Death day

                                                        Death day

“Have you ever seen death before? It stands still and silent like a statue, never moving never blinking. It slips silently between every nook and cranny of a room like a bad rumor spreading in a high school hallway. Have you ever felt death before? It hangs over you like a dark cloud sending light showers of despair and sorrow, soaking your body and seeping slowly into your mind and soul. It embraced you in its cold warmth like an expensive North face jacket. Have you ever smelt death before? It invaded your nose like the U.S soldiers in Germany. It smelt like the mysterious ingredient in a pot of gumbo, you couldn’t quite place your finger on it. It smelt like that the last rotting leaves of the fall before winter slowly crawled in.”
I read the words carefully over and over again until the page blurred and my eyes began to tear up again.

‘Are you ready to talk?’ I glanced up at my therapist and blinked away my tears so I could see her pretty face clearly, today like all other days she had a different hairstyle; it was a careful fringe and it accentuated her big blue eyes and her perfectly sculpted face, she reminded me of a Barbie doll that had never been brought out of its plastic box. Her lips held traces of a forgotten smile and every wrinkle told a silent story.
‘Where do you want me to start from?’

‘Anywhere you want’ I shut my eyes and allowed all the memories to flood in and crash against my mind like angry waves during a harsh storm, suddenly I was back in my room and the whole day played back like a bad song stuck in my head.
I had just woken up from a very fitful sleep, my eyes felt heavy and my tongue felt dry and scratchy. The house was quiet which was very strange because it was always filled with a harmony of loud voices and high pitched laughter coming from either my arrogant older brother or my very girly younger sister who always re-applied her lip gloss until the sun glistened against her shiny lips. In my groggy, sleep-ridden state I trudged to my brother’s door and noticing it was slightly ajar I pushed it open and as I walked in I felt a dark presence welcome me like a hostile host. His room was darker than our over-crowded basement and it smelled of old stale bread and cheese, the curtains were drawn bathing his room in semidarkness, I could see a faint silhouette of his long body sprawled on his king-sized bed I felt around for the light switch to assess how the rest of the room looked. I flicked it on and the sudden brightness burned the back of my eyes and I had to close them for a few seconds and when I opened them again I gasped as they took in the mess that surrounded me; on the floor beside him were several empty bottles of Smirnoff ice, a half empty box of cigarettes and an unopened box of pizza, there was a clear white bag filled with cocaine-I had heard rumors he was selling it- a rusty razor blade and three lines already laid out on the deep mahogany coffee table.

  My head started to pound loudly and I wondered if my brother would hear it and wake up from his sleep induced dream, stepping gingerly over his clothes I inched closer to his bed and tapped him gently when he did not move I shook him harder, it took me what felt like a million shakes and a few hard punches before I realized he was dead. I sat heavily on his bed next to his cold lifeless body and I felt my system shut down slowly and then I blacked out. I woke up to the voice of my sister Dee talking loudly on her phone, I heard her footsteps as she walked up the stairs and I felt her dark shadow as she stood in front of our brother’s room door I tried to put all my words into my eyes so she could understand what had happened without me having to say anything. She stood arms akimbo, her coffee brown hair fell across her acne and freckle stained cheeks, I can never forget the way her eyes widened in surprise when I told her the news and how they crumbled like a stand castle left unattended for about a minute before a gust of wind swooped in, I can still hear her shrill screams playing repeatedly in my head each one louder than the last.


The silence hung heavily in the poorly furnished waiting room at the hospital; the couches were old and worn, the magazines on the table dated as far back as 1995, the room smelt like wood polish and the chair I sat on sagged beneath my body weight, Dee’s face was streaked with tears and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun she placed her head in her hands and I could hear the deep racking sobs she tried so hard to hide. The doctor walked into the room with his shoulders hung down as though he was carrying the weight of the world, his graying hair was combed neatly to the side of his face and his wrinkled aging face confirmed what I already knew.
‘I’m sorry but he was dead long before you brought him in, he over-dosed.’ As soon as those words flew out of his mouth, I felt all my senses spring into action; I could taste the hot dog I ate before I took that nap, I could smell the lemon shower gel my brother used to take a bath this morning, I could hear the sirens of the ambulance that arrived minutes after I called them and I could touch my brother’s dry skin as he was pushed into the morgue. The walls started to close on me and I felt myself slipping into the large hole that was going to be dug later that week for his burial, I could feel the sand beneath my shiny black shoes and the light wind that caressed my face. Suddenly the future did not seem so bleak anymore that is until the doctor spoke again, ‘we need to sedate your sister, she is hyperventilating.’