He was finally home. His mother had always told him that home was where the heart is. And after all these years filled with the misery that his congenital talent granted him his heart had finally found home.
Good fortune had eluded him for almost the entirety of his miserable life. The one platitude he could attribute to his mother was also the sole memory he had of her that was close to pleasant. She was right to blame him for everything. She had clearly convinced herself of that years before she convinced him. And she had convinced him eventually.
His father had walked out and left mother and son to fend for themselves when he had been but a mere nine years of age. A man could only endure so much talk of dead people. It crowded out the living. He never said it out loud but he knew that his father laid most of the blame at his mother’s door given her background and genealogy.
Choosing to dismiss his experiences as the creations of a delusional young mind had been useless. It was odd. He thought that doing so would have pleased his mother since that was what she had made loudly and painfully clear what she wanted to believe. Instead his attempt at the masquerade earned him one of many beatings he had had to endure at her hands. Like his father before him, he had told himself that this was the way of her people, the ones she had left behind to get married.
That was the distant past and he was determined to leave it all behind once he walked through the doors of the facility. Check-in had been smooth and his lack of any luggage or personal effects must have oiled the cogs of bureaucracy which had a tendency to burden life.
Just like the dead did.
He made his way to his assigned room. It would have been difficult to negotiate the maze of corridors and hallways but his new co-cohabitants had been eager to help him settle in. He hoped that they would make for much better company than the pathetic and decayed souls which had trailed him all his life. He was sick and tired of being woken up in the middle of the night by the moaning of some recently departed victim of life who was drawn to him. To what his mother called his unveiled eyes and the power they held. Power he had never asked for but had been granted to him since birth anyway.
It did not help that these spirits were often those that bore wounds and mutilations which had been inflicted on them and had sent them out the door from life to death. Their dying sentiments had been filled with fury and dissatisfaction at the perceived injustice they had been dealt. He was 14 when he learnt to listen to these poor sods. They all wanted the same thing.
Vengeance.
But he was done with those episodes. It was high time he turned the page to a new chapter in his life. One that did not require him to bloody his hands in service of the dead just so they would stop bugging him.
He had decided two weeks before that his father would be his final customer. That was one reunion that was better off had it never happened. But he had complied with the old man’s request anyway for the sake of the estimated nine years of frustration. He wondered what happened in the intervening period before they met again. He knew aging was a natural process but the sunken cheeks and emaciated body that his father had presented with was something else altogether.
As he lay his head down on the fluffiest pillow he could remember ever feeling, he wondered if his mother had been somehow involved with his father’s ultimate fate. She had been in a nervous state since the turn of the year and in the ensuing six months had behaved like a member of the witness protection programme. It did not ease her temper in any way though, the fresh scars running down his back was evidence of this.
Her involvement would also explain why his father had come to him for help in sending her on her way. There was no point in him thinking it over now though. He’d done as his father asked and it had nearly driven him over the edge.
Thanks to his unwanted gift though, it hadn’t been long before he was reunited with mummy again. And unlike his other night time visitors, she hadn’t seemed vengeful at all. She had been rather warm and he wondered how different things would have turned out for them had she been so maternal in life as she was in death.
She had forgiven him and said that she was worried he wouldn’t be able to cope on his own. Then she had shared with him some information that she had long forgotten from her younger days some three decades ago. She would have told him earlier but it had slipped her mind continuously or so she claimed. Her passing had restored some clarity to her muddled thoughts.
Better late than never, he supposed. She had spoken of a place where he would be taken care of in the ways that he needed most. She promised him that it would be wonderful and was the escape he had sought for so long.
Dear old mummy had gone as far as to take him by the hand and lead him to the gates of the facility.
They had said their goodbyes to each other before he crossed beyond the wrought-iron gates. Her final words had been that she would follow him in were she able to. But now that her last order of unfinished business had been taken care of she could move on.
The memory of the tears he had shed provoked a fresh downpour. It was as unexpected as the first flood mere moments ago. He dabbed at his eyes with a corner of the pillowcase and settled down for sleep.
It had been a long road paved with misery and crowded with death. He was relieved that it had led to this place of rest which had exceeded the high expectations his mother had set for him through her words.
He made a mental note to say hello to his fellow residents as well as the staff in the facility he hadn’t met yet once the morning came. He would also have to ask if he could get a fresh mattress or pillow. This one seemed to have a problem with bed bugs. He had felt the first bite seconds ago.
Slowing his breaths so he could enter a relaxed state, he hoped that he would not be kept awake by the nips on his skin from the bedbugs. He distracted himself with the reminder that he had finally found home. The ends of his mouth curled upwards into a satisfied smile as he drifted off to sleep.
He would finally get what he deserved.
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