By Gabrielle Mohamed
In the early hours of the Christmas Eve, the rickety gait of a broken granddaughter stumbles along the red chapped bricks of Georgetown’s Main Street. In the chaos of the Christmas Eve mania, loneliness conducts an orchestra of her depression. Under death’s blanket, the golden beams of our dearly departed souls gleam perkily in the veins of the Red Muddah’s heart – at least that’s what Papa used to say. Perhaps he, too, is with me tonight.
Beneath the long, thick curly mane of the Red Muddah’s lungs, her golden seraphic hue lulls the silver whispers of vacant memories playing a symphony of madness, mocking my sorrow, burying my guilt with scenes of the obvious signs and symptoms of a bomb detonating itself in the silence of my own ignorance. At the altar of his dying, I kneel into the fragments of his unspoken pain, cold tears baptising my own demon of regret. He who is absolutely famished and persistently feeding on the fire of my wholeness leaves nothing but a shell in his absence.