STUCK TO MEMORY

The air was chilly and piercing. My shoulders bore with the weather, stripped and unattended to. The back of my right shoulder tickled with the cold feel of the first rain drop to fall from the heavens. The clouds were charcoal grey and moved hastily, as if in a rush for an appointment. My left shoulder felt two drops of heavenly water. Then suddenly, the gates were opened and the rains rushed towards the earth. My surroundings were filled with all men and women running around, clutching papers and polythene bags above their heads in attempt to shield themselves from the raging drops. My clothes were soaked wet to my skin while goose bumps grew all over me. Among all this confusion, I seemed detached from life. My eyes remained fixed to one position and the tattered old ruins I wore for clothes no longer felt a sense of security. My ears slowly turned out the sound of feet running on muddy ground, splashing water and mud to different directions. Silently, faintly like the running feet were a hundred kilometers away, my ears became numb to any sound. I continued to stare in the same direction. "How could all this happen so soon?" My mind kept on going round and round the same words, like it was a tape bound on replay. As much as I tried to move a step closer, my feet remained fixated in the same place, like they had been built into concrete. All I could do was stare, too shocked to even let down a tear in hurt. Too weak and scared to notice the pouring rains. Again I tried to move, and again I was disappointed. I slowly went down on my knees and began to crawl. I reached a muddy pit in which my mother had been placed. I sat there and looked down into the pit, at my mother's pretty face. Two heavily built men had begun throwing the mud piled at the mouth on the pit onto my mother's body. The men worked quickly against the rain, shoving the dirt into the pit faster than the water filled it up. With my mother's face no longer showing and the pit fully covered up, the two men left me behind, still staring at the grave. "How could all this happen so soon?" The same words kept on replaying in my mind. A tear began to roll down my right cheek; till it reached my lips and I tasted it. Suddenly it was a downpour of tears. I still sat in the same place, making no sound and yet my face told it all.