The Keeping

Competition Entry: Wattpad - Wuthering Heights Retelling

In anticipation of the upcoming Warner Bros. Pictures film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, this story brings a fresh twist to Brontë's iconic tale of consuming love and its cost across generations.

In a hollow older than naming, where fever trees twist toward lovers and mist takes the shape of longing, the women of Nomathemba's line have kept what others let go.

At seventeen, she meets Andile between the trees-storm-dark and inevitable-and their love burns so fiercely it cracks the sky. But he leaves for London, for bridges, for a life across the ocean she cannot follow. "Haunt me," he whispers. "If I forget- remind me."

So she weaves their love into mist and keeps it. For sixty years.

The keeping costs her everything: her body dissolving by degrees, a hollow marriage to a man who collects broken things, three daughters poisoned against her by whispered lies. Only Thandi sees the truth - the mother who braided their hair, sang them through fevers, loved them with everything the keeping left her.
But the hollow collects its debts. And some loves, once kept, can never be released - only transformed into something that reaches forever, fingers almost touching, never quite meeting.

A South African reimagining of Wuthering Heights that asks: What does it cost to hold on? And what remains when we finally let go?