My Father’s Flesh in My Mouth

The old room carried my grandmother’s old house scent. Harsh summer sunlight creeped through a tiny window above the room's only wooden bed, casting pale shadows across the walls.

My three brothers left the room and locked the door behind them. The door slammed shut, its echo bouncing off the walls and settling heavily into the silence.

Despite the heat outside, I shivered. Not from cold, but from the heavy dread hanging in the air. My heart pounded violently against my ribs, rising into my throat with every breath. I kept my eyes on my father, unable to look away.

He lay there. My father. Cold. Motionless. His rough skin drained of life, his hazel eyes wide open, staring blankly into the void, unblinking. It was in that suspended, unbearable stillness that the truth struck: he was gone. Really gone.

I tried to scream for my brothers, to call them back.

“He should be buried. He shouldn't be left alone in this room with me.”

The thought echoed over and over in my head, but no sound escaped my lips. My voice was gone, strangled by a thousand invisible fingers. It felt as though a dry, wooden hand had crawled into my throat and wrapped itself around my vocal cords, squeezing tighter and tighter until the last trace of my voice dissolved into the void.

I reached to close his eyes, but my body froze, paralyzed.

Instead, I found myself doing the unthinkable.

Eating him.

I was eating his flesh while he lay lifeless in front of me. With both my hands eating him. Flesh in my mouth. His flesh. Liquids seeping from the corners of my lips. I feel it, I smell it, I taste it; putrid and rotten. My gaze fixed on his eyes that refused to shut. I clawed at him with bare hands, scooping muscle, tendon, fragments of the man who fathered me.

It was not grief that moved me. Not hunger. My hands, my mouth, acting on their own. I didn’t want to. But I had no control over myself. It was as if something had taken over me, forcing me to devour him. At the same time, it felt like there was another version of me in that room. Quietly watching me from across the room with no judgment doing what I’m doing. Watching my body moves, but I was not inside it.

I hated what I was doing. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t look away.

His body was no longer whole, holes where I had burrowed.

Then suddenly…his hand grabbed me. Flesh on flesh.

“Is he still ALIVE?” I thought.

It’s like his body screamed “Stop!”.

My heart leapt into my throat, and in that terror, I broke free, maybe his scream shook me back into myself. I found myself running towards the closed door - escaping him, the room felt bigger. My legs dragging my heavy body about to fail me. Fail me escape the shame, his remnants that are inside my digest system, the idea that no matter where I go, he’s in me now.

I flung the door open. But I was no longer in the room. I stood at the edge of Petra*.

“What? How did I get here?” I told myself.

Something’s not right as nothing makes sense but at least I hadn't fallen from that height. Without turning my head, my fingers reached back toward the room door, trying to hold on so I wouldn't fall, I felt them desperately searching through the air for something to grab. There was nothing. The door behind me had vanished, as if it had never existed.

I sat there, stunned, on the mountain ledge above the rose-colored cliffs where Petra is built. The desert below stretched endlessly, empty and pale. The faint whistle of the hot and dry wind multiplied through the echo into a thousand whispers, each one crawling across the sand dunes.

Unconsciously, I looked at my hands, wondering if any part of my father still lingered. But they were clean, spotless, as if I hadn’t dug into his corpse minutes ago. The taste had vanished too. No rot on my tongue.

And though that should’ve brought relief, it didn’t.

I wasn’t sure which was harder; what I had just done, or where I stood now.

Devouring the dead… or dangling between sky and ruin on this edge of the world.

Beneath me, carved into the rock, I saw a giant statue of a woman’s head, only the top visible from this height, wrapped in an African “gele”.

Then... I heard giggles. At first, they were distant, accompanied by faint footsteps, almost like a slow jog. As they drew closer, the sounds grew louder, carrying through the air.

A dozen or so children appeared from my left, they ran – laughing- along the mountain’s narrow edge. Five, maybe seven years old. Reckless, joyful. Like it was a game to them.

But it wasn't. Not at this height.

As they got closer to me, one slipped.

Then another.

Tiny bodies disappeared over the edge. Their screams mixed with the rushing air and clouds of dust as they fell. I guess the wind failed them. In all those spiritual stories, it was supposed to carry them, wasn't it?

I gasped, horrified.

In my mind, I saw their skulls cracking open against the rocks below. Limbs twisted into impossible shapes. Small hands reaching for something, anything, and finding nothing. Blood spreading beneath the ruins of their play, turning a moment of laughter into a scene no child should ever become.

“Fingertips! I see their fingertips” I shouted happily.

Some hung from ledges, desperately holding on. But the rocks were slick with sand. Too loose. Too cruel. There was no one to save them. No one to climb down. Just me. Watching.

Hope, then horror. That was always the cycle.

I felt a musty breath on my right cheek. I stumbled; it was him, my father!

                 *                                 *                                 *               

“You should forgive him,” my therapist said after I described the recurring nightmare. Two years, this same grotesque vision has haunted me. My father died four years ago. So why now? Is it the ghost of trauma? Psychology? Unhealed wounds surfacing in dreams?

I don’t want to forgive him. I never did. Why should I?

* Petra is an ancient city in Jordan, famous for its rock-cut architecture and its historical and archaeological significance