'Violence'

I was very angry. I took it all upon myself and carried the heavy plastic sacks filled with soil one by one to the back of our house, ignoring my mother's pleas. It would've amounted to the same thing, carrying them and putting them into the car, then driving to the back to deposit the soil next to the drain behind our house. They were heavy and at times seemed about to burst as I struggled to make my way from the front--passing the living-room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and then the toilet--to the last room leading to the outside. We had shifted about twenty bricks earlier by car to the back. Debris and earth had remained in the backseat on old newspapers. We found a nest of ants beside the drain when my mother was weeding. They were fleeing in hundreds with larvae in their mouths. I tried trampling them to death. Then the truck came and bags of cement were stacked next to the front door. Sand was unloaded, blocking the entrance to our porch. I spent the next fifteen to twenty minutes still fuming, shovelling furiously the sand away into another pile so that the gate could be closed and locked. My mother kept telling me to stop, that it was enough. Let us take turns, she said with a hand held out for the shovel. I shook my head. That's the last time you call me useless, I muttered.