Desolation

          “Maman!” The kids screamed after their mother.

She had already crossed the river and was walking fast up the ridge on the other side, such that she was visible to them. They screamed, their vision blurred with the streaming tears, until they could no longer see her.

Their Grandma called to them again. That they better put some food into those bones before the lunch grew cold. Lexxie smeared Ned’s tears on his cheeks in an effort to wipe them away. She then took him on her back telling him not to cry anymore because Maman would be back later. Even as they both knew it wasn’t true, they made their way into Grandma’s compound, and to her hut.

They had all the sooner forgotten about the morning’s fiasco and joined in in their cousins’ playing when Ned returned home, finding a bottle of medicine in his mother’s kitchen. Evening was creeping in and Lexxie realized that her brother had been gone for a long time, so she went in search of him.

Lexxie was stunned into a trance on finding Ned, fallen just outside the hut, the tinted bottle slipped from his hand and foaming in his mouth. Snapping to, she automatically went to shaking him, initially with ernest but more frantically with every ticking second. Finally she stopped. She entered the hut and similarly drank from every medicine bottle she could find. Then laying beside Ned, she closed a hand over her baby brother’s torso, and curled up tightly against him.

It was indeed too late to save them. The previous night, the air had been filled with accusation between man and wife. This night, aside from the wailing, the air was pregnant with the silence of catastrophe.

With just one stroke, a life build on 7 years had been struck down into nothingness.

~Pierdz