Dada 25

I walked slowly towards them. I could feel my forehead swelling from the intense heat beating inside me, as if trying to force me back. And every time I felt its hot blast rise up against my face, I clinched my teeth, tightened my fists in my pocket and, strained with all my being to engage with  the dazzling fire of the lights above me. My jaw tensed tightly every time a piercing ray strobed me from the ceiling.

A white seashell or another piece of coral broke away inside me. I was like one those jigsaw puzzles of my youth, each piece slowly being put together or taken away by my mother and father, the killers of my Dada.  I was walking on a glass carpet and my feet were bloody. It seemed I walked for a long time on this shining roll. I could almost see the dark little shape of my tiny steps like star fish in the phosphorous. In the distance the wake of a ship stole away in the night like the sinewy shape of the Indonesian fighters as they turned away from us. My own body shape was breaking up before me, surrounded by a blinding necklace of light and spray from the disco floor.

I thought about the cool water and the ‘mantans behind the rock and in the shelter. I wanted to return to the soft sound of the stream, wanted to escape the sun, wanted to find peace once more in the shade, away from everything here but the boys’ faces were fiercer now and they raised their long white arms and their voices came towards me. I wanted them quiet.

 ‘We have our own ways here,’ Iskra  said.

I turned and saw the eyes on my table before me, the eyes from every table in that place and then suddenly clear the look of one of the white boys, his gaze as deep as disturbed liquid as he peered at me as if from the bottom of the sea.