In one last burst of life, she let out a staggering breath exclaiming, 'Ahgh.' She lifted her hand, nothing but skin and bone, reaching out towards me.
'Kara, take her hand,' my grandmother told me, but I had frozen. Her hand dropped and her life was gone as that last gesture of love and life sent her off into death.
I took her hand after that; after it was too late. I was crying, I couldn't help myself. I didn't feel as if I could ever be happy again. All I wanted to do was hide away in a hole, with no people to try to comfort me, to read and cry away my sorrows. But no, my family wouldn't let me do that. They wanted me to spend the day of my mother's death being hugged, having pity expressed, and then playing with my cousins. I don't understand people, and it seemed they didn't understand me either, not even my closest family.
My dad thought I should look at the painting mum did of the flowers, hanging above the dining table, but I knew that would only make me sadder. Later on, it would help, but not right then, when the pain was so fresh and any memory of her life would only serve to remind me of her death. Every stroke on that canvas had been made by a brush that she held in her hand; moved with her arm. She would never hold a paintbrush again. I couldn't look at that painting now.
My uncle thought I should eat something, but who could possibly have been feeling hungry at a time like that? My grandmother thought I should talk to others but I couldn't talk through my sobs and listening to them talk through their mourning would make the sobs worse. I wished they would just let me read.
YOU ARE READING
Like a Cigarette
LosoweWhile Kara's world may not completely have fallen apart when her mother died of cancer when she was 12, two years later when her father is shot and she and her brother are orphaned, she fears she may not be so lucky. When her father's will is read...
