The white field had a smattering of yellow and they reached my very shoulders.

I remember celebrating my sixth birthday just two weeks before she fell ill. Then the doctors came and went, each one leaving a few bottles of pills, that my dad threw in the garbage the moment they left. “Absolute quacks,” he always said of them. And then a month later, she was dead.

The day she died, I swallowed a piece of bubblegum accidentally in a bet with my brother. I read about my mother’s death in the papers the next day. Her obituary was simple, next to a full-page colour one for a minister’s son. “Departed 13th May 1994. Will be missed dearly” it read.

That day, I went for a long walk behind my house. It was the place my parents had met as children, when they played hide-and-seek amongst the trees with their band of gollywog friends. The place my grandparents had met when the land had been barren and they drew figures on the ground with sticks and rocks. Now, there are daisies.

I hated the place. Why couldn’t there be corn, or barley, or big, bright, bloomin’ sunflowers like the fields in the other villages?

It started drizzling, then it began pouring and lightning lit the sky. In between the flashes of bright, I saw her.

That day, I stole the daisies.