Usually, it begins with a rose in a vase plucked to be planted in a more fertile soil, not so with my father. He found his rose, plucked her or do I say rooted her then threw her in a refuse dump. I usually hear grandpa ask my mum whenever we visit him how his stubborn illiterate husband is just before reminding her of how much a mistake she made marrying my father. My mother will always put up one defense and the other. She will afterward retire to her former heaven of a room as opposed to our ragamuffin of a house and weep till my grandma goes to pacify her.
It was on the day that supposed to be her introduction day to the man approved of my grandfather that my mother eloped with my father. My father was poor and leveraged on that to have my mother. I know you are surprised but poverty is a powerful tool. Segun, her childhood love had proposed some months before and grandparents had approved of him, mostly because he was the decent child of a fine, rich family friend. But when my mother later met Stan, my father, she felt marrying Segun would be unfair to Stan and that it would break his heart forever. Yes, she eloped with Stan on the day of her introduction after my father pumped her with enough tears, and “Do I have to be totally unfortunate? I am not wealthy and I can’t also have you, my world?” My mother for compassion and pity followed him through a little hole in the fence at the yard. It left my grandparents devastated for years and as usual, for the fact that she was their only daughter of four children, and the first born also, they forgave her and gave them their blessing. I was just four.
On that faithful day, a Friday I remember, they had begun their usual petty arguments,
“Can you for once please stop yelling at me? Just hear me out. I am your wife for Christ sake”. My mother said in her pitiful voice. “Seriously, if I had known it would burn, I wouldn’t have started the cooking. But since it was just about the time you’d arrive from work, and I also needed to finish washing the clothes you dropped in the morning while we were both departing for work, I just had no choice but to combine the cooking and washing. This was why the pot got scorched from the little burn of the rice. “So you call that little?” Father fumed more with his now shorter than usual temper. He ran inside the kitchen, came out with the pot, showed it to me and then throw it at mother. Five seconds after, mother wasn’t talking. I couldn’t understand. Dad was shocked too.
My mother died that day from peaked panic attack. She died because of a scorched decision!
© Ben James
#ANSAShortStoryOfTheWeekContest