Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

The girl - the other girl - is pushing the stripy pushchair along the pavement. Aldi carrier bags swing from both handles. She almost walks into me. The baby is playing with its feet. The eyes of the child in the pram are his eyes, green and bright.  Those are the eyes that I once fell into, coiled together on that old sofa with the stuffing bleeding out, our hands exploring one another for the first time. Their baby has snot snaking down towards its lips. They’re his lips, too. His warm lips on mine on that sweaty sofa, the teenage mingle of sweat and aftershave, stolen from his dad’s bathroom cabinet.  I’ve replayed this scene a thousand times – bumping into him, or bumping into her, bumping into them both. Showing him I’m fine, I’m over it. I’ve done all right for myself, thanks. But the baby, this baby with his eyes and his lips has stalled me. He was a big fish in our small home town, once. He reeled me in, threw his affection around for a while. Before unhooking m

Sarité is dead again. Nearby, a mother kneels at the side of the road in loud lament for the shattered child in her arms. An old man leans in the doorframe of his soot-blacked house, watching me. Leaning is the best option after the landmine took his leg and his livelihood. Images surface when I’m not looking, in idle moments when I’m tempted to believe the world is a safe place again. But it never was. I see Sarité again, turning to smile at me as she walks away, adjusting the child on her hip. “See you tomorrow,” I call out, but she doesn’t answer. Perhaps she knows that I will see her in an eternity of tomorrows, but not she me. The moments fade, stealing my energy like a receding wave sucking sand off a beach, and I am left incredulous that life is mundane. I move through each day, get on with my life like I’ve been told to. I get up, I do my job, I drive through endless stop-start traffic. A car backfires in the middle of Reading and I’m in Baghran again, running, stumb

There will be a pile of sand flanked by 31 stones where a sister died. She was carrying coloring books and boxes of crayons in her backpack when the bomb came, her final breath a question, not a goodbye. She was carrying them for those who died before in similar blasts and fear. Now there are lies, speculation, calculations. What'll happen when it comes here. A girl on the subway cups her hands to alert her mother she's hungry. A boy plays with a toy machine gun. In each I see postures becoming prayer, notes for us who haven't yet fallen. Photograph: L.M. Hurtado by Carl Boon