The African trinkets

Stirring

"Everything has gone tits up."

The voice was so familiar to Lance's ears but he had never heard maternally warm Rosie spit vulgarity. He was so taken aback that he almost forgot that he was drunk from trying to drown his despair with whatever wine was left over in the cellar.

"Rosie the rogue ruffian?" He cocked his head, "It doesn't suit you."

"Of course it does." She lingered in the door frame. Her demeanor was casual, relaxed -- something that Lance was not accustomed to. All his life, Rosie had always been Rosie: soft-spoken and gracefully docile. This Rosie was very different like Lance hadn't really looked at her in years. She was gaunt now, dark semi-moons puffed under her eyes and her mouth looked as if it had never known the curvature of a smile.

Lance sensed this moment as an introduction of sorts. He sauntered to the door, arm extended and hand out, ready to receive this strange company. Rosie grimaced at the jest. She had no time for Lance's nonsensical games. She had entertained and indulged him since birth, him up for the better half of her adult life and now he expected her to watch him crumble.

Rosie smacked his hand away, "I wish you would take yourself seriously."

The words smacked him harder than her hand, "Have you been absent for the past month or so?" He placed his chipped wine glass on the scratched and scarred wooden floor.

"Weepy white masters are the worst kind of white folk." She cleared her throat and spat at him. Rosie's thick saliva traveled across the room with a vicious velocity and nearly landed in his glass but instead knocked it over. The glass cracked but did not shatter. "Your forefathers stole the world and handed fed it to you in bitesize chunks yet you refuse to chew."

Lance's instinctual reaction was to passionately object and correct Rosie: his life was lavishly hard and heartbreaking. But no matter how horrible living as Lance Tate had felt, he had never lived feeling as if he were completely alone in the world.

"I cannot bear to chew it, to eat alone," he sighed the confession.

"Alone? You believe yourself to be all alone." Rosie's face softened, her maternal instinct melted her, "If you are alone then who are you speaking to right now?"

..........

[So, 've been entertaining the idea of resurrecting this story to finish it off properly. Comment if you're interested.]