The body was cold. Hours before, it had been warm and alive. The body was female, wrapped in blue flesh - lucid and shiny like plastic. The room in which it lay was airy and cold, panelled with a hard wood. ‘Go on: cry,’ urged the boy’s older cousin. He had been feigning it, forcing it, coughing in an attempt to concede emotion, but he felt little. Maybe the feelings were too hard to conceive or bear. He just stood there, sombre.
He had seen the last moments of this life; how the space of her throat frothed and foamed; she had gargled her last and made a sound like an angry primordial fear. Her eyes were wide, with whites ever so white, pupils tight, focusing on no one.
When her living was done and her dying was over, the boy’s father went outside to cry. He was urged on by his sisters to join him. He approached him and pointed to the clouds. In the faint light penetrating through them, he pretended he could see the figure of his nan: ‘look, dad: there she is!’ From that moment on, he knew he would never see her again. From that moment on, he would wrestle with guilt, struggle with memory, and try to allow joy to occasionally repair him. There was nothing left but a cold, paling, wrinkled shell for the worms of memory to turn over.
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