A Checkpoint Away From Dying: R. Cherbo Geeplay
A SHORT STORY
Musue wore a colorful green and yellow cotton lappa, large, silver hoop earrings, and silver bangles to match. She stretched her slender arms and sighed loudly, “Oh Lord!” as she stood facing the street. She glanced at her face reflected in the window-pane. Her image stared back at her, flushed with sorrow and pain. She peered through the window again looking out. Birds and bees were flirting with the flowers in the courtyard, the morning was early. The sunlight poured over her and filled the room. She scanned her yard and her neighbor’s. She shook her head in disbelief, why was this happening. Why was the country engulfed in chaos? There were words on the streets about a revolution and holocaust; nervous in her thoughts, she glanced over at her friend Massa Kolleh’s yard, her annoying busy-body neighbor. Massa had fled the community just yesterday. The neighborhood was desolate, whereas before she would have heard the sounds of children squealing and mothers shouting; now all she heard was the buzz of flies. She winced and clutched her fists to her chest. Her children’s voices were absent. Her heart pounded. Musue hadn’t seen nor heard from her children for three days, since the war hit Monrovia. Her son and younger daughters had fled then, she knew not where. She’d traveled to Careysburg and the surrounding towns to search for them, to no avail. On her last visit to a family member in Rossville she’d given up and told her husband, she thought they should escape the town, that maybe their children, too, had left as the situation became dire. Even then, food was running out as the Freeport lay besieged by the freedom fighters of the Patriotic Front Liberation Liberia [PFLL,] or another of the “patriotic fronts,” rampaging through the city and the land beyond. Story Continue here…