Daddy's Feet

The days were peaceful as any Autumn days during October, 2019, when I recently finished my semester exams and scored well. My parents were proud of me, so for that very sole reason of my scoring, our father kept his domestic violence at Bay. He didn't hurt our mother for a while. My brother and I don't even have the need to take refuge under the desk's cold floor, where I used to whisper to him, that everything is going to be alright.

The finances of the family weren't going well either, neither my father's drinking habits nor the bruises on our mother's face. After my school hours, when I came home, my eyes always searched for my mother, and rested upon her swollen face, as she sat on the floor of the kitchen and used to fold laundry. She acted as if nothing happened, we all did. It never occurred to me, to ask our mother to leave our father. It was because, at that time, I didn't want my glass structure of fragile family to collapse.

Our mother seemed like a broken doll to me, beyond repair. Our father was its abusive owner, who never saw her worth and used her like a toy. My feelings, torture and absence of word happiness continued in my life. Next year arrived, towards the beginning of July, when the Laburnum tree in our solitary courtyard blossom, I gazed at it because, there wasn't anything worth in my family which was beautiful. It was around that time, my family fell in the clutches of a deadly virus called COVID-19.

The symptoms weren't hazardous, so our patriarch decided that we shouldn't visit any doctor instead we should isolate ourselves. Something seemed wrong with my mother. I wondered why did her complexion looked like the leaves of Laburnum tree. That was the last thought I had of her. Around the same day, when I couldn't sleep in my room. I saw my mother hurdled up on the sofa with a couple of blankets, her sclera seemed little like the color of cherry blossom, chill ran through my spine. I ran towards my room, and slept like a log. That was the last I saw our mother.

 From then onwards, our mother vanished into thin air, like a whiff of smoke, only leaving memory behind. I asked our father, he smelled of booze when he grunted and said that she left us forever. I didn't ask because she was only a broken doll to me. My monotonous routine to school started. I was called to the principal's office for the complaint of unpaid fees. It was late afternoon, when I returned home from school. I entered and the home was eerily quiet, as I entered our mother's bedroom, my eyes fell on my father's pale and blistered feet which were hanging in the air. I felt dizzy and thought about my brother. Where was my brother? It felt like an arrow pierced my chest, when I realized I never had one.