How To Build A Man

I could shoulder it. It wasn’t easy but I could just about shoulder it. Not on my own of course as coffins weren’t designed for carriage by one. There were two of us. There had always been two of us.

We’d listened to his stories, seen him drink his tea and read his paper, heard about his run-along childhood. We’d invented ourselves, we were something like a wife.

We’d lain next to him in his bed and lived off the fat of his land. We’d travelled his roads and returned to his home. He told us that it was always his home and never our home.

We were bound to him. He’d saved us and we gave ourselves to him in gratitude. Once given that way we could never be equals. He laboured for us and we laboured for him. We got by. Some days we even laughed, all together. Other days we saved our laughter for times when he could not hear. He did the same. We heard him sometimes, laughing.

It was an honest arrangement and it suited us all. We could not be parted and he needed our succour.

Now he is no more.

But I don’t know if we shall build another. We built him, in the way our mother showed us. We produced children, his children, but they were all boys. None survived.

He saved us when the soldiers came. We gave him his youth. He believed in himself. He defended us. That was all as it should be. But then we gave him too much in gratitude and we lived with it. Now he has died with it. We are glad about that.

But we are the last. We shall not build another. We shall not produce girls.