A beginning of something new…
After my mother died, I spent the first days staring out at sea. She passed away at night just before a storm broke. Inside our small hut by the light of the fading fire, I folded her arms over her chest, kissed her pale cheek, still warm, and I stepped outside. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I thought I was going to go to my uncle’s home, to tell them that she had finally passed on, that after the days of nursing her illness, her end had come.
Instead I found myself by the water’s edge, by the fisherman’s boats that laid ashore, their sails billowing in the gusts of wind. The clouds above the ocean looked like giant faces, lightening flickering in their depths, making the water glow when I could see it. Pity the poor men still on the water, if any there were.
Rain hit my face, great fat droplets of rain that made me look as though I were crying. The truth of the matter is that I wasn’t crying. I had lost my father early to a storm like this, his remains washed on shore after his boat was crushed by the angry ocean. I lost my mother to a wasting illness, her rattling breath my constant reminder of her painful struggle to live. On the shores among the boats, I was alone. In my life, I was alone.
A gust of wind tossed my hair, whipping it away from and then across my face. I shook my head and it flew back just as the rope of one sail snapped and the cloth snapped in the night. Lightning illuminated the ocean, the dark shadows cupped in the pearl waves of the water. I held my breath because it was beautiful. In an instant, the scene was gone. The rain crashed down. I let myself be soaked by it, as though I were under the water, drowning, trying to find my father to tell him that his wife was gone. Then I put my face to the air and the rain sliced my face, cold rain like sleet. I closed my eyes pretending I was in the empty sea.
When I came to my senses, I went back into my house. The fire was nothing but gray ash. I began again, feeding tinder then kindling. When I had warmed and shed my clothes for a drier set, barred the door against the storm and the night, and placed pennies on my mother’s eyes, I sat across from my mother’s body, using one of my bed sheets to sew her shroud.
