Sophie
/Her job drives her nuts! She tries to keep calm, tries to act normal, tries to blend in with the others, but the cracks in the pretense are too visible. No wonder those who worked there for over thirty years were tight friends with alcohol.
At night, it’s hard to stay awake at work. And if she’s lucky to get a few minutes of sleep, they’re never peaceful. Wailing sirens. They penetrate her sleep, sip into her dreams, coloring them with nightmares. Once she dreamt of floating in a dark river, voices , whispers, calling out her name from woods nearby, “Sophie… Sophie… Sophieeeeeeeee !….”
Friday nights were busy times. Families came to claim a body, off to some vigil before the burial. Nobody ever came there smiling. Tears. Questions. Always.
And the shop across the road from where she worked, the apprentice selling coffins for his master made more money on Fridays. The bright side of misfortunes. No wonder the shop’s lights seem to shine brighter as she stares at them.
“Sophie! Sophie ! a co-worker calls.
The idiot, what’s he calling her for? She wonders. Perhaps to help dress the freshly brought in corpse with lips puckered up as if to deliver a lethal kiss.
She pretends to not hear as she leans on the wires fencing the mortuary, drawing hard on her cigarette. She allows the inhaled smoke to pepper her frustrations a bit longer before gently releasing it all into the foggy night. The night is cold, yet her brows are covered in beads of sweat. She tries to mop them with her sleeves.
She looks across the street. The coffin shop was closed. In a dark alley beside it, two lovers were locked in foreplay. They were young, she thought. Her life was slipping out of her hands like quicksand. How she hates to see herself in a mirror. To see the remains of what her job has taken out of her.
But she isn’t complaining. It’s what puts food on the table, pays the bills and takes the children out for ice cream.
She worries about her children. One can never be so sure, though she washes herself with soap and disinfects her clothes before leaving for the house. She can’t afford a maid. She can only hope that no germ wrestles itself from the claws of her disinfectant to jeopardize the health of her children when they embrace her or when she cooks for them.
If she were a nurse, there would have been nothing shameful about where she worked. But she was no nurse. Just one of the donkeys at the mortuary, doing the dirty jobs.
And the men, every time one comes by, all is rosy and sweet, till she mentions the kids, and they begin to act funny. Some men claim it makes no difference. They love her as much as her kids. But the closer she sniffed their words, the more she understood what they were really after.
What to do? Complaining doesn’t solve anything.
By Benjamin Nambu
From: Ghana
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