Taste my wraith

I’m staring at my coffee machine frantically;how bizarre is it to wait for my cup of coffee when I should have headed out for work minutes ago. I peep at my wrist watch, good heavens I’m seven minutes late, toss me in the bin! That’s about the last glance I spare the little machine before concluding that it is indeed broken. “Maybe later” the words leave my mouth and I feel a dashing hope pierce through my skin the moment I take a step out of the door. The weather is too cozy for a summer’s afternoon, perhaps hot coffee was a bad idea after all. I flash a horrid but desperate glance at my wrist watch again and I’m slapped with an empty plate full of middle fingers from time, “curse my luck” I sped with my pace almost beating that of Eloise, who is slow riding her little bicycle just across the street from me. The suburbs where I live in is a small circle of conservative natives and although we’re all from different parts of the world, we somehow found a way to relate properly regardless of our diverse languages. It all started when the 2045 world war broke out. when 4 out of 7 continents unified to fight against bad governance, demanding for a political reform. I wasn’t even born at the time but my grandmother made sure to fill us in; Jericho my late brother, Maya my little sister and I. When I asked her why such a revolutionary war erupted, she shrugged and said “ Oh well we wanted an end to our suffering, the unnecessary hunger, lack of consideration for our constitutional rights, immense increase in s*x crime rates, gender inequality, low income jobs, corruption, religion discrimination, racism, manslaughter, oppression and every type of injustice in the book, we were so fed up and that was how the war began” I remember sitting on her thighs, so she could give me a hairdo. while she was braiding my hair, my siblings sat in front of us and listened. “ I was 17, working in the barns when I heard the news over the radio.” War is upon us!!! War is coming !!! All I could think of was my lover, he was just three roads away from me. Do I drop the shovel I was holding and run over to him? Do I rush over to the house and inform my father of what I just heard on the radio? Do I fetch my bicycle and ride down town to collect my sisters from school? All these thoughts ran through my mind and before I could react, I heard my name. Helena!!! It was my dad calling. I ran quickly towards the sound of his voice. He was standing in front of our maize plantation with a rifle. As soon as my eyes met his rifle in-hand, I froze. It was then my brain started to process the delicacy of the matter but the urgency of it was what my body refused to accept. I was in so much shock that my father had to c**k his gun and I flinched at the sound of it. “Don’t just stand there Helena! Get your mother and Tony!” He yelled. I retreated, making sure to head towards the direction of the other side of the farm, where mom and Tony were picking fresh oranges. As I turned to my left, I gave my father another frightened look but he had already hurried into his truck in haste. “ where are you going?”I yelled from a distance so he could hear me. “To pick your sisters, get your mother and wait for me inside the house, lock all the doors, let no one in, no one! not your friends or their friends or the people from church or the neighbors! Understand?” Still shaken by his firm tone, I watched him drive off in his truck before running down to meet my mother. “Well when you met her and your brother by the orange tree, How did she take the news? Was she as frightened as you were? Did your brother also panic?” Jericho, who was already on the edge asked and she smiled, “Well not as panicked as you are now” She teased him. “Then what happened when you met them?” Maya interrupted, “Well that’s the thing- my grandmother signed- I met no one. when I got to the orange tree, they were no where to be found” She stopped braiding my hair and almost put the scissors down. I looked into her eyes and saw sadness, even after all those years, sadness was still ever present in her memories. “ Boom!” I jolted and almost fell off her legs when she made that sound. “Boom!” again, “Boom! I heard so many bangs from miles away, then smoke! I saw smoke, lots and lots of smoke. I started to scream and cry at once. I screamed until my chest hurt calling out my mother’s name, my brother’s name, hoping they answered . But nobody answered. “Where did they go grandma?”Jericho asked, so lost and troubled by all the cryptic information his 13 years old brain was receiving. “Where are they now?” Maya cuts in “I don’t know dear, I never saw them again Not my father Nor my Sisters Nor my Brother Nor my Mother All gone- she halted in her sentence and it was then I noticed that she was hyperventilating. “It’s okay grandma” I held her hands calmly and tried to reassure her, “maybe they’re alive somewhere waiting for you to finally reunite with them” “Yes I know my dear and I cannot wait to be with them at last” she let out a weak smile. “Well at least you had your lover you know, the one you so desperately wanted to run to.” “Well Maya I wish life was that fair. Maybe if I went with my father to the orange tree, we would have looked for mother in the truck together, maybe we would have found everyone in time, maybe I would have ran to his house and found him in time, maybe we would’ve all died together, maybe in that last moment even in our deaths, we would have smiled together.