She is Mother
Talk to the bone white dawn; insert a prayer in the silence. No one wants the raw breath still carrying the mole holes of your lungs. Keep quiet! The clock ticks in the clogged drudgery of the hour. The feet are rough with sleep. The sheet is wet enough to hang. Swing low, the winds hums under the window sill. Its breath stinks of the carrion of night. Who was the night’s guest near the fire? Two big foot prints lie still sucking the smallest sigh of the single flame.
The light comes like a silent train. The tree beside the house draws away its shadows then returns with the cold shudder of the world yonder. Someone scrapes the stone floor, walking like the condemned to the bathroom to take a piss. The deep press of the bed enfolds the last taste of the sweet dream. Wake up, wake up, the morning comes. A cock crows. The riot of mosquitoes quells beneath the bed where the darkness yawns, turns to its other side and goes back to sleep. A cock crows. The springs begin to sing, impatient to be relieved of the burden they had carried throughout the dreaming night. They know the dreams better than the dreamer. They snicker within their song. A body is a weight bigger than worship, bigger than the gods. When it cries, whoever it carries becomes deaf to any god’s anger. A cock crows.
It is Sunday. The boys, bare feet as the grass, the trees, the rivers and hills, crisscross the boot print and though each is a sluggish slime across the dew dropped room, they do not see it. They are bowed, eyes wound open with the cuckoo of the crows and the swallow and the cock but they see only their toes move one minute at a time. Wake up, soldiers of god, your god is come. Let us worship! Fat with the oily sheen of unrepentant sadness, the father holds the big book, good enough to spank with, higher than the last flicker of the dying flame. He preaches. His eyes are the diamond darkness of a cunning hole. He preaches. His fists are tighter than Sango around his war hammer. He prays. Gods, he prays and the children say amin.
The body has arrived with the light. The mirror smiles as if there is welcome there. The face reveals its fault lines, where the seismic events tumbled the mountains, the grand savannahs, the mighty battlements, the deep seas of her body. She is woman. She is very woman. What story can a body tell? She tries to rewrite her image in the mirror like a goddess she once loved, worshipped and fought for but her powers are limitlessly futile. She sighs. It is deep. It is sad. A wrapper is a weapon. A wrapper is also the only thing between sanity and the black hole of fading. She washes her face. She is woman. She washes her hair. The sink waddles through the greasy soap smell to the gullet and gaggles it. She stares at the retreating water. She wanders. Amin, she whispers for a prayer that she did not say.
The day is impatient outside like a dog eager to take a piss. Father is not done. He is never done. He reads the big book. His index finger traces the words slow and his voice is hoarse with misuse. He misses the words. He misses the meaning. The boys snicker. They will pay for that later. The book closes with a bang. He preaches. The boys snooze. He preaches. Mother comes out, tidier than her dream and her fears. She knocks the boys together like bowling pins and they spin about in a tangle of knees, elbows, fingers and toes. Father roars from up on high. It is hell and hail, brime and volcanic ash. Hell is unrelenting in its puke. When the floor is finally filled with what hell can bring, father breathes his last, falls on his feet and then, there is eternal silence.
He died of a stroke. A bad heart. A bad heart? He died of too much living, mother mutters. Too much prayer and fasting. Too much waiting upon his wretched god. Too much repentance. He died and left me in this unending today. Will tomorrow ever come? The boys are dressed in sombre silence. The import of that loud absence has not sunk in. The cock has stopped to crow. This is not betrayal, i crowed more than three times. It picks a tick with its beak and chews deep in thought. He sees the hens scramble out like passengers escaping a damaged vehicle and he flies into the rage of lust. Like a rocket, it flies.
What a morning, the priest says. Our brother died while doing his god’s work. He is definitely with the father in heaven. Mother stares at the window. The sun is almost rising. Its fingers tease the morning with soft bursts of golden hue. It should be beautiful. What beauty? He promised that it would be beautiful. I am hungry mommy. So am i, son and so am i. This is how you know that hunger lives longer than grief. She listens to the nothing in her head. The people move like old memories or old movie scenes about the room. They pick through her things, his things without respect. They sit on his chair; the only chair. Its seat is low to the ground, adjusted to the burden of his once growing body.
One of the boys stops the woman from sitting. It is my father’s chair, he insists. The woman widens like a balloon. She splutters. She gets up and disappears through the only door. The chair wonders what it means to be owned by one who is no more. Does it mean i am useless now? The world moves on, the tree whispers back. In time, you will be the playground of everyone.
What will you do now? The man of a god asks. He adjusts his wristwatch to better see the earth rotate. He has four more members to console and three more new mothers to congratulate.
We are moving. The priest looks around unconvinced. No one ever leaves here except dead. Mother stares at the mouth, the horrific hole that bled out that truth. They will not let you leave, a frightened man whispers. I know but i am not like you. I am not from this place. I am a visitor and i will leave when i am good and ready. The room is filtering the sun when the silence meets it. The sunbeams falter to the floor forgotten in the sudden shock that patters about the room as if in jest. You do not know me. Mother stands up and the boys stand up too. They will not let you, the frightened chorus. As she walks to the door, they rush to the door in desperate flee.
Mommy, they are afraid. Yes but not of me. At least not yet. Soon they will see this time as a time of joy. I bring sorrow when i move, my children. The three of them stand outside and watch the distance shorten between them and the herald. When it arrives, dressed in the form of an old woman, there is blood on its feet. You will not leave with our sons. Many voices screech from the old woman’s slack mouth. Her eyes are bone white and her hair is dressed in the colour of rain. Then you and everything you worship will die. We worship god in truth and in spirit. Then he too shall die.
Did the spear fall from the sky? Did mother drag it from the other side of life? Did she always have it with her? No one can say. When she was done, the village was no more. A god, broken, crawls away in agony. A herald runs into the river, mad with hate, fear and grief. When she is done, mother walks, bereft, old, without love, with her two boys, back into the world she once abjured. Amin.
END
Yours always,
Osahon (warpedpoetic)