Fading

• Rama Emad, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

It seems as though I am drifting, and a mighty gale may knock me over. I am flying, airborne, ‘a candle in the wind’. Indomitably, as I fade, I am befuddled by a solemn wave of weeps that wrenches me from the ambiguous grasp, channelling panic into my frail, shivering body.
Mother, her face streaked with tears, smiles. I should smile back, but I am too far gone. I read her smile, and it is tranquil and true. “Smiles like that, you don’t see very often,”, father would retort, writhing from a fit of hysteria. Mother, though, had smiled like that, in her own exceptional way when I had graduated my schooling years with flying colours. And when I had written my first novel, she kissed me on the cheek, and whispered in my ear: “thank you for making my life just the way you would like it.”.
Alas, the day a phrase was muttered into mother's ear by a fleeting female figure, dressed in a colourless coat, her eyes squinting as though she was gazing at the sun, mother pressed her palm against her chest, let out a wracking sob and began to cry. She began to cry for the first time I had seen it. And as I melt into my surroundings, floating abysmally, I put it into my head that I love her, with all my heart. I love her for her heart, untainted and angelic, for her everything. Yet, when she mourns, I won’t be there to weep on her shoulder, to love her as she might love me. And as life fades away, I remind myself that life is a monstrous beast, ferocious and unforgiving.