Death Stalked and Mocked

I stood in the middle of the road, the mirage in the distance beckoning to my stinking unwashed body. I had not washed in a month. A month of aimless search, watching dreams fly by like broken kites, dwindling self-esteem and rough coughing. Death stalked me like a chameleon stalking a fly. But there was nothing it would celebrate on, I was not worth a kill at all! Tired, I stood in my tattered outfit. Licking and caressing sponge-like lips, my rough tongue was like sandpaper..... I had stood in the way of death, but it smacked and shamed my wish! My tongue dry and rough as an armature baker's ginger biscuit, there, I stood in the middle of nowhere - nowhere because death never came.

'One.... two....t-h-r-e-e....,' I stood there, trying to count the senses left in this numb derelict shell of mine.

I looked down and saw this scrawny puppy looking up at me. Staring right in my face! Two balls of drained energy trying to speak to me. Four crippled legs squatting in the dust. I stared back, struggling hard to get the story. A spear tore into the back of my brain and shot a hellish majolica dance from the centre of the spine. Stiffly, I bent forward to pick it up and there was my daughter's sadly bewildered face siting on its shoulders, tears rushing down her ashen ill-fed cheeks that looked like tomato-less fish soup!

The wind pulled me back. I struggled with all the feeble energy left in me to keep on my wobbly bootless feet and stumbling, suddenly, I did not want to die any-more! Not any-more! Yet, I kept on falling like a scarecrow without balance........!

The road spun like a giant black ribbon and I caught the sound of an approaching storm, its thunderous anger shaking me like an ant in a frying pan! The ground shook all around me and I felt the wrath of the storm straddling me. I lay there on the ground, my cracked bulging lips smiling for the fist time in I do-not-know-how-many-months! Death! Happy in the confusion, that death had finally come!

The storm passed quickly and as its tail receded in the distance, I felt its warm thick rain in my face. For moments I lay there with my tongue licking the warm sticky rain on my torn cauliflower-lips.

Then, a cloud of faces appeared above me. Someone sat me up and cried: He's alive, he's alive!

I looked around me but there was no dog anywhere. I wanted to get up but a thousand hands pinned me to the ground and as they gently lifted me onto the stretcher, I could not help but notice a squashed loaf of shaggy hairs flattened on the tarmac........

Death, so proud, spat on me and would not relish my vile body......