In the early hours of a rural morning in Jamaica, in that small space in time before the sun rises and the moon leaves us, my father tells me that when he was a boy, he once saw a ghost walking its cow to its field, along the main road through Ginger Ridge.
It walked; he said, with a sharpened cutlass under its arm, the clinking sound of the cow's chains, synced with each footstep made along the uneven pot-holed road out of town. All the time, this pedestrianised percussion befriending the solitary wind that once rustled alone through the leaves of the trees, in a rural morning in Jamaica, that my father would soon leave behind forever.
For the first time, last Sunday evening, soothed by the soma of booze as we were, my father told me that he flew to England wearing the shirt which his mother was sewing buttons onto when she had died.
Dad also, in the way that he releases his personal history, like a random bulk Wikileaks leak, also told me he about being stabbed in his side with a tree branch he accidentally ran into; getting a neighbour to pull it out for him - as you do.
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