Dating : Red Savanna

Red Savanna

That very morning the sun did not rise — it set.

***

And sometimes in the middle of that undying turbulent wind of grief; that deeply piercing voltage that’s chocked you — the entire you — to the brim, you realize within the crevices of your excruciating and exploding and extincting heart that perhaps, now, you need to reassess the state of things.

You begin.

***

Your brother — your lovely, charming, funny brother — is a box of decaying bones under the weight of the Earth. Buried with outpouring pool of coppery-smelling blood. After being butchered like a ram on a Sallah Day by the vampires ruling the land.

Your sister was dined on. Forcefully pierced, into her purity and her being.

Your mother, shocked by the callous height of that unfeeling brutality on her seeds, fell at the instant — and never woke up.

Your father is a walking dead. A living bereft of soul. Holding himself for the sins committed on daughter and son he couldn’t protect from the extreme-class barbarity of the vultures in human skin.

***

You begin to do the Math.

Everybody — anybody — you love, or have loved, is dead. Killed. Either at soul. Or at heart. You’re a sociopath that knows no-love. Knows no-pain.

You’re starving. Sleeping on empty stomach. But to go in search of the grain to put to mouth is to deliver yourself to the shores of the human angels-of-death. To decide you’ve lived enough to die.

How do you continue to survive here, inside this red savanna of bloodlust, of this unfeelingness, of seemingly deathless savagery?

And, finally, it sparks unto you. Like a flash of light from a supernova in the Milky Way. You’ve got the solution. The Sliver bullet. The Philosopher’s stone that’s for long evaded discovery: Joining the Vultures. The human angels of death. The winning side. The side of the living. It’s dishonoring to the memories of Mama and brother Ahmadu, you know, but what else can you do? Sit down and wait for your round of death to come?

Alamin Abubakar.

June, 2021.