THEME: KNOCK YOURSELF OUT
TITLE: “REST”
Written by Pamella Amethyst Brown
My mother’s cries were the last thing I heard every night since my brother went MIA. It was heart wrenching seeing my mother loose against grief like that. We as kids had always seen our parents as impenetrable walls of strength. My mother unraveling at the seams not only was breaking her up to her atomic components, but it was also tearing the family apart. She had been figuratively the glue that helped keep the house together. My father was neck deep inside a beer bottle. I was a mess of emotions. But the one emotion that took the front seat was jealousy.
Yes, jealously for my brother.
It’s weird I know, but I was jealous of my missing brother. He’d been the golden child. Our parents clearly loved him more than me. I was their last born and only daughter but they worshipped the ground he walked on. When I say they gave him everything, I mean they gave him everything. He had his first car when he was 16 years old. They sent him to a private integrated high school, because they wanted the best education for him. When my time came for high school, my mother sent me to a township school that wasn’t even doing that well in regard of their passing mark. I never even cared about how fancy the school was. They could have at least sent me to a school that was strict and had a good passing rate.
No, not them. The best was always reserved for my brother.
Seeing them lose themselves when he went missing sent me up in flames. Even when I started getting reckless, they never noticed. I wished that they cared for me half as much as they cared for him. Even when he was gone – or in our case missing – they totally erased me out their view sight. I found myself sometimes for a spit second wishing that he was gone, permanently. That was a bitter possibility that my mother refused to accept.
My brother was in the South African National Defence Force navy, and his ship had gone radio silent somewhere around the Bermuda Triangle. A total of 321 men and women just gone like that, as if they had been ruptured or something. We hadn’t even known that he was that far away from home. Why was even our army that near the Americas? Was there something everyday people like us were missing?
We found out one warm day when two army brown cars drove up our long dusty driveway, their wheels pushing up dust and making it look as if a pack of wildebeests was stampeding across our front yard. Some of the downsides of staying in a farmhouse just a kilometer and a half outside the city was all the dust we had to deal with.
The cars pulled up in front of the house. My mother was already at the door. I assumed she was hoping it was her son, as we hadn’t seen him for a year up until that day. Instead, they gave her the bad news. It was like they had stampeded on her heart. She cried for days and as much as I was jealous of my brother, I felt for mother. She had given so much of her heart to him. Now there was a possibility that he had sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean along with her heart. It was a fate far worse than death, for my mother. What is worse than a mother losing their child? I’ll wait…
***
I don’t remember much about the accident. What I could not get out my ears was the ringing. It was as if a phone was ringing right inside my ear. I don’t remember how I got out the taxi, but outside the world was ending. Smoke seemed to have taken up all the space, and a person could barely see two feet in front of them. The screaming. Jesus, the screaming was overpowering the ringing ten-fold. I navigated myself around the smoke and finally found the edge of it. I sat down and watched the wreckage as if I were watching an animal giving birth on the National Geographic Channel. It was an out of body experience. I could not take my eyes away from it. The image held me hostage the same way a pimple popping TikTok video did. There was just something about the burning people that just made me pause and watch everything in slow motion as the smoke cleared.
A woman was screaming her lungs out being held back by a boy in a school uniform same as mine. I didn’t recognize him. She was trying to get back to her baby who was inside one of the burning cars. She was bleeding profusely and close to death, but her motherly adrenaline was keeping her body just alive enough for her to witness her child being burnt alive.
A man walked out of the clearing smoke, as the hero would in an action movie, carrying the child. The women saw this and recognized the child in the man’s arms, and she stopped screaming and relaxed in the boy’s arms. I still didn’t know him. He looked to be in my grade or a year younger, but I just couldn’t place him. The man was limping badly as one of his legs was damaged to what seemed like beyond repair. He made his way to the woman. The mother took one look and smiled, as if she was satisfied with what she was looking at. She then just stopped. She stopped moving. The boy and the man looked at each other and a moment of silence felt like hours. It was an unbelievably unique moment to witness that happen in the middle of a car pile-up.
I would have probably witnessed the child waking up in the man’s arms, but the wailing of ambulances made their debut into this saga, redirecting my attention to then. They sounded as if a bunch of Banshees were screaming. Maybe that is what Banshees sound like. It’s just that we think it’s the ambulances that make the sound. Now isn’t that food for thought.
One ambulance stopped a few metres from me. People in green jumped up and whooshed past me. They attended to the motherless child, the man whose leg was long gone, the boy I didn’t recognize, and the newly deceased mother. I watched as more green dressed EMTs jumped to action to help other people who were still alive and holding on by doll hairs. It was a miracle that I had walked out without even a scratch. God must have had me on His lap when the accident happened.
Not a moment too soon, more fire trucks than ambulances made it to the scene and got to work trying to stop the fires. A field near the road was already up in flames. The crops were an inferno and those poor men and women in red had their work cut out for them. If the fire got worse, it would reach the city, and nobody wanted that. I felt someone place their hands on my shoulders.
“Pudding,” came a whisper.
I froze. Only one person called me that and right now he was most likely swimming with fish at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.
“What!” I jumped up and faced him.
He looked bigger than I last saw him. He looked healthier and happier. I jumped on him, attacking him with a hug. The resentment and jealousy were out the window. My big brother was home.
“Slow down tiger before you strangle me,” he laughed, prying my arms from around his neck.
“Sorry, got too excited,” I grinned and tried to keep my knees from giving way. “Why are you here?”
“Well, the car couldn’t cross over due to this….” he gestured to the accident. “…so they dropped me off here. Are you okay? Were you involved in this?” he asked checking my whole body.
“Yes, but I’m totally fine,” I said, looking myself over to make sure that I was really fine.
“Are you sure? You don’t want the medics to check you?” he blinked and pulled a smile.
I smiled back. I never realized how much I had missed his smile. Even though our parents had treated him like Cinderella’s stepmother had treated her daughters and me like she had Cinderella, I and my brother had gotten along fine. He’d even taken my side a few times and spoke back to our mother, and as always, she never saw wrong in what she did to me, and she never reprimanded my brother for speaking against her or going against her wishes. The golden child always won.
“I’m fine. Let them attend to people that need the help more than I do.”
I took his hand and looked back. The mother was covered in a foil blanket, the child was being carried by a female medic away from the scene, the man was on a stretcher being attended to, and the boy was nowhere to be seen.
“Then can we go home. I could use the walk. I need some time with you.”
“What does that mean? You can’t be going back. You got lost at sea. I can’t lose you again.”
I held back tears. Not today’s tears. This was not your day. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. I’ve seen too much to cry now.
“No, I’m just… I’m just saying I don’t know when we’ll ever get time just the two of us.” He had teary eyes. He was fighting them as much as I was fighting mine.
“We’ll have to make time, you are home now…”
We walked away from the wreckage. I didn’t even know how many vehicles had been involved. Where on earth was my backpack even? At that moment I could care less. My mother was going to lose her marbles when she sees him walking through the gates. Maybe this time she’d see me too. She’d see that I had brought her baby back, and maybe give me a hug.
It was a very blissful moment of walking in silence. I felt so at peace. I had never felt this light in my life. Our farmhouse slowly came into view. Our father’s van was driving down the driveway heading for the gate, which was already open. The car flew the two yards to the gate and they didn’t even stop to close the gate. They always left the gate closed when they left the house. The car zoomed past us, as if neither of them noticed us on the side of the road.
“Where are they rushing to?” I watched the dust they left behind them as the car disappeared in the direction of the accident. “They didn’t even see us. Anyway, let’s go inside,” I said and shrugged. “They’ll see you once they get back.”
I started walking towards the gate, but he didn’t follow me.
“What’s the matter?” I looked at him. He was fiddling with the army uniform he was still wearing. “What?” I started to feel a pit in my throat.
“Pudding, look…” he sighed, “…Mama never despised you.”
“You can tell me all that inside, come.” I walked back to him and grabbed his arm. “Come.” I pulled but he didn’t as much flint.
“She loved you,” He sniffed. “She loves you.” Tears ran down his cheeks.
“No,” I shook my head. “Let us head inside please.” I pulled, nothing.
“She just had a colourful way of showing it.”
“Bhuti no.”
I remembered who the boy was. He was the boy that had gotten me pregnant.
“Pudding.”
“Bhuti.”
We were on our way from school to tell my parents. We had already told his. They hated it. They wanted me to send it back to heaven. I didn’t know what I wanted. I had thought telling my mother would help. In hindsight, that was probably the worst idea in the history of ever.
“Pudding, our road ends here.”
The boy had pulled me out of the taxi hardly alive. I was bleeding from my stomach.
“You never made it out The Bermuda, didn’t you?”
“None of the 321.”
I swallowed the lumped and I felt sick to my stomach. My stomach. I held it and felt a headache brewing. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream louder than any Banshee had ever wailed.
“Come on, let’s go rest. You must be tired… I know I am.”
He flashed me that one-million-dollar smile of his. I smiled back. I didn’t feel better, but rest did sound nice. I really was tired.
Aren’t you?
PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Magazine Facebook Short Story Competition is funded by the National Arts Council, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme 3
PUBLISH'D AFRIKA 