Abdulrazak Gurnah

After the funeral, my father said: God will make you pay for the boy’s death. My grandmother said I had stood and watched him die a terrible death. What hope is there, she said, when brother murders brother? My mother told me to stop crying and that I could not help what had happened. They made me live years of guilt for a wrong I had not done. And then it was possible to hone self hate and remorse into a tool for causing pain. Creatures rose in the night to suck my blood and bloat me with waste and sin. I fought them in the way they had shown me. I paid them back pain for pain, silence for silence. I learnt how to reject them.

scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light