Al-Qusayr, Syria

I know Death. I know it well.

How can I not know who Death is?

The figure who crept over my father’s dying, but determined, fighting body and trailed a bony finger down his chest as he smirked, watching my father slip before me with content.

“Baba, Baba, Baba!” I murmured, my fingers curling into his feeble, limp ones.

A small chuckle emerged from Death and I watched it put a thin, black leather half finger gloved hand on Baba’s chest.

Baba stopped breathing.

His eyes shut gently and his hands fell open. I blinked once, twice, thrice, trying to play it off as a figment of my imagination.

Baba’s chest did not rise.

Baba’s hand did not tremble.

Baba’s eyes did not open again.

Baba is dead.

Gone.

“No, no, no, Baba...” the tears were ready to fall out any moment, but I resisted them.

I wanted to see the bastard who took my father.

It was a cloaked figurine in an ebony robe, with a black bandana concealing his mouth and nose. From what I could see of its face, it had dark eyebags that looked like they were permanently etched under its eyes. Its eyes were a mysterious cloud grey, ones that seemed so beautiful and precious for a grotesque, apathetic, and disconsolate thing. They didn’t suit it.

I glanced at Death and it glanced back at me. There were millions- no universes of things I wanted to scream at it. But they never, and to this day, still never string together the fury and somberness I felt and still feel.

Death’s thin eyebrows knitted together and it said in an eerie, yet, collected tone, “I’ll be back soon.”.

When the last letter escaped his mouth, I threw my hands at him, trying to strangle him.

But he evanesced away.

And there I sat with Baba’s frigid corpse.

Confused, enraged, and sorrow, all at once.