The Grotto

Chapter 3

As a kid, the masterpieces of the old artists paintings on our walls, didn’t mean much to me. Only when I grew older did I understand the value of colour. Inside our house, the light that the artist had created seemed brighter and clearer than those city lights outside.

‘Dad?’ I timidly asked, ‘Who was he?’ I said as my legs were hanging over the edge of the kitchen table.

‘Sit up straight boy,or else a stone will form in your stomach forever, pulling you down and making your back hunched. You saw Mrs. Higgins, she has many stones in her stomach.’ With those words I jumped off the table and held my fork elegantly in my left hand. The door opened and a grey smoke began to fill the room. My father, a man who has seen the striking tenaciousness of a bullet and the flickerings of virtue in holy war, was prepared for what came next.

Growing up as a brown outsider in a tight knit city was nothing short of a miracle. My mother is half Turkish, half Tunisian, while my father never revelled in his past and always wished to leave his heritage where it came from, behind him.

‘Dad?’ I said, the conjunctions of his brow leaned into him like a man on a fence. “When is mum going to be home?”. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand, something about his work. His desperation for privacy emminated from him.

The sound of wind moving through the thin, elongated streets outside left a shimmering sensation touched by guilt rolling into my blood.

My dad was in his corner, scribbling, working away on one of his buildings. Surrounded by endless tall sketches of towering mammoths that are made to grow taller, metal and glass giants seen on barren landscapes, all in the eyes of my parent.

Seeing that no ongoing reaction will come from the wondering statue, I went outside to look at the light reflecting on the village river water. The reverberating tones, as if escaping from an echoing room, turned me into the unwanted listener, the unknown ear.

All was dark except the lights, from which, I was now hiding. First their shadows appeared on the flat tall wall. Then these big dark figures vanished behind the edge of the wall, shot into the closing, airy distance.

The rest will be told in The Grotto.