The 100 Year Old Scream

The 100 Year Old Scream –

By Tvine Donabedian 

February 2015, 5 pm. Tvine Donabedian is practically parked on the 15 North Decarie highway, only one among the many metal sardines stuck in the blinding blizzard blowing at their windshields, like the screen of a fuzzy television.

The falling snow was thick and quick to cover every surface. In a matter of minutes, the city was beginning to look like an eternal wasteland.
She hated it.
Something about large expanses of land made her feet ache.
Something about the snow hills looked like sand dunes.
Something about the snowflakes floated like ash.
It scared her.
How the below zero temperature made her sweat.
How the ice under her wheels teased her; just more water that could not be drank.
When her family migrated to Canada, her great grandmother told her son
The snow would never melt.

She was driving home and hopefully, away from what had potentially been the worst day she’d ever had.
But it was the year 2015 and she could not complain.

Morning greeted her with yet another frustrating tutoring session.
How was she to teach language to a boy, who could not pronounce wealth.
But it was not his fault.
She could not complain.
He would never know how to love a language.
He did not know how to dip his finger in scorching deserts to trace letters.
Fill his pens with blood.
Skin his flesh for canvas.
Make his bones an easel.
To trace letters.
He did not know how to use his last breath to recite an alphabet.
Sunburn his palms together in prayer.
Break his knees to kneel.
Clear his throat of his own lungs.
To recite an alphabet.

Noon.
She had packed a lunch, but forgotten it at home.
She was starving, but only as far as the expression went.
Hunger had not impregnated her stomach.
Her tongue was not swollen from thirst’s beating.
There was always too much food on their dinner tables.
So much food.
To eat with compensation.
She never asks her mother who it is she is trying to feed.

The sun begins to set
And her oral presentation in history had been nothing short of a disaster.
She had said all the wrong things, but could not complain.
Her grandparents still choke on sand when they speak.
Three generations later, she reaches for the glass of water a little too often herself.
Washing down Der Zor takes time.

She inherited their rootless oak
And their habits of watering it.
At its foot, she reminisces,
The memories of some past self.
A nostalgia she was born with.
Like her ancestors,
She would not pull out this never ending spear,
Piercing through her genealogy.
For fear of bleeding out.

She inherited their divine abandonment.
She learned how to deal with the snakes of the world
After Tekeyan deported God from Eden.
HE was not welcome in her gardens either.
Bidi essenk asdoudzo
That she had a mountain to worship.
HE could go blaspheme himself.

On her way home, the light of day had disappeared.
She glared at the greying skies, daring them to keep snowing.
See if she’d care.
A sunrise was no promise, where she came from.
Low expectations spared her the disappointment
And you’d think, would dull the pain…
After so long,
You’d think she’d know,
How to save her people
From this malignant fate.

And suddenly it was all too much.
Too much snow,
Too much traffic,
Too much school,
Too much history,
Too much weight,
Too many souls.
1.5 million too many.
Waiting too long.
99 years too many.

She opened her mouth and bellowed carnage.
Shrieked charred bones.
Her voice unearthed corpses,
And revived the fires that burned them.
She was drowning in crimson river beds,
Screeching their rusted bullets.
They split her palate, but hardly interrupted her.
She wailed the sorrows of a million mothers and their orphaned children.
She howled cries of rape, of an entire people being stripped.
She yelled murder, assassination, annihilation.
But the world stood still.
Not a single being budged when the final bullet roared out of her mouth,
Only to land in Charlottenburg, Berlin.
She emptied her being of this cultural sickness,
Until only its tumor was left.

With one final breath,
Her throat stretched; a canal for an ancient anger.
She retched genocide
And it twisted in her lap.
Hello Old Friend. Alive and well, I see.

It was the year 2015 and Tvine Donabedian screamed the 100 year old scream.