Death Came to Mock Me
I had forgotten the colour of her eyes. I woke up in a panic. Almost every photo I had of her was in black and white, and the ones that were in colour were too pixilated to tell. It was nine years to the day that she had died, but now I found myself grieving all over again as my mind had lost her eyes.
A bird had nested itself in the crevasse above my window, below the roof slab. It was there before I awoke. I could hear its call echoing in my unconscious state as it invaded my dreams. The sound of its call, in a word, was hellish. “Goorrwah” It was an eerie, ungodly sound like nothing I had ever heard before, and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight. “Goorrwah” To describe the sound, it was like something between the “coo” of a pigeon and the “caw” of a crow, but with something more diabolic in its presence. “Goorrwah” was haunting me.
My body was repulsed by the noise and shifted itself into a survival mode in a response to reject it. “Goorrwah” It made that hideous sound relentlessly, and in the moments when it took a pause, the silence became unbearable as I anticipated the noise to return in every moment and I could still hear it even when it wasn’t there. “Goorrwah” “Goorrwah” “Goorrwah” It echoed in my head, ever lingering in the chambers of my consciousness, each syllable twisting itself around my skull slowly, and painfully, dragging itself out and making itself comfortable as an unwelcome guest in my mind as the bird repeated: “Goo — rr — wah”
Surely this was Death himself come to mock me on this day of her anniversary, as he knew I had planned today to stay in my bed hidden from the world to drown myself in the misery; this I was sure of. What I wasn’t sure of was whether it was a punishment for forgetting her eyes, or if he had just come to torture me for the sport of it, rubbing salt into the wounds of my weeping soul. “Goorrwah”
I tried to ignore the infernal beast screeching above my window. I picked up the book by my side table and began to read, but every word that I read was coupled with the bark of the demon outside. “Goorrwah” Defeated, I threw the book to the other side of the room in frustration. I tried listening to the radio, but with the lyrics of the song that was playing, the creature would create a wicked duet that was impossible to drown out.
“Why are you doing this to me!” I snapped. “You foul beast, leave me be!” Now I was yelling at the bird. I had surely lost my mind. Death came to test me and, failing at the first hurdle, I had dove headfirst into a pit of madness. “Is this a punishment, or are you here just to observe and mock my despair?” “Goorrwah” The bird replied, crying out once more in its favorite demonical tune, but this time, possibly from hearing it so many times before, the very essence of that noise shattered before me. Every syllable was broken down and its hidden meaning was laid bare for me to see. A whole universe lay naked before me, with stars and constellations collapsing and reforming unto themselves in a show for only me to witness, as they found their final form, and took the shape of a familiar sight.
A deep and heavy cloud of shame that was hovering above my head suddenly burst over me, as tears poured down my face uncontrollably, and I remembered again, that her eyes were green.
This story is dedicated to my Nonna, my Italian grandmother, whose eyes were brown. Ti voglio bene, Nonna, mi manchi tantissimo.
