This is..

I watched, detached, as the child’s right hand opened and closed in pantomime slow-motion. Chubby and dirty, and on the final closing, the index finger unfurled and poked rigidly towards me. “Why not the middle finger”, I wondered? Like the Agincourt bowmen sticking it to the French knights.

A cool breeze pushed against my face. I found this puzzling in the thick humidity of a late tropical afternoon. A dirty coloured sludge entangled itself in, on and around the child’s muddied neon shoes, white socks and stumpy feet. In an horrific parody of a slow motion movie, the child slowed, wavered, stumbled and would have fallen but for the push, lift and bustle of the wall of water and mud and debris that supported it’s doll-like body ever so briefly, before sailing it past me and into the doorway of a hotel to my right. That was when the smell overcame sight as the dominate assault on my senses. A putrid, shitty smell, pungent with the stink of human existence. The freak cool breeze was erased by the stench of that smell and its reminder of raw sewerage, unwanted body fluids and aged waste.

The child did not scream. It’s plump mouth was wide open but it made no sound. How can that happen? How can a rugrat brat of a human just give in to its early demise? Where is the outburst of ineffectual angst? Where was the cry for another chance - the opportunity to live long enough to experience joy, triumph, remorse and regret? Can a life just be relinquished like that? Handed on uncontested to Death as a grotesque victory wreath? It was wrong, and every fibre of my pathetic mortal soul wanted to scream with primal rage. I was that child. I AM that child. That child and I fucking count for something in this disgusting, brutal and senseless world. Take me you indifferent, apathetic bastard. Take ME, and give back life to that fat little corpse being pushed against walls and grates and pillars and spikes and I really don’t know what else. Where is purpose in the scheme of a life where a child can be erased at the merest whim of some demonic wall of water? Where is the mourning for a life lived, the relevance, the reward?

I don’t think I know. No, it’s more than that. I. DON’T know, and truly, I no longer care. It’s wrong. So wrong that I can’t fight the urgent shoving that lifts and carries me past the hotel, knocking me hard against sharp, cutting and rasping edges in a discordant sheet music of ragged and senseless notes. My leg is dragged along a garden mesh, which rips and tears my weak and water-logged flesh in a celebratory serration of sharp-toothed cutting edges. My head thumps against a steel pipe as a spike of tree branches pierces my left side, releasing blood and soul and energy into the maelstrom. The hurt escalates, until the bubbling sounds of underwater madness overcomes all senses, and dulls my ability to know and think and feel.

So this is Death. How absurd.