9 Months

The Tree of Red Flowers

He wakes up at 3:30 AM after a 17 straight hour sleep. That's what a bottle of cheap whisky does to your life. He squeezes his head trying to pull the headache off. He reaches for the remaining sips of the bottle of whiskey on the desk next to him, but the smell of alcohol sickens him.

He sits down for few minutes looking at the scattered empty bottles of alcohol in anger; too much disappointment; too much confusion. No answers. No purpose. He slowly recalls who he is, and what he was doing before he slept. His name is Shams. His mother chose that name for him. She told him it was a sunny day when he was born. So she called him after the sun.

The voice of his father comes from the other room, yelling as usual at his mother to tell him where she has hidden the money this time. He knows it's all in his head. His mother is dead. And his father… Well, Shams refuses to even think about him.

He wears his jacket and goes for a walk. Stepping down the stairs of the building he lives in, Shams remembers the last time he walked those steps; the day it happened, not very long ago.

 The time when he hated that house and wished he could leave. But he never wanted to leave his mother alone with such an animal. He was all she cared about, and she was his home.

She supported him throughout his life with 3 jobs. In the morning she was a teacher until 2:00 PM. In the afternoon she was a maid. She cleaned houses and cooked for families while they were at work. And from 8:00 PM until midnight she was a secretary at a clinic.

 She struggled her way through a devastating society. Especially for a woman who has nothing anyone is interested in except her body; with the eyes of men throwing her with seductive looks sometimes, or repulsive some others. Some sees a lonely prey they can put whatever they please inside, and others -the so called oriental- just feel offended that a woman left her sacred duty (raising kids and cooking food and taking care of her husband) to make money. The Egyptian society at days when education is merely words on some paper for the children to memorize. Yet still she raised her boy to be an educated gentleman.

 He lives in a small city called Al-Sherouk, away from the crowded streets and dusty districts of Cairo. He believed it was his destiny to be raised there. That it wasn't a coincidence that his name matches with the name of the city (translates as 'the Sunrise'). Shams opens his building's gate. Dawn's cold fresh air fills his lungs with electrical intakes. He is on a dark lane to the main street with two building gardens on his sides. He remembers his father; the swallowed, creepy eyes; the pale face; the ugly beard; the smelly clothes. He doesn't remember what his father was like before that.

 He was ten or something when he saw him drunk for the first time. It was late night and he woke up on the sound of his mother screaming. She tried her best to lower her voice, but it was too hard even for a tough woman like her. She came from work tired, went to bed to sleep, but her husband wanted some sugar. Shams, with terrified steps towards the sound of what had seemed to him as an intruder threatening his parents and hurting them, knocks at their room door. His father opens and yells at him with a drunken voice, "Go back to bed you son of a whore. You are just like her."

He sees his mother at the corner of the bed smiling at him. But the bruise on her eye seemed vividly clear.  

 The gentleman closes his eyes and folds his fist in anger, with an attempt to change the thought. He looks around him as he walks. The young trees sway with the cold, soft wind of winter. The huge tree in the garden on his right gently lays its gloomy, red flowers down to fill the moon-sparkled, wet, green grass with joy. Such beauty. Just as beautiful as his mother that day he was back from college; lying on the bedroom floor, with the remaining of a blood-tainted smashed chair on her body.

He walks inside the garden, steps on the flowers, just like he stepped on his mother's bloody floor. He gives no attention to the whole universe, as didn't he to the father on the bed, with eyes wide open, a mouth drooling saliva, and a needle stuck to his arm.

 He stands an inch before the tree, same as he stared at his mother's dead body smiling at him as she always did. He kneels. He opens his hands wide and looks up, takes a sigh of the sweet scent of winter to fill his chest with dawn's air, witting his face with little drops of rain.

 He turns around and sits, leans his back against the tree and looks at the path he just walked. He never really cared to look before that. The shiny light of the moon in darkness; the white ray reflected from the grass. All the windows are dark. People are all sleeping; no one to understand the beauty of that tree.

 It still throws its joyful red flowers gently through the air. He puts his head inside his hands covering his ears with his palms and weeps. Angry and silent, he cries. Tears mixes with the alcohol he had been drinking in the past couple of months and it's swiped away with the few little drops of water falling from the sky. Then he takes another huge sigh, and smiles at the moon falling down into space before him while the sun rises at the back, dyeing the scene with its golden rapture.

The End

Stay tuned for the next story 'Hard Like Stone' on Friday.