Gilbert
He loved Led Zep and Deep Purple. He played drums and rocked out in his shoulder-length hair, bell-bottoms, big specs. He was my mother's youngest sibling. The baby in a family of nine. Despite what everyone else said about him, he never thought he was lazy. He tried his best. He worked hard. All the boys his age in the village where they grew up got into drugs. Soon they were rounding them up.
When he got out, he took a job selling vacuum cleaners and, at a discount, sold my mother the top-of-the-line model. He got married to a mousy, plump woman ten years older who had tiny eyes and a silent laugh. He was doing fine. At family get-togethers, he'd always ask how I was doing in school and nod approvingly. Stay in school, boy, he would say, smiling. Don’t be your uncle.
One day, he banged on the door again and again all the way into the night making threats then making all sorts of promises into the early hours and then finally ripping the guard rail off the window frame and plunging to his death from his locked room on the fourteenth floor of his apartment block at dawn.
On the last night of the wake, under the tent in the carpark, as we sat on mats folding paper offerings and making small talk, a lone moth appeared and fluttered anxiously about before flying smack into the hot white of the incandescent bulb hanging above the casket again and again and again eventually landing on the lip of the lamp shade just beyond the reach of the light and settling there for the night.
In the morning he was nowhere to be found.
~
*note to "Gilbert"
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