Citrus sores

...a story of grief.

Photo by Elena Baidak on Unsplash

Can anyone truly describe the sound of the heart breaking?

It is similar to the clunks of little rocks that hit the drape coffin of your father, swallowed by the wails of your mother flinging her worn-out Ankara, clutched by women with meaty arms and bristled voices.

The sweltering heat from the sun overhead burned the men who threw the sand into his grave. I avoided my mother’s gaze because I knew she knew. They all did.

Everyone remembers what I did, but no one knows why I did it.

“He has gone to be with the lord,” the priest clamped my shoulder, nodded, and brushed by me.

Maybe I should have asked him what he meant by that, why the Lord took my father so early. Maybe I should have asked him why the lord had let me kill him.

ONE MONTH EARLIER

The room was laced with the acrid scent of citrus that stung my eyes as I moved toward him. He lay on the bed like he had been doing for two years: his eyes scanning each movement like that one painting that follows you everywhere.

The last time I had a conversation with my father was the day I finished my final examinations in secondary school. It was cloudy when I dropped the ink, slung my bag over my shoulders and went home. I didn’t expect him to understand what I was saying because he had stopped recognizing our faces for the longest time.

“I wrote my last paper today, Dad,” I said dismissively, moving around his room. He stared at me and his eyes glazed over with recognition, his mouth tugged, and a bright smile split his wrinkled face in half.

“Thank you,” he said before the recognition melted into the milk waves of confusion that cloaked his once-sharpened black irises.

It became a downward spiral from there on. The mattress he lay on had become so used to his skin that it considered it as part of his own. Each time he was turned and wiped, a shaft of skin peeled, leaving the malodorous taste of pus hanging in the air.

University felt like an escape: leaving the confines of a place that had stopped feeling like home.

“Change him…wash his sheets…wear the diapers…” the commands kept spewing from my mother’s mouth. A heavy sigh left my lips as I went through the chores mechanically.

Her worn eyes mirrored the mental strain that hung in the house. We moved like shafts, guided by the cruel wind, shuffling through time to make meaning of what life had dealt to us.

When life gives you lemons? Squeeze them into a cup and apply them to your father’s bed sore. Isn’t that how the saying goes? Because that is what my mother did, and that was why the irritating smell of citrus clung stubbornly to my fingers even after stubbornly scrubbing them with bleach.

The sore gradually worsened like a pothole on an overused road; it sank till I turned him over one day, and I saw the jagged edge of a bone piercing through. That was when I knew something had to be done. Maybe it was the way he looked at me, the desperate longing for peace swirling in his eyes.

I knew he was tired of suffering, and frankly, I was too.

It was a calm evening when I finally decided to do it. I fingered the tip of the small bottle of rodent powder I had gotten the previous day in the busy market. The silence in the house clinked with the emptiness in my heart.

One teaspoon would make him sicker, two would make him go into shock, three would do the job.

I added five teaspoons of rodent powder into his steaming Quaker oat. I swear, there was a look of gratitude in his eyes when he swallowed the first spoon of his last meal. For the first time in a long while, he finished his food. He didn’t stop until the entire bowl was scraped clean.

I dressed his wound, lowered him on the clean sheets and placed a Judas kiss on his face before shutting the door and moving to my room. The plangent scream of my mother tore through the calm night air when she came home to his rigid body. His eyes were locked in the corner of the room where he possibly saw angels, foam gliding down the side of his face till it hit the treacherous mattress that had swallowed his skin, blood and pus.

THREE MONTHS LATER

I thought I would feel some sort of joy, like Rose did when the salty wind combed her hair on the boat with Jack, or sadness when she watched his lips turn pale blue and his body merge with the icebergs as he drowned.

But, I felt…relief.

As I sat across from my mother, her eyes reddened with an expression I couldn't fully read, my heart shivered with sadness, not for my dad, but for her. She had the most memories with him: she met the man who loved to tear the fat legs of a turkey while the juice dribbled down his fingers; she met the man who loved to dance and stare at her like she was the only woman in the world.

She held my hands: the cold, rusty silver bracelet chaining me to the table jingled sadly.

“I forgive you,” she whispered, and the first tear slipped from my eyes. The scene ravaged my mind as the fraying edges of the noose passed over my head like a diabolical halo.

The tears broke free again as I remembered her warm smile and how happy she would be now. The stool beneath my toes wobbled and fell violently. The last thing I remembered was the sharp prick of the rope digging into my throat, my lungs clamouring for air, and the familiarity of darkness as it swallowed me whole.

This was redemption.