21/03/2024
"My father usually returned home at night during my childhood, reeking of ci******es and clutching a bottle of beer or gin.
My mother would challenge his behaviour, calling it irresponsible.
She would tell him it was unthoughtful of him as a father to return at midnight, drunk and high off ci******es. And when she would not let up, my father would pounce on her like a fearless hyena, pūnching her until her flesh turned purple and her eyes became little melon seeds.
The one time I tried to stop him, he shoved me so hard my head bashed the cracked walls behind me and I nearly passed out. And enraged by my defiance and interference, he doubled my mother's bēating. I was six.
In consequent times, I would lock myself in my room as soon as my father returned home, quivering with fear that he would break my door and get to me after he was done with my mother.
From inside the wardrobe in my room where I hid, I would hear my mother calling for help. But I knew none of the neighbours would come. They never came. They had grown deaf to her pleas as the bēating came daily and they had become weary.
One morning, I woke up to a hollowed house. There was no sound of my mother's pestle thumping against the mortar from the kitchen as she prepared the morning meal. There was no sound of her voice crooning along to a local gospel song drowning off from the radio in the parlour. There was no whistling kettle restraining boiling water.
I trampled out of my room to the parlour where I met my father. He was seated on his favourite seat, reading a preferred newspaper. I greeted him like a civilian would greet a soldier, with fear and cautiousness, and then asked him about my mother. He said she went away.
Went away, I couldn't help but ask. I bit down on my tongue as soon as the words rolled off it.
I was surprised when my father beckoned me closer. He cuddled me against his chest, so big and hairy and smelling faintly of ni****ne, and then told me that my mother ran away last night while he wanted to bēat her.
She probably ran off to evade my beatīng, he laughed as if he was telling a moonlight joke. She would return later in the day, he added.
But my mother never returned that day, or the next day, or the next year. Eventually, we agreed to ourselves that she was missing. Some nights, I would sit and think about it: where my mother went, if she thought of me as often as I did her, if she woke up in the middle of the night with an unbearable burnīng to see me. But life must go on, although the memories of my mother were like a stone in my chest, so heavy and big it felt hard to breathe sometimes.
Today, a young man of 21, I returned from school to visit my father who, now older, has lost the rigidity of his youth. We have reacquainted ourselves over a few bottles of beer, and while he now sleeps in the parlour, I sit on a log in the backyard, looking out at my dog. It is a male German shepherd, a gift from my girlfriend on my last birthday. I love to keep its light brown fur free of dirt, but it doesn't share my thoughts. It is quite playful and loves digging in the dirt, often bringing me gifts of rubbīsh it had dug up. It had already gotten me an old bottle of Coke, caked completely in mud, and now, a large bone which I barely acknowledged as I tapped away on my phone.
Some minutes later, I look up from my phone to find a small pile of bones and debris by my feet; my dog has been busy. Curious to know where it has been getting them, I follow my dog to the far end of the backyard, to a hole it had dug at the base of an orange tree. As my dog pulls out yet another bone from the hole, I shush it aside and then crouch down and begin digging with my palms, to find the source of these endless bones.
I have barely dug for five minutes when I hit something hard, something solid. I dig faster, my fingers soon latching onto a smooth, rounded bone which when I tugged hard, reveals itself to be a skull. A closer inspection reveals the forehead area of the skull to be cracked; a work of something heavy like a hammer or pestle.
I cannot get why a person was buried at the foot of the orange tree in the backyard after their head was crackēd open. But just as I am about to get up and take the skull to show my father, it hit me and I finally understand.
I finally understand where my missing mother went all these years.
- Desmond Ben -
My Dear Gender, Leave to Live....
Your kids need you alive...
Your Happiness And Peace Above Every Other Thing..."
WRITTEN BY NKECHI OPUTA
