To Know Kindness

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

To know Kindness You'd have to watch your world dissolve into a pile of broken bones and then lose it To a bird ferrying them with its beak across the sea to rebuild its nest Your favourite cat goes missing The grocery store downtown folds up because Their customers have fled the country & soon the town becomes a ghost of memories Every day the little boy guides his blind father around the market begging for alms But no eye pays them heed or the empty bowl in the boy's hand What should come first, the shredded wall or the parched lips begging for water? Everything is marked by time Watch the girl on the train stare at the boy sapping on his ice cream with relish & notice how his face dissolves into pity as he extends it to her As his mother scolds him with her eyes and pulls him towards herself There's so much grief in the world—brothers losing sisters, husbands separated From their wives during war but I sit with my phone on a Saturday morning, munching a soulless pie and watching a boring soap opera And combing through my friend's Instagram feed, missing a life that was Pried from my grasp like a tender vine from the earth Sometimes I flinch on a busy street, in the swirl of bodies Brushing past me, like a ship in the belly of the sea When a stranger leans in to hand my fallen scarf to me My gratitude becomes fired clay trapped in my mouth and the Confused man leaves without a word My mother sits all day in front of the television. She doesn't face me when I tiptoe across The room, like a mouse because I don't want to disrupt the sprawling silence. She calls me Yūsuf when I plant a kiss on her forehead and inhale The dew of old age and pomade in her greying hair. I let her run her fingers down my face, her face splitting in a smile as I assume the status of my dead brother But the smile dissolves and her voice calcify, you are not Yūsuf, you're not my boy She almost arrives at a breaking, her voice thinning into tears when I gather her In my arms and serenade her with songs until she falls asleep But this is not the version of the story the media shows you The pain of carrying a loss so great it hunches you Strips you of agency and leaves you floating and floating Buoyed on the fragile wings of survival And yet, nobody teaches you how to come back from the loss of a father, a brother A doting grandmother & the world just moves on Like nothing happened Perhaps that's the curse of war; not the carnage, not the properties ruined Not the media reducing dead bodies into mere statistics As though they were not formally people with souls and dreams But the silence of palms folding under the table What better way to butter grief than to turn your back to a wailing child? Like the sun, I am reminded that the dead live in dogeared photographs, in the silence of walls reduced to dust in the shadows frittering back and forth between the pantry and the living room, when the nights become longer and your bed brims with memories of the street of Darfur, the laughter of children echoing through walls, in conversations held under swaying trees In the muezzin's cry for prayer, In the palm of a country that cuddles and pokes you. The store attendant's gaze lingering at me for too long as I receive the meds for my mother, as though I am a foreign thing, As though determined to disrobe me To sponge me clean of my faith The British girl in physics class, who mispronounces my name every time, Amia, instead of Amira and apologizes as if my heart was made for torture and shame Because Allah is all beneficent and merciful To know kindness, You'd have to experience pain, rejection, watch what you love Grow still and cold and colourless.

About Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is a writer from Southeastern Nigeria. He was a finalist in the 2023 Gerald Kraak Prize and Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Speculative Fiction Writers.