In His Absence

Anticipation

Sizzling sausages were urgently scraped from a blackened, sticky, throbbing grill of sweat for proud buyers who strutted by wearing rich suits like there was no tomorrow. Another morning, another chorus of workers clinking and clonking to a continuous beating rhythm of feet crunching on hard pebbles in the dirt. Did they know this way of life on the other side of the grill living at the centre of poverty?

A tired family covered in grease with never a sausage for themselves.

Yet somehow, a daily mist of laughing children swarming amongst yearning cries for help in society still managed to singe what disgust accompanied the odour of frantic bodies and bitter smoke that clung rebelliously to dry tongues.

Of thousands who gathered in slums, this one family stood protectively over eachother like lionesses to their cubs. A few scraps of petty meat in exchange for a generous couple of coins each day were all there was to offer. "I'm hungry, I'm hungry!" screeched the child in desperation, his O-shaped eyes narrowed at the sausages. "Not for us, Niko," his mother sighed in despair at her four-year-old son. She glared down her nose at her pride on the floor for a short moment. In response, he obediently withered his shaking little bones back into his sister's welcomingly warm arms where he belonged. How much more longer would it be before they tasted as much as a single bean pass their lips?

Niko was comforted by his sister, Afia, like his salvation; a sun always smiling upon his protruding bones throughout their journey in life. Life in the Kenyan slums had not been pleasant or easy for that matter, yet Niko's mind always returned, slipping into a calming state of splashing waves, waving palm trees whispering their presence, and playful company of snakes hissing their midnight song while he remembered laying in his cot. The silhouette of a Caribbean man drifting in his kayak swung his fishnet fiercely into the sparkling lake of pitch-blackness beneath him. A rush of silver eyes flitted into captivity like a naive flock of sheep. "Wheeey!"

Mother, a once thin beauty, strutted across aeneous moonlit sands, her fingers intertwined with her twelve-year-old Afia. The mellow shore licked their sandy toes while the two returned to their eroding shack beside the secluded lake, caressing a huddle of snapped twigs. There was nothing more Niko could ask for but his father to burst through the door with fresh fish for his family in order to hush his intensifying hunger.

The three of them anticipated incredulously. Only absence lingered wherever they looked, in place of father's missing presence- spring to winter, the deafening silence still remained until patience retired. It was like he had been completely obliterated; just a distant dream.