At home

At Home

Looking towards the window, the leaves and flowers of the old tree shaking gently with the wind, he thinks how warmly this bedroom could be in the afternoon. His nephew and Sarah, his daughter, came upwards and kiss his cheeks, one at each side, when he bends over, calling his name and jumping all over with dirty hands of chocolate. They don’t know what happened. They’ll just get acknowledgement of the incident more than a decade after that night.

Just before a shower, he told to his mother what happened. She becomes angrier because he leaved the hospital without telling her. Grandma, grandma, can we eat some cookies with milk? Worried about the children, as always, she looks at him with a recognizable face that means “We will talk later” and he just says OK. This tacit truce gave him some peace, at last, in the end of that long day.

After the bath, he laid down in his bed, turned on the TV and the children sited down using his torso as a back rest, happy to be around so late watching the news with him. When the report about the flood was screened, none of the three understood what happened, even paying much attention to it. He slept with Sarah and Paul the nephew fighting for a Spider Man comic book above him.