MAMA

When realisation hit Torshie, she was drinking gari - a pinch of salt, some sugar.

Her mother was dead.

She blinked.

She tried to remember why.

           

What was making her remember? Was it the gari?

She looked down at her meal.

It was a white mix of cassava flakes; gari, water, sugar, some salt.

The answer glared.

There was no milk. No groundnuts.

No love,

Nothing.

Then, and only then, did she cry.

Rivulets of unshed steam and brine, pouring down her face.

She touched them, amazed at where this pain and gut-wrenching feeling was coming from.

She was crying hard.

Crying for all those times she'd been clear-eyed.

Making up for all those times she'd been obstinate - when she'd refused an opportunity to grieve freely without being judged.

She saw the day Mama had died. Her bony body lying still, and she had not shed a single tear.

The night before the funeral, Mama's body had been brought home from the morgue.

She'd been laid in the sitting room.

The same place she'd often told Torshie stories.

Of Cinderella's and Aku Shika's, of Aesop's and Ananse's.

Torshie remembered sneaking off into the room, glancing at the block of ice that once had been her mother. She remembered touching her hands and wondering why they felt so rigid.

She remembered shaking Mama's body, hands on her sunken chest, and willing her to wake up and shout "Joke's on you!"

When she didn't, Torshie didn't cry. She just left the room a little numb and cold.

She didn't cry when she read the short eulogy that had everyone sniffling. She just imagined Mama smiling at her comfortable use of English, nodding at her 10-year-old's big grammar.

Not a leak when Mama was laid to rest finally. Not when she was asked to drop dirt on the white coffin.

Not when she came back to the place they called home.

Yet now, 6 years later, she was crying into her cup of gari.

Making up for 6 years of numb disbelief.

Mama was dead.

 NB: Photo credit: Black Women Art on Pinterest. Their page is liiiit! - technically speaking ;)