LINDA
A Prose by
Afiqah Azhar
Cigarette is her father. Camera is her husband.
‘This is the end. My only friend. The end.’
Crystal is her son. Champagne is her lover.
Lights, camera, action!
Morrison echoes in our ears. Jimi. Janis. Jim. There
goes another one. ‘Yes, Mama.’ I whisper.
‘Look at me dancing in these diamonds, adik!’ My Audiences view her like a picture book in an
mother. My Linda. A serpent of my soul, slithering in ancient library without alphabets and numbers,
opulence and sweat. A goddess living in the failing to read the shades of blue beyond her nose
kingdom of deities and imps. Born into a home of
baby-breeding actors and thrown into a circus of
trippy mannequins on the highway. There she goes,
prancing in classic black Chanel with a cancer stick
ring and mouth piercing that glitter like gold moles
each time she drinks her Cola in the meth-fumed
flask. ‘I live for luxury. I live for love. I love you too,
glued between her alabaster fingers, those broad sayang.’ She wobbles unsteadily like an acrobatic
hips swaying softly to the psychedelic poetry of Jim girl training to steady herself on ropes and giggles
Morrison, clad in her John and Yoko Ono’s Bed-In in my dumb face, chokes on her cigarette and puts
Peace thin shirt that denudes her bosom. The
swelling flesh is tingling and alive like stubborn
the half-burnt menthol lipstick into the ashtray
while smoke licks us all over. The woman in the
mosquitoes on my salivated tongue. Her flaming red
nails match those inviting ruby lips down to the
deflowered genitalia that were once a warm home
to me. She flutters her black cartoon eyes like a
green tudung stares frighteningly through the
Swarovski-studded frame on the foyer table,
black-mascaraed tears staining her plastic cheeks.
flirtatious darling; teenage boys and sidewalks
would prostrate at her feet not long ago.
Money is her mother. Medicine is her sister. Music
is her daughter. Make-up is her best friend.
‘My baby, do you love me?’ she asks, flicking the
ciggy amidst her ashen-coloured teeth. A poignant
image of her green tudung attacks my brain cells as
I drink in the woman twirling before my unwelcome
eyes, boundless and free from a stranger’s hand in a
desperate land. My mother. My Linda.
One, two, three, go!
16 | DISCOVERED