GONE AGAIN (standard:drama, 1454 words)
Author: DAVID TUMUSIIME	Added: Feb 26 2003	Views/Reads: 3401/2246	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
story i have just began and really need comment on whether to continue it.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

nine, then thirteen, then seventeen, and in her memory always she's 
entering this room. 

Always when she's entering this room she's different. This room is
different. She's happy. Then she's sad. She's confused. Then she's 
heart broken. 

This room is always changing. At the beginning, her mother is on the
green couch, knitting, laughing with Mama Salif. She's entering the 
room, Salif behind her. Their mothers turn, laughing, to look at them. 

“Salif, what have you done to Arac?” Mama Salif asks in her deep, gong
bell voice and their mothers then laugh heartily, at what she can not 
tell. I t makes them laugh long and hard. Salif himself smiles 
embarrassed. She cannot understand why they are all laughing but she is 
also suddenly overcome by an inexplicable happiness. 

Every time she enters the room her mother is there and the room is
changing. The room is becoming stocked with more and more expensive 
furniture and it is cooler and cooler after the great heat of the 
afternoon outside. She's happier and happier and she wants to find her 
mother and tell her how happy she is but her mother is harder and 
harder to find in the room. The room is fuller. There are many people 
in it always. Every time she enters this room she knows she'll find 
someone in it. Yet every time she enters this room it feels emptier and 
emptier. 

One day she enters this room and although there is a party she might be
alone in it. 

This is how she remembers this room. 

She lived in this house for nine years. Saw this room for 3,285 days.
But never did she see until today the French glass doors that led to 
the patio, that through them you could see the architecturally planned 
flower beds around the Olympic sized swimming pool constructed in the 
gomesi- dress shape of Uganda. She had never noticed the circular stone 
paving in the middle of the gleaming brown varnished floor that clicked 
as they walked over it. This is where he used to stand when they had a 
party and he wanted to address their guests. A gold bar railing would 
be run around it then and a many bulbed chandelier would be fixed 
overhead in the frescoed marble ceiling. 

The guests seated around the long King Arthur dinning table would turn
respectfully from their food and their conversation to listen. 

She could not remember these large strange paintings on the walls that
showed scenes of bloody combat in dark, green jungles and red and gold 
skies where silver and black helicopters exploded and circled each 
other. She could not remember that gigantic full-length portrait of him 
that glared down from the ceiling at whoever entered this room. 

Where had all these weird black and brown shrieking masks with slashes
of red and yellow paint that hung from the walls come from? The spears 
and spiked ball chains? 

She could not remember this. Only the room, and happy afternoons when
she was entering it and early mornings when they were all around the 
long King Arthur dinning table about to take breakfast waiting for him 
to come and wondering where he would come from. The bedroom upstairs? 
Or sneakily through the kitchen with surprises for them all? Or with 
soldiers and cars with scary screaming sirens? 

“He was not a man,”the tour guide croaks,”all the people who knew him
agree. He was a beast!” 

Arac recoils. 

“He was a beast?” one of the women asks wide-eyed, as if expecting the
tour guide to confirm if he is a beast even in his physical form. 
“Yes,” the tour guide replies grinning sinisterly, “he was a beast in 
every way!” A shudder passes through them. 

He was a beast? She asks herself. He was? Anger carouses through her
body. 

They can say what they want now. He is not here to defend himself. But
what about herself? Is she not him because she has some of him in her? 

Should she tell them he is her father? That she is the forgotten
favourite daughter of ex-President-for –life Field Marshal General Idi 
Amin Dada? That she is still alive? 

Does she want to tell them? Should she tell them? 

For twenty-five years she has hidden her identity. It has not been very
hard to do. She does not resemble him. She looks like more like her 
mother. She has her pug nose, her small wide-set eyes, her chubby baby 
cheeks and face, her long neck graceful like a flamingo's. 

She has his surprising tall height but her mother had also been very
tall. She has his physical strength but her mother had had to be strong 
to try to leave him. There is one thing she is sure she has that he 
gave her. She has his heart. She does not forget. She does not forgive. 



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