Saturday 4 March 2017

"THE TWELFTH BOTTLE"

He knocked on the door, but unlike usual, there was no response. No eager answer served on hugs and kisses that night like it has always been on all previous nights. 

He knocked again, "Honey, I'm home." Once again, there was no response, but the noise of crickets in the flower garden and distant conversations on the television from inside the house. He slowly grabbed the door knob, his heart racing and thumping like Zulu drums, and turned it. His head was a nest of questions, concerns and worries. He stealthily charged in and dropped his laptop bag and roses that he'd bought for her, on the sofa. 

"Honey..." He mildly and softly called out once more, checking the kitchen. Onions burnt coal black, smoking and sizzling on a pan, on the cooker, was the sight his worried eyes got served to. He turned the cooker off and hurried upstairs in panic, breathing like a bull in rage, shouting, "Honey! Are you home? Where are you at?" He certainly knew something was wrong that night. 

As he walked into their room, on their bed, she lay lifeless, eyes rolled inwards. Strangled marks on her neck, her dress torn, her lipstick smudged, her cheeks as red as ripe Scotch bonnet pepper and in the dead tight grip of her right palm was a piece of fabric. She died with a grip of a piece of the killer's cloth. 

She lay still. He collapsed onto his knees and shook her lifeless body. "Please, what happened to you? Talk to me!" She wouldn't answer. She was long gone. 

That was almost a year ago, and that guy alone in the house with several beer bottles on his table at 2 am in the morning, is the guy whose lover's life met brutality and was reduced to a painful memory, which he is trying to wash away with vast oceans of liquor. He's in despair and lost

"Rest In Peace Honey." He mindlessly mumbles in between his drunk belches every time he empties a bottle. And that was the twelfth bottle. 

"The Twelfth Bottle"
Drew Poetry
~Andy Mwalasha

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