Rabid monkeys with fancy tools

Late afternoon and I go downstairs for tea and a cigarette. I step into the backyard, a warm dry day awaited. Sun on my face, hot, felt almost like home. I light up, lean against the wall and close my eyes. Bright orange through my eyelids. Sound of bees buzzing. A bird swooped past overhead, wind from its wings blew me a gentle breeze. Smell of ginger and Chinese things from my meal in the microwave reminds me of afternoons growing up in my granma’s house.
I see myself as a child - sweaty, gnarly haired, invading the gardens before I developed the fear of milipedes. Philodendrons, ferns, hibiscus plants, other greens I know not their names. I feel like I am back in the days before I started kindergarten.
The air is balmy - my grampa had yet to renovate the house and the neighbours build their walls. Radio playing somewhere. Granma talking to someone, cooking dinner, the smell of chilli powder permeates the air. I play by the pond, catch fishes, the humidity of the shade stiffling but when you’re a child you cared not. I had no other children my age to play with during those afternoons. I invent my own games, follow my granma along wherever she went. There was a kindly old couple who would take me in sometimes but they moved away.
The sun filters in through the windows in my granma’s house, I remember it vividly. I see the dust in the dark, yellow sunshine, and when all that dust settled, I move around and kick it up again and watch it float in the air.
Sometimes I imagine myself in a fort, and shoot at strangers passing by the house.
And in the evening, my parents will fetch me home for dinner. We go to my other granma’s house to eat. TV always playing some Cantonese serial. Always too loud. The house is badly lit, more smell of food, mother talking to granma.
We eat out as well at times. Memory of a coffeeshop in Welky, a red shrine in front of the shop, I sit on two stools stacked on top of each other. Floor is dirty, there is a dog too. Everyone shoos it away.
The microwave beeps, shocks through the silence of the afternoon and I come back to the present. The child in me slowly faded away, staring at me with my own eyes. She looked neither happy nor sad. She was just looking, standing at the sidepath in my granma’s garden, she waved not, she resigned herself to be forgotten again.
I am frightfully afraid of losing these memories. Strange memories of childhood. Strange to remember it so intensely in a land far away from home.

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