Colours of Memory
The picture floats across the floor. Sepia tones, torn white corner, blotches of faded colour on a hat with a daisy, a pair of red gumboots. The girl smiles with her whole face, hands clutching a watering can that once shone green. The boy, hair so blonde it’s white snow against an ageing background, is petulant. Looking down at the gumboots.
A door slams. Over and over. The sound punctuated by the crunch of glass and scrape of metal. Slam. Crunch. Scrape.
The picture shivers. Wind blowing in from the cracked door swinging broken in its frame fusses with the light paper, this fragment of a memory. Dust bunnies and cardboard edges and burned feathers puff and fluff in the wind’s path. The photo blows up against the open door of the fridge. It sticks in congealing milk turning a sour yellow beside the ruined fruit, broken shelves and bottles of formula. A cracked hum sputters and spurts in the distance as surges of electricity fight their fate in hanging lights and shorn appliances.
Water drips.
Sound muffles.
Winter steps in through broken windows and shattered panes to stroke the shredded sofas. Rain sifts as soft as a sigh on the cart that lies on its side. Needles scattered. Glass vials rolled into corners. Together they fill the hallway with ice.
Ice after the fire.
The fire that still smoulders. The acrid smoke that seeps in through every crevice and fresh crack, scented with metal and death and chemicals. The smoke that twines with the wintery wind as together they twist through corridors painted in pink and green. The colours of childhood and joy and freshness. Colours that now lie fractured on still forms. The woman who will never hold her child. The child who will never know her mother. The nurses and doctors that will never again bring life.
The mother who will never show her child the picture. The one of her and her brother in the garden at home many years ago, taken by long-dead parents with a long-dead camera. The mother who sits with the body of her child in her bleeding arms and rocks and rocks and rocks as the memories of her past are burned along with her hopes of tomorrow.
War.
