The Tragedy

<p>Suspended between the indifferent gaze of the heavens and the mute earth beneath Fran��ois by his own hand by the rope he himself had so meticulously knotted met his end. Hanged in the desolate confines of his backyard a few bleak hours before the dawn's cold light. He abandoned them his wife his children yes but what weighed more heavily what lingered like a festering wound was not his absence but rather the petty the <i>banal</i> story of hatred-a story that like some insidious disease would continue to metastasize to corrode the very souls of those left behind to bear its weight.</p><p>It was Ang��lique's voice-oh that voice a flat toneless instrument of fate-that delivered the news a brief furtive summons from the abyss a mere handful of seconds to pronounce this utterly absurd this cruelly meaningless judgment.</p><p>A love triangle twisted and perverse; friendships mere charades hollow and reeking of hypocrisy; fleeting feverish embraces; the stain of prostitution; the ultimate despair of suicide-it is here in the very heart of Kinshasa that monstrous maw that city which it is said devours its own children with a ravenous hunger that the interwoven threads of these wretched destinies are unraveled.</p><p>And he who now takes up the pen-he too a captive of his own inner demons tormented by the ceaseless struggle of opposing forces that tear at his very being-he strives with trembling hand to find some semblance of equilibrium in this chaos. It is with letters of blood one might say with the very essence of suffering distilled into ink that he will attempt to chronicle the fate of those who have vanished those who have irrevocably crossed the threshold into the realm of the forever lost.</p>