The Journey Prize Stories 33 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

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The night fate rendered my mother’s tongue silent, we had said our goodnights and each retired to our bedrooms on opposite ends of the hall. The sound of her voice calling my name stirred me as I was drifting into sleep. I went to her room and she was sitting up in bed, looking much older than she had two hours before. She couldn’t move, she said; her legs had stiffened like pitchforks.

“I’ll go fetch Papa,” I said, knowing he’d be at the soukous pub down the road. He’d been contracted to build a canteen at the health centre and had fallen into the habit of stopping at the pub on his way back from work.

Mama shook her head, no. “He’ll be home soon.” She wanted a drink of passionfruit juice. There were only two butunda left on the kitchen table. I scraped their yellow insides into a tea mug and topped it up with cold drinking water. She swallowed it all up in one long gulp and said, “Back to bed now. I’ll call if I need you.”

But rather than go back to bed I ran to the pub. The female bartender said my father was out back under the frangipani, and that I needed to go back out and use the side gate. I found him sipping waragi at a red plastic table with four other men, the yellowish light of the lantern illuminating their happy faces.

Papa ran to a neighbour, the carpenter, who owned a pickup truck, while I rushed back to Mama. I found her moaning quietly, delirious. She’d broken into a sweat even though her forehead felt cold to my touch.

As Papa and the carpenter struggled to get her into the pickup now parked in our compound, Mama stared intently at me. I could tell she wanted to speak but her tongue seemed stuck to the roof of her mouth. A solitary tear rolled down the side of her face.

I wanted to chase after the vehicle as it sped off, but my feet felt heavy. I felt heavy. And a storm was coming. I prayed to the heavens to give me my mother back, but the black clouds spilled rain.

It was still pouring when I got to the clinic early the next morning. The taro leaf I’d used for an umbrella had been insufficient and I was wet, my school uniform suctioned to my body. Mama lay unmoving between pea-green clinic sheets. She looked peaceful, like she’d come to terms with her own mortality. Her pulse was hollow, floating, and the nurse told me it was the kind known to grace the wrists of those who had bled.

My mother hadn’t bled that I knew of, wasn’t bleeding now, I didn’t think. “My grandparents,” I told the nurse, “they’re the ones who bled. Not my mother.”

The nurse arched her eyebrow. “The doctor thinks the rheumatoid arthritis has gone to your mum’s heart,” she said. “It’s what brought on the heart attack.”

I said, “Will she awake?”

“She’s in a coma, little darling,” the nurse said.

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