffling from the depths of the house. Slowly her lazy steps grew louder on the creaking wooden floors, until finally she ambled into the kitchen. Her face told me she had just woken up, despite it being just past 1pm.
“Hey, Dad.”
The moment he had clearly been waiting for since purchasing that newspaper had arrived. My father dramatically slammed the paper onto the kitchen table for us to see, his eyes greedy for our reactions:
CROP CIRCLES FOUND IN ORIBI.
Kim grabbed the newspaper and silently studied the photos of the perfect crop circles found on the farm in Oribi Gorge, a beautiful area about 35 kilometres away from us. She placed the newspaper back on the table.
“Is this real?!”
“Of course it’s not real!” I cried. I was growing impatient. Once, Kim and my father watched a ‘documentary’ on the History Channel about a ‘mermaid’ that was found by some fishermen. When the documentary showed the visuals of this mermaid ‘bumping’ the fishermen’s boat, it suspiciously looked a lot like a big fish bumping the boat. But those two took in every word of the narrator unblinkingly. Every time the documentary showed that one and only visual they had of the ‘mermaid’ bumping the boat, those two would inch closer to the TV to find something they might have missed the last time they saw that same visual of that same big fish bumping the same boat.
My father picked the newspaper up again and started to read the article aloud (and a bit too dramatically):
“On 31 March, Piet Kruger, a sugar cane farmer from Oribi Gorge, was summoned by one of his farm workers when they noticed something strange in the field…”
“Dad, have you heard of this Piet Kruger?” I asked. He usually knew most of the sugar cane farmers in our area, being a sugar cane farmer himself.
“Never heard of him.” He shushed me and continued:
“It looked as if the cane had been flattened, but the flattened ground never seemed to end,” said an overwhelmed Kruger. “I phoned the police immediately because I had never seen anything like it in my life.” Sergeant G.U Llible was equally amazed with the find. “We sent a helicopter up when we received Mr. Kruger’s call, and the discovery we made was astonishing – perfect circles cut into the fields. There was no sign of any life forms near the circles or anywhere on the farm, but we are still investigating the area thoroughly…”
I took the newspaper from him and studied it.
“On 31 March…,” I said slowly, to no one in particular. “DAD, man, today’s the 1st of April!” I exclaimed. “It’s just a prank by The Herald!”
And then I saw it. I laughed. “Sergeant G.U Llible?!” I looked at him to see if it finally dawned on him, but he stared at me blankly. I shoved the newspaper towards him and underlined the sergeant’s name with my impatient index finger so he could see the spelling of his name.
A sort of gurgling sound came from his throat as his face fell into realisation. “BLOODY NEWSPAPER, what a waste of time and R2,50!”
Which then spiralled into a rant about how journalism had gone to the dogs. But I couldn’t resist:
“Dad, did you know that the word ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?”
“WHAAAAAT?! That’s impossible, I’m sure it’s an English word!”
***
*bakkie: what South Africans would call a pick up truck
*R2, 50: I don’t think this exists in dollars…maybe less than 20c
So that just happened. 
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