Symbiosis
I was waiting to kill him.
Ready to spill the blood from his throat over the funeral flowers standing on Mum’s kitchen table — petals still holding colour with the moisture seeping out.
He’s been out celebrating. Drinking, eating, and playing darts at the bar. He only remembers to turn on the lights of the new SUV Mum had bought the previous week when he stopped at the gate.
He opens the door and gets out to see why the gate I jammed won’t open.
My pulse starts to pound in my ears. My molars compress. My tongue lusts for violence. There is no other way. I can’t live while he’s alive. And my only way out of dying is through him, here, at this table eating cornflakes and cold milk, like every night after drinks and darts at the bar.
Too much mercy, I think, confirming to myself, and you dear reader, that I won’t be granting his last meal.
This is the way I was made: A possessed naked ape rising from the savannah to be the undisputed apex predator of the world. And now I was coming for the man who snuffed out the only family I’ve ever had.
Then, like black mambas through the tallgrass, two hooded figures took form behind him. I watch, in complete silence, how an old rusty blade denies me the pleasure of smelling the iron in his warm spilling blood over the same table he fed Mum the end of her existence.
That night, like animal spirits summoned from the veld, my present and future found a harmony in which they could exist in symbiosis.
As payment, they took the car. But then again, Mum doesn’t drive anymore.
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