Ides From A Third Sunday

 The bitumen of the camber on the Guildshine Avenue is reflecting the lambent flicker of the only streetlight that still burns the tungsten within itself. It is shiny, glossy black. It rained today at twenty minutes past six in the evening, so the black even wears a sparkle with the drops that are yet to dry up, composing it on the aloof avenue tonight. 18 degrees Celsius. I read it from the corner of my wrist watch that he gave me two months ago. It wasn’t a gift to be precise; an offer of something essentially tangible in lieu so he could ask for the same. In some time, he did. He always does. He paid me. I see. He never asked back for it, and I have kept it in a garb that he cannot be aggrieved about. I have cosseted both the watch and the time in it ever since. It doesn’t seem like it’s not mine anymore. The previous night was two degrees colder. I note that down in my mind as I juxtapose the window sill where Blanolin sits, slightly tilted along the left its own frame. He got the moniker from me. Little did I presume that twelve years of my life would be insufficient to outlive my fancy for teddy bears. I like his eyes – round, pale brown eyes that stare right at me. I wonder if he has seen all that I have displayed upfront him every night of the third Sunday. I want to outgrow my penchant for him, but he reminds me of my childhood when I had Billy, my first Teddy bear, whom I willingly slept with because, unlike Blanolin, he was actually gift. Billy, my toy of I cherished the moment of turning two years old with in the living room of the mansion. He didn’t ask back for the teddy either. I don’t know if it will be seamless to me to give him back at the hands of the real owner. Did he steal him from another teenage girl, or a wench even younger than that? I bet he did because on the clementine bow about his neck, the ribbon wears a stitch in small letters. “Teddy Toklin” it reads. I call it mine. I lie, but I call it mine because that way, I get to accept it, embrace it. I have learnt to do it quite well now for I have done so with so many things so many times. I hear a murmur inside my belly, and cannot deny how hungry I am. I didn’t have my dinner last night because Mr. Onyphora has always told me to be with a barren stomach if we the women did not want to be barren. What can I say about the breakfast? Blancmange, ratatouille, chocolate croissants, angelica chopped off with the top layers of vanilla just like the ones I see hang on the cake of first birthday in my dreams, and morello from choux pastry, courgette in case the foregoing stew doesn’t catch the taste of your tongue for nothing must fail to make you exclaim “Voila! Moreish!”, and tortilla stuffed with patty and meringue in tandem – Uh huh. The breakfast is quite a banquet every morning - The breakfast is quite a feast every morning. My matutinal hours are the only ones when I feel my own body’s ends on the skin at the utmost of my ability to feel. That’s when I acknowledge my human existence at the zenith of my consciousness; I am either comatose above my torso to my chest or my legs are petrified to my ankles that I sometimes stop knowing that I can walk as well. I am also perplexed about how I keep getting overwhelmed by oblivion in my mind about every Christian conviction I was tenacious about. Perhaps, I am about to lose all my virtues. I surmise so. I will perhaps, lose my faith in my Lord, but following the outset of his endeavor with me cum an attainment only on his part which is now blasé enough for me to even acknowledge, I have pondered over being tenacious about my Christian belief for just a little more time. I think He will see me in the next second that will come, or within an hour, or within days, or within months, or years. I pray thrice a day – morning, evening, and right before bed. I pray on my knees for Ms. Evelyn has taught me how to; she only forgot to teach me what to. I sense this ineluctable urge to tell you how I love my God with all my heart because I need to right now. You see, He may detest me like I was never a creation in His mind when He witnesses the deed that’s in mine. The urge is in me, and it is way more irrevocable than I thought it would be. He is testing me I believe, but I am here to be tested. I pray thrice a day I repeat. I pray thrice a day for His Holy Providence upon us all, and hands on the heads of those who are losing their minds.

“God will never forgive me. He won’t take me in His embrace. I shouldn’t. Oh God! I really must not.”, I hear a voice speak inside my head. I am too inches deeper on the futon of my bed now. I am shrinking, literally shrinking when I thought I was, only figuratively as I have been on the nights of every third Sunday of every single month. I see, I am also shivering now. It is mine. I have heard it a million times whilst on this bed. Yes. I am sure, clearly in fact. I cannot be wrong. It is mine. Regardless of whether I say or don’t, I always hear it so close to my ears that the thought of him overhearing these whispers of my head often paralyzes me. What will happen if he heard them? What can happen, anyway? In the middle of his chest, right on top of it, and pressed sometimes under the blanket by the same, breathing in between where my eyes meet the utmost of what I cannot even dare to call as sinister from my mouth anymore. I prefer dumbness to the speech of my throat for he would strangle me if I even coughed; I have slept with him on this bed linen. Pale cerulean, mauve, with a turquoise pile. He was forceful the night that preceded the last time he did it to me. Hear me as I tell you the truth – he was violent. “But what will happen if I don’t? It will remain, won’t it? The question is – how long will I?”, the sound is acerbic in the rotunda now, and I clutch a fistful of the muslin about the centre of the bed, ruining the velvety mat on it. Yes. It will remain if I don’t do it. I don’t know if I should; all I know is that I want to. I hence, conjecture that I have to. And just like everyone, I am scared that I will fail.

The lighthouse is three miles away from my compartment. But every time the mildly sallow hue flickers on the pane of my window, I delude myself to believe that it is only two feet away from the patio of the Onyphoras’. It was only at the hour when I was baptized that I heard the clamor across the alley the lighthouse falls on. To this date, I don’t know what the voice was, or whose; I have thus, been ever captivated by it. I hear it every night. Yes, night after night when he exerts his weight on my ribs, on my lungs, on my shoulders on this soft bed as well.

I have a deluxe basque underneath my negligee tonight. My dress was stitched in white calico by Madame Evilyn. It took my obtuse brain two nights to pinpoint the pieces of the jigsaw of the reason why. You see, she wove it as a skirt of finery with beautiful embroidery of tiny red buds on it, as if plucked from the fresh roses of her own garden. She wouldn’t give them away for free, would she? No one will, and she never will. But she left the corpus of it completely untouched. My blood would often stain it anyway. The white would divulge the puce of my blood just like the carmine of a russet sun with the dollop of my blood being the garnet of its central embroidery which sits right on its bloody core. In all the hours of those nights when I would be offered a poisoned Chalice straight from the hands of Mr. Frederick Onyphora, Evilyn made the way only easier. She has taken good care of me. I promise you that because I am damn sure that I cannot get it wrong in any way. She has cosseted me like her own child and allowed his hands on my body – my thighs, my chest, my neck and back – as soon as he wanted me. I am twelve now. I was five when I was brought here, only if my memory still serves me right in the aftermath of the fifteen whiplashes in the course of my stay with them. She has been just like my mother. To help myself cringe at their similitude towards each other, Evilyn even reflects my mother in her words – “You will soon be in good riddance of me. We will be at peace shortly. You are a bird Atom, a bird with wings on fire. Why don’t you fly? Hah! When you do, remember to fly high.” So it is safe for me to say that it was not more than a cinch for me to find a second mother in this dungeon. But I couldn’t just erase my mother’s touch from my skin in spite of all the touches of his filthy fingers. Many a time he enjoys the power over me, as if to exercise some ludicrous prerogative that only he can understand what is. This means his tiny nails’ scratch in between my legs. He is really quick to act; I am nonplussed whilst he closes his feat ceremonially.

My folks both realized their respective vocations in the middle of July this year. My mother is a post graduate in Archeological Science, and thus, her penchant for fields far from the suburbs of this town doesn’t really surprise me. She returns late at night, often after the clock has struck eleven. My father, on the other hand, hurled his eyes rather switched to a new bailiwick of the editorial coterie of an international newspaper that is now published after the moniker Cosmic Class. So you see, besides Madame Evilyn in this house, my mother and my father also haunt the same space. I merely wish they would be a tittle more concerned about who visited them for I was supposed to be precious.

“I have allowed him all this time. It won’t count as a misdemeanor. Do I care?”, I hear the whisper for the third time now, only in a different composition of words. “I will. This is my night. It is tonight or never. I can do it. I will… damn it! I must. What will follow? Should I think about it, just as now? If not, then when shall I? Will it be too late if I keep it for some time later because I have other things to look at, some things to take care of, some things to plan? Can I do it? Of course. But should I? No. No, no, no, no, no!” continues the voice to lam my head incessantly as I hear the latch on the door to the space of my boudoir move.

He is dressed a little differently tonight. Does he know what is on my mind? God! Does he? He clicks the bolt open with his index finger. I see. He is saving his little one. So I will have his tiny nail tonight. Great. It is great to know something beforehand for it may prove to be conducive in some way for me, if only I’m being anywhere logical. Oh, you see, I have lost all sense of what is right and what is wrong. The click is barely audible to my ears. It is that whisper in my head again, one that I was listening to. And if not, it will soon be. I hear someone say something until I find a way to captivate their words inside my mind where they echo as and when they wish to. I hear him press his feet on my carpet. The Crimplene, the surface of it has been woven with, is mussed up now. He is messing it up. Yes, he is messing it all up! I can tell that because it happens every night he requisitions one half of the area of my bed from me for his body. I have not yet dared to look at him on all of those hours that he has spent with me. I am not scared, but ashamed to – for his part of shame as well for I know he won’t feel it, but I do, and it sets my plexus of my neurons on fire, only if he knew. He will dress me up in the moniker of his daughter if you ask him who I am to him. Oh I’m sure of that. He is the mirror the devil will descry his own face on the shiny pane of. He is here – all dressed in a raglan kameez. The shirt has only one pocket on the right edge of his chest, stitched a little towards the bottom of his ribs. I have never felt his bones as he has felt mine – the bones of my rib cage, my clavicles, my phalanges, my vertebral column, my femora, my humeri, my nape, all of them. I wonder if I can put my hands in the pocket of his tunic and touch the surface of his chest. I must not. Oh Lord I must not for I am so likely to rip his heart out. I bet it’s empty, both his pocket and his bosom. Surely for he has never been that imbecilic. He holds back his hands at his rear, standing akimbo upfront me. I see, he has also got something for me today. The last time I can recall a gesture of this kind from his end was a month ago. He is Mr. Onyphora, a man of blessed fortune with the fulfillment of almost whatever the heck he demands. WHATEVER THE HELL HE DEMANDS FROM ME AT LEAST. Yet, I preach His name for me. I have never prayed for him. My mouth hates to utter his name, so he presses his lips on mine for he demands what I cannot give – what I will not give. I can feel it in my heart that it’s not my God showering His blessings and unfolding His provenance on him. My God will never forgive him, let alone His blessing.

“How are you?”, Mr. Onyphora asks, quietly closing the door behind him. I don’t answer, but observe that he just became careless enough to not put the chain on the gate. I wonder if he really forgot to do that, or if that is advertent. If is the former, perhaps, my God is somewhere inside this room tonight. “You didn’t hear me. I should reiterate.”, I hear him mumble to himself whilst he stands seven feet away from me and only two from the door. So I am nine feet away from the door as I deduce the calculation in my mind, being completely ignorant of what he says next. “Atom, how have you been today? Atom?” I see his feet move closer to me. He has not yet divulged what he is holding at his back. I want to pull his hands out from his rear and stretch them towards me as to seize them out of his arms – the arms that tie mine in feathery handcuffs on the bed. They have not mauled my wrists yet, but I can feel the bruise aggravating somewhere every time they are fastened on my skin. He might have got a new pair for me. Maybe that’s what he is hiding. What’s the secret? I am badly desperate to know because it seems like my life depends on it. “ATOM!”, I finally hear him shout as he breaks into my speculation with a slap of his right palm on my shoulder. I look straight into his face without flinching for once. He is close enough, so I feel the warmth of the breath he breathes out into the air of the room. He has put a new scent on his apparel. It’s the Madzing Lovielle Perfume. I know the smell dead well. It is my father’s. I look at him straight in his eyes as he lowers his. I don’t bat an eyelash until he looks up at me again. I have some questions for him which I must ask before I do it. “My father. It’s my father’s. What did you – ”, I ask, taking two fringes of the skirt of my negligee inside the fist of my right hand. “Yes, oh yes. It is Gordon’s. He is asleep downstairs. Holly is there too. Quite a couple they make I must say. You are lucky to have such folks Atom. Anyway, about the perfume, I visited him in his office today evening and asked him if I could borrow his perfume tonight to impress my dear someone.”, he takes one more step towards me. “He said that you had got that for him. How do you like it now? Don’t you revel in already?”, he expounds, gradually revealing his hands from his back. “Here, have these Groundsels. I accrued them on my way home from the harbor. Work was over early and I had time in my hands. So I walked the longer route to trudge past The Camellian’s. Look what my saunter and a vaguely planned visit at the florist’s garden got me Atom! Why! Don’t you like them? You fancy them, don’t you? See, I picked the ones which were fresh, really really fresh”, he continues, his face just an inch away from my lips. He is too close now. “Don’t you see the meaning behind it? Oh you silly ingénue! I reckon you need more lessons from me. I am willing to teach. I can have these nights with you to take my part.” Saying so, he walks closer to me and touches the hem of my negligee’s voile. “They are nice, uncle Fred.”, I say and step back like a coward. A strong inrush of shame gushes out of my veins and I am filled with a repulsive revulsion in my blood for myself. How cowardly a move! Shame on me! Shit! How can I be such a pussy to cower like a child? I have infuriated myself and even if I have previously at times, I don’t really know how to cool down right now. I am losing my composure. God! I must not. He must not know anything that I desire to do, that I am dying to do. I’ll have one shot. Only one and never twice. I must not fail. I will discover soon. If I stay to see the sun rise from the far end of the meadow of my conurbation tomorrow from the clean pane of the lateral window so often have I read Margaret Atwood’s works by, I will know it; if the beam that will steal a way into this room for I know it will whether I am there to greet the rays or not, lays itself open on my skin, scarred from the tight clasps of my uncle’s hands and legs, and I feel the warmth, only somewhat differently, I will know it; if there comes the successive night tomorrow and I am there to realize it rightly the next morning that I will witness it by hook or by crook when my sight will be blinded by the pale yellow shade of the bright sun, further espying the stars on the night sky through the dormer built high up on the roof of my room and straight into the intense turquoise of the night sky where they will dazzle high above and amidst the black of the firmament in the hour of the night, and I will also tuck my head out of the same lateral window to see all of them with the kiss of the cold zephyr on my skin, I will know it. I will. “Hah! Oh come on Atom. Don’t you see it still? There, found them. Look at these buds that haven’t blossomed yet. The flowers are still so young – ”, uncle says and sniffs through a panicle of my hair that dangles over the back of my left shoulder. “I want you to spread them on the linen. Yellow will complement the white of the sheets, and if not, let’s see how it doesn’t.”, he persists on, “Just a couple of minutes. I will be right here. Make sure that you have strewn the petals by then. I will wash up.” and leaves for the washroom, pushing the bunch of Groundsels into my arms. I stand with the flowers on my arms, held tightly even as I try not to crumple them, not in my arms. They are flowers, beautiful and bright colored flowers. It was never their fault. They don’t have to feel the agony that is in me. They merit love from the inmost core of the heart of whoever plucks them, and I, who have been made a pet of an animal, will have to pluck up my courage to tear out even one petal. I almost think that I have become precocious to bear the buds when I am only twelve. I have not known any lady so closely to know what it is like to bear someone within you and then have them as a part of you quite intrinsically even when the creation is one to be hated; even when it has come out of you but not your child. Strange, the buds are way too small to ask for any mass, barely grains of wheat they appear to me, yet they are abruptly too heavy on my arms. I don’t want to hold them. They aren’t mine. I throw them on the floor, and they are strewn on the wet marmoreal tile instead of spreading themselves on the coverlet of my bed. They belong there tonight. I will embellish the vase that my mother gifted to me on my third birthday for she knew how much I loved to have flowers in the room the next time I have them from anyone. Tonight, I can only detest them beyond words. I steal a quick shufti and can barely admire them. I hate them. The yellow and auburn petals are hurled across the front of the bed. The linen is unkempt. Even the bed hasn’t yet been made. I don’t wish to spend a second doing it because I don’t want to prepare a bed for two. “Yes, it’s your tiny apartment, a house inside a house, which you can decorate as much and in any way you like”, my mother said when we moved into the mansion. She kept her words until then. It was only after two years had lapsed of our sojourn in this residence that she divulged that she had been waiting for the right moment to tell me that. This room was a gift from her to me. It was a gift from my mother to me. Surely it was on me whom I wanted to have in here. And strangely enough, regardless of all that I knew was in my power, I made way for my uncle to intrude my privacy. I allowed him in even when I knew I did not want him here. You see, I may as well turn the clasp knife towards my neck when I have it merely one centimeter away from his. Yes, I may as well do it if I keep reminding myself of every time I let him in until he found he had known the space well enough to know how to enter despite my resistance. I hate to have to say that he might have charmed me in some way, but never enough to confiscate my authority in the jurisdiction of this room. It was mine, but it seems like now he owns it. I step aside by two small feet and come closer to my disc player which has always been a contraption for me. My mind has always seemed no less of a motley menace to others in the house when it is about music. I am fond of genres that vary from pop to jazz to classical to contemporary music. Sadly, I seemingly abhor the disc player as well, let alone my predilection for any song from it. I look around and hate every corner of the room, every crevice on the venetian blind that stretches itself open on the pane of my oriel window and the bigger ones that accompany the two walls which face each other. I see, my mother built every inch of the room with a careful design, and my uncle is absolutely reckless in tousling a space that was never his whilst foraging for my flesh. It is incredible how my eyes also descry the red ribbons in this stygian shade of the light. I can see everything so clearly in this black hue as well. I have grown up in here. I know it more than anyone else in this world will. True for me to say, there is perhaps, no other place like my room. I laid those red ribbons on the four edges of the room to prettify the ends of the four walls with a royal regalia, thinking of myself as a little princess in her teeny compartment with her doll’s house, her instrument that was her legacy from her grandfather, the children’s novels, the nursery rhymes and loads of homework from her school which stood at the end of the seventh block of her residence. I laid those ribbons. Now he is extending them to any extent he desires, and spreads those ribbons on my body as he pulls one out from the terra firma of my territory. He may as well push the outskirts beyond the touchline because the floor, where sometimes the field of Rugby, is one of baseball at other times, whilst it is a hoopla’s ground on another hour. I see, he has transformed the ambience under my watch. I see, he comes and I open the door; he asks for something which I deem as his demand and fulfill it with not a syllable of protest like there is nothing as such as what I want to do; he sleeps on my bed and I make room for him even if I still cannot bring myself to say that I welcome any of it – any of it! I do not. Hear nothing else. I said I do not. My queries clobber my mind again and I totter on the doily, ruining the flat display of myself now. I make it look a little puckered at the centre as I flinch because the realization of it all hits me hard – he has made me a slave in my own room, and how he did it, I do not know.

The sound of the faucet dies out. He has switched off the tap. He must be done and will soon be out into the room again. I look at the door which now stands more than nine feet away from me, but that’s not much. I can make it. My folks are only downstairs. I can scream. Of course, why not? It won’t take them longer than two minutes to run upstairs and find me – finally find me. I can expose him. But here I stand right on the centre of the rug, transfixed upfront the mirror, absolutely speechless, as if some invisible hands are garroting me and my mouth has been gagged with cord tape. I don’t speak a word. The sound of the shower commences from the toilet. The flush is heard no more. He is probably on the ablutions now. “I have enough time in my hands. I can run”, I envisage, looking at my reflection in the mirror. But nothing changes. I stand exactly at the same place. “What is wrong? Atom, run! Run for your life! Shit! Have you gone nuts? Why aren’t you doing anything? SAY SOMETHING!”, I hear my own voice create a clamor inside my head, and I simply discard what I hear. Seriously, what is the matter? I must figure it out. But I barely move, barely flutter my eyelids, barely blink, barely move my lips. Am I breathing? It seems like I am dead, or utterly caught inside a sculpted effigy. How can I prefer a life so hellish to a life of redemption? I am not oracular, nor is my mind. It is justice that I seek, not an escape. I must redeem myself for I am a stranger to what will happen if I tell the truth to anyone. I have been accommodating for him hitherto. He has had enough of my generosity, obedience, compliance, and stoical demeanor. Enough of all this bullshit! He brought me on my knees for him. When growing up, I was always taught to bow on my knees for my God. The devil seized the place of the Holy, but not in me. He might have found the pedestal to sit on, but he never owned it. He cannot deny it. I can feel the strength of my faith in God despite my intention of a vice that I am going to commit – that I will commit. My God may not greet me in His Paradise, but I will hate myself for all the days I’ll get to breathe in if I concede with cowardice tonight. Not tonight. Not anymore.

Uncle Fred now switches off the tocsin of the shower as well. As goes my empirical presumption, he will take fifteen more minutes to finish up. I stand upfront the mirror, but avert a gaze; I know I won’t be able to look at myself. This negligee with no print of his fingers but still very much there with my cognizance that he touched me somewhere over here is what makes it hard for me to catch one glimpse of myself. He has touched me so many times regardless of whether I wanted or did not want it that only his presence around me is no less than a threat of depravity of my soul. My skin feels too grubby already. I can’t envision going to bed with him for a shake of a second, even for the sake of what I want to do tonight. I can let the fear cripple me from head to toe, and just give up – let him do whatever he wants to do with me, rape the hell out of me. He is not yet to do it. I have seen every that universe from every nook, and all the while that I would cede with his whips and his fingers, I would only look for the stars in its black sky. They would be the only thing of beauty in the heinous hour. Indeed, I never saw them. It is ironical how I hate the man in my washroom and yet, I am succumbing to what he wants me to feel, intimidated, hollow, scared, and powerless. I do not understand my own mind. It is telling me to give up. I want to give up so badly. I never wished any of this for myself, but a childhood where my Barbie dolls would be simply presents on my birthdays, and not entities to win my approval for a proposition. He has made me a whore and I simply comply – no words, not a tinge of quiver in my body nor a blink of one eye are executed. I mustn’t dare to. He is capable of anything. I want to run, not scream. I want to give in to cowardice, not failure. I am shivering when I am so close to working out my salvation. I ought not to veer, not now because I will be running my whole life. It may as well be very plausible for me to claim that I am convinced I must not let anything weaken me tonight at any cost. I can say that I mean it both literally and figuratively and be verily correct because I will have to settle the price with my life otherwise. The Guildshine Avenue now has a sparkle on the black surface. There is Chevhoil Burmuda parked next to the red kiosk which is closed. The street is gradually wrapping the black blanket of the night. I look a few feet outside the gate of the mansion. Only two steps take me to the window. I undo the latch and let the cold air in. As I jut my head outside the frame of my window, an involuntary action works on my hands – unknowingly, they come together. I still don’t speak a word, but in my heart is the recitation of a prayer; I am wobbly in my mind as I surmise that in case I see someone standing outside the gate, I will put aside every thought and call out to whoever my eyes can espy down there. I am dying to tell someone everything that I have encountered every third Sunday, month after month. Tears brim in my eyes before I can try to look down. They are somewhat clouded, but I see through the vagueness and see an empty street beside the lamps that stand on top of the two pillars that flank the gate in grey grill. The cerise of the walls instigates me further though pulverizes me all the same. There is a sneeze inside the washroom. Maybe, he has caught cold. This does matter. Without knowing how exactly, I make a mental note of that. It is as if everything, tiny and colossal, may count. I turn away from the window without fastening it. I can’t tell if I leave it open intentionally nor can I think that I do it without much thought put into it. Either way, I cannot reason why. Moving around, I catch my reflection on the mirror that my mother got for me three years back. It was larger than the one she had in her room. The image almost transfixes me now. I don’t stare for too long. I have done that mistake many times before. It’s not him who will have my hand; it’s her in the mirror. It’s not him I will exert my pressure on tonight, and asphyxiate until I have sought every ounce of breath that he sucked out of my lungs whilst filling them up with vigorous terror in all those nights; she is the one I must kill. Oh I must kill her tonight. It is as less about his departure from my life henceforth as it is much about her demise at my hand. And she has to die at my hand. It’s time I do my leave-taking. I don’t want to know her anymore. We must separate. I stitched her body with mine until the line of demarcation on both our skin was seamless. But tonight, I conjecture it is time I undo the reef knot that has tied us both together. I must cut her out of me because I have tried a million times and sought ways through hell and heaven to forget her, but this my cruel fate, I have always failed. And given it demands me to jeopardize my life tonight, I am willing to stand on the ledge – all alone. I hear my uncle close all the faucets one by one. He squishes around a little on the bathroom floor. In the meantime, my steps quicken towards the pane of the glass that holds my reflection still. My image grows in size as I pace with my feet ahead. It is no more than a doddle for my hands to ascertain the rapier in the second shelf of the drawers of the table. I grab it inside the fist of my right hand and look up at my reflection for one last time. I will never look at her again; I will never look like her again. I will be sinister tonight. I am ready to be anything worse to set her free. I must kill her within me so she can have the body she should be in and be inside it without having to have my skeleton as the walls for her spirit. She will die to be set free at last. I will set her free, at last.

I stretch my legs a little wider. The linen feels soft under me. My nightie ends right above my ankles, leaving thus, parts of the skin of my legs bare. I pull some ruche of the negligee upwards, uncovering a little more of my legs to splash them across the white linen on the bed. I strew from the left edge of the bed to the side that will soon be his. I like the fabric tonight. My mother must have taken care of the laundry the previous day. I wish to thank her, and so I thank her in a whisper. I may never see her again. I am still clueless about how I will do it. All I told myself in the throes of the days whilst I was spending all my hours merely thinking if I was right to decide on it this way was that I wanted to end this. I don’t desire to witness another Sunday, any Sunday with a horrified heart. I never wanted this, and have never prayed for this hell on Earth. So having received it as my just deserts perhaps, I only get to smile at the power of my cruel fate for making me see what I did not expect to see at any corner of the world, not in this life of mine, never in my own room. But it turns out whatever I had dreamt of was some white vanilla of fallible fantasy for it melted too easily under the sun. This can also happen, you see. All the possibilities of his victory and the probabilities of my failure are both difficult for me to take in right now. It will be either me or him to see the sun rise tomorrow through the window that abuts this bed I am lying on, with my ribbon tied in two half-hitches. I enjoy the aimless motion of my legs here and there and all over the bed because I have so often confined them within the mild lines of demarcation on the bed even when he was not there sleeping next to me. You see, he would come, have his pleasure and render his position aloof until next time. But it was only his side of the spectacle, only how he could see that side of my bed if he ever wanted to; my eyes never found his side of the bed empty. He would join me every third Sunday, but I would have him every night. If I got through tonight and I am the one who wakes up, having the entire bed to myself with the same feeling I had when I jumped on it and slept with my head on the bunnies in lieu of the bolster for the first time in the eighth year of my life, the victory will be mine. The ability I will have finally earned for myself to call the room mine and actually mean it and be aware of how true, how badly true it will be, will be my victory. I will pull the red ribbons down to the lower ends of the walls back to their places I conferred them the day I called this compartment mine for the first time from where he has hurled them now, and have the décor of the room congenial to me, if not exactly the same as it was formerly embellished with. Back then I was still a child growing up while falling on the floor of it time to time. I will know that this is my room. Yes I will know it and that will be my victory and it will be enough for I am dying to find some space in this room which I can call as only mine, a space I won’t be scared in, be it open or closed, where I don’t have to allow anyone in if I won’t want to. Yes, surely it will be. It will be just enough.

His feet have no slippers on. He has left them on the doily, those wet slippers. I smell the citronella and the fragrance helps me pinpoint him even if I am not facing the edge he will occupy in a few moments. He is walking to the bed now, getting closer and closer.The smell is nice but strong in tandem. It is not nearing me. He is not coming towards the bed. I preconceive in the spur of the fright that is now starting to grow inside my core that he is rambling around the room. Maybe he is just checking out the space. But why? Has he known anything? Can he sense any nuance in the ambience? Oh Lord. Can he? I enhance the force on the grip I hold the knife with. I smear out the upper lining of my right thumb in doing so. The smell has pervaded in the room now. I think I have lost track of him. I wonder where he must be right now, at which corner exactly. Did he see me from the bathroom? What will he do if he has found out? Has he found out already? Has he, and everything? Have I already been defeated, before having my fight? I press my eyes inwards and squirt a modicum of tears out of my left eye which run down the edge of my forehead in a curlicue, wetting the tapering ends of my right eye brow. I am not scared, but disappointed. Unlike everything that might have been my victory, this chagrin is my defeat. I feel the weakness taking control of me. I feel the fear grow inside me again, and it’s conjuring itself into a monster, a hideous one. He won’t spare me tonight, not at all. He will exert the greatest of the forces he is capable of bringing out of the man he is, be at his most rigorous and shake me to death afterwards. This conceptualization makes my body shake by my torso. My legs are quivering as to shake the entire bed. I am so lonely in this room again, but lonelier on this bed. Every part of my body shudders more and more now – my arms, my hands, my legs, my knees, my waist, my hips, my head. I feel the grip of my fingers slacken on the rapier. I can barely find any strength to put into my fingers amidst the violent fear that is taking room inside me now. It’s sad for me to know that a combat will be absolutely unnecessary for it will be a cinch for him to snatch the dagger away from me. Damn it! Will I not even put up a fight? Will I die just as I have lived my entire life under his machismo, being just a coward? My knees judder, almost inflicting themselves with a pain of gout. I care too little about how I am mussing the linen of the bed. I am messing it up now. I cower on the bed, taking my legs closer to my chest while still safely hiding the knife under my pillow, but I am not holding it anymore. I have let go of it. My tears are a dirge of lament for myself. How pathetic! What a pity! I ought to be laughed at by anyone who has failed a million times because I have failed without trying for once. It is so easy to let go, so easy to relinquish. I have never found anything this easy to do in my whole life hitherto – Just leave everything and go to sleep. My back has gooseflesh pimples all over my rear, hair standing high on the skin like the thistles of a taut tightrope. I shiver and shiver, my chest inflating and deflating alternately as it gets harder for me to quell my shrieks of terror inside it. Right then, his hand on my waist renders me all cold in a shake of a second. Following the mayhem of emotions rising out of disappointment and self deprecation, the fumes burning me in fright, nightmares cramming my head whilst I had my eyes wide open and then pressed at the utmost of my strength that I should have rather instilled into my hands and helped myself to hold tight to the rapier regardless of the apparent loss of the battle, I am suddenly very cold and still. Every motion has ceased in me. It seems to me like his touch froze me and didn’t take as long as a blink of my eye does all the time. It was so quick. He was too quick to shut me down just like that. I am ironically astonished by the power he must have over me. God! I would kill him to know it a little better. He lowers his hand slowly. It is his left hand. I can tell. He employs his right one only now. His right hand slides deeper below and even deeper until it reaches the linen of the bed from where he pushes it across my torso and grabs my breast. I allow him. His left hand, on the other part of the job, slides away from my upper body and below my pelvis. That is the farthest he takes it to because in his words, he has whispered in my ears twenty one times –“I do not like to play with you”. I know his every move. I have had enough time to study them really carefully. I have known the nitty-gritty by heart. I can tell his next move. He now directs his left hand to move upfront my pelvis until he is there where he always desires to leave the grisly marks of his fingers on my body. He doesn’t have his wedding ring on. But unlike his general execution of the actions, he does play with me today. Is it my chance to do it? Shall I do it? Or is he only mocking at my frail confidence that vanished the moment he stepped into my room out of my bathroom? He pushes his right hand even harder towards my ventral front and squeezes my nipples until I can’t help, but press my teeth into their jaws, all of them just helping each other out from the opposite edges inside my mouth. His left hand leaves my lower body and makes its way straight away towards my head. He parts his fingers and combs my hair with them. “Do you like it?”, he whispers into my ear, enhancing his pressure on my nipples. I don’t respond, and pretend to be asleep. “Atom…”, he takes my name softly, his fingers caressing my scalp. “What! Have you slept already? You cannot. We haven’t yet had all the fun.”, he continues to utter, the warmth of his breath papable on my nape. On the next move, his actions swerve from the orthodox route that I have known about all of his touches all this time. I am unfamiliar to what he does, how and where he moves his hands now. I feel subjugated when he uses his left leg to split both of my legs apart. His right knee comes to touch my hip. The fear clasps my heart, but I am happy because so does the fury. I think I am warming up. The feeling on my nape feels little to not different whatsoever. It has seeped deep within my veins. I think I am angry now. His right hand now lands on my stomach and further plays with my navel. He tries pushing his index finger into it, compelling me to scream. “Don’t”, I finally submit. “There you are my pretty little Atom. How come you fell asleep? Anyway, won’t you entertain me now? Show me the flames. I am an old man also cold tonight. Your shower had a cold bath for me in store. Warm me up with some fire.”, he says, pulling me closer by his right elbow while his index finger presses deeper into my navel. I scream louder, and he uses the shot to take his index finger out of my navel and put it into my mouth. I throw it out right away. “You are in a mood tonight, aren’t you? Why, won’t you be my sweet girl?”, he enquires and with his left hand, pulls the chignon of my hair that I didn’t undo before bed. I scream again and so does he do the same as well. “Suck it, you temptress! And give me what I want! Do you understand?”, I hear him say, his right knee kicking in between my legs now. I bite it as to make it bleed. He withdraws his hands from my mouth and hair and then uses them to untie the two half hitches of my negligee. He kicks me at my spine with his left leg as he undoes the knots. I look outside the window and the shimmer on the black of the road takes me to a time when I barely knew something so grotesque like this. The bed shakes heavily under both our weights. He may as well break it into two or more pieces. It has borne with me for long enough – this bed from my mother. I won’t be mad if it splits. It doesn’t merit this shit on itself. But as I allow myself to feel everything with closed eyes, I can only feel it shake more and more. I have always been terribly scared of earthquakes, and it reminds me of one tonight.

It has never shaken this way before; it’s reasonable though – he has also never played with me any time before. I look outside as he continues to kick the heck out of me. I bleed from my rear end whilst my eyes get hooked to the shimmer of the gate of the mansion. Standing at a distance of some feet away, it seems like the most seductive will-o’-the-wisp to me, but raping me is him. I ponder over that hour at the zoo when I and my mother saw two giraffes at the Hillside Palalti at the end of the fifth block past the Billnash Avenue. It is not more than two hours away from here. We rented a cab that morning and the journey was abridged even more. We made it there within an hour. The giraffes were named as Laxmi and Jinly. The former one was from India and the latter from Australia. I remember it well, not because I was captivated by their necks that seemed to touch the sky, but because I held my mother’s hands without any hesitation. It was so easy back then. I don’t know where it all went wrong, or what. I held her hand, twisted it in the direction I wanted to run towards and she let me. In fact, she also ran with me. I remember how incessantly she was panting around the Jocky Turn of the zoo, but didn’t complain. She apparently liked to run in the company of her daughter. I stretch my legs a little further on the bed so it touches the farther end of the iron frame. They touch the rods and feel how cold they are with the breeze allowed inside the room from the window that I left open for the night. I want to close the windows, yet cannot move. I am petrified by what is on my mind. But I prefer keeping the plan in there. I know tonight is the only night. I have to do it. To allay myself by a tad, I allow myself to delve deeper into the labyrinth of the times when every admission would find its way out of my mouth at the tiniest trouble. It was so much easier to tell her about anything and everything. We don’t converse the same way anymore. We have grown apart ever since she married my step father. Something clicked off the moment I realized that she was ready to move on, leaving the past that was meant to be erased. Surely, I should have given her the chance to tell me the entire verity, divulge the complete truth about all that followed her second marriage. I know she would have convinced me. She is my mother. It is not an event for my universe to shelter, by whose happening I and my mother have stayed apart for two years now. So much can happen in two years. So much has happened in these two years. I wish I could run to her, crawl on her bed and rummage some room in her embrace, tell her everything, show her every inch of my skin where he has touched me so many times, tell her why I wouldn’t sit down with her to pray every fourth Monday morning in the temple because I had bled the night before, and let her smear her ointment on my scars because so far that I have tried to find some medicine, I have always found my way back to an arrant nothingness. I want to tell her that she is the only one who can help me heal by accepting me with all the sins. I don’t know how to bury them somewhere. They just don’t leave me alone. I wish I could cry without any dubiety clouding my mind and telling me that I may be wrong to think that she will believe me. Maybe she will. Maybe, I will be right about doing it, one thing in my life for I will happily admit the rest as my fault then. What if she doesn’t? What if she spurns it as some well fabricated lie? Oh God! Why will I lie? Damn it! How can she even envision that I will lie about my humiliation when I have been harried time and again by my own uncle? She trusts him. She will let her conviction for his gentleness supersede her trust in me. These questions don’t cease. One follows another, each one complicating the next one the more as I heed to the queries that proceed to occupy my mind until no corner is left unused. It is then that I want to scream “SHUT UP! AHHHH!!! JUST SHUT UP! I cannot take this anymore. I am not sure. What should I do mom? Will you hear me out? I have so much to tell you. I promise I will end it with my love for you. After all that I have said, will you still trust me if I tell you that some part of my love for you is yet to be erased? I want you to know it because they are remnants and are starting to fade away. I want you to know that before I lose everything in me for you.” I want to scream. My voice builds inside. I can see my chest inflate under the voile of my gown. I am scared as hell and mad beyond it. Lying there with the right line of my body compelled to bear the whole weight of me, I tighten my left fist and put it inside my mouth. I want to scream but all I do is bite my fist. I bite it harder and sink my bare teeth on the knuckles as hard as I can until my gums ache. My tongue tastes something. It is the blood of my gums from that hand. I have made myself bleed again. I have known the continuum by heart now. Two years have been enough time for me to study every movement of his body on me as he would molest me on the nights of every third Sunday. He goes – left hand on the upper half of my left forelimb, sliding down to my nape, then caressing my back along the spine, there he would bring his right one to use. He would utilize it with no delay, pressing it under my breasts straight away as I would still face the other side, too terrified to face him. I will see the devil in his eyes. Will he show mercy if I tell him my age? Will he slacken his grip on my torso and stop pushing his left palm under my gown if I reminded him that I was only twelve in age? I may as well be as old as his daughter is. Can I take the name of his daughter? Or will hit me harder then, to hear these home truths about himself? Or shall I try telling him that I am the daughter of his own sister? Will he stop then, or is it just another one of my fallible fantasies pestering me with a false promise? At the farthest, I can tell him to stop. I have. I swear I have, a million times more in my head than on his face. I have told him not to for times I have lost count of, and so has he turned a deaf ear an equal number of times right on my fearful face, only intensifying the terror in me each time and raping me twice every night I would dare to tell him not to. He never stopped. He won’t stop. I tighten my right fist now and do the same with it. I am bleeding inside my mouth, but that won’t stop him from thwacking my face with his palm. My cheeks have known the skin of his palm as has my legs known his fingers. I weep like a child, and am cowardly to do so. My own chagrin poisons me in my blood. I can feel the warmth in my ears. I cannot see them, but they must be ten seconds away from changing the hue from red to blue. They too will soon become oblivious of what they now feel. I have let this happen to me all the time – finding a feeling, burning with it in infernal hellfire and then letting the flames extinguish in me. I cry like a child, but there’s comfort in it. You see, I crave for the time when I was seven, a first grade kid who would be excited to reach home on every Saturday because her mother would be home early. The family would thus, get an hour or two more to spend together. I want to be her, my seven-year-old self. I want to trace my footsteps backwards and etching the temporal hour I met uncle Fred in, I want to walk backwards until I find my mother’s lap. But I realize how exactly that isn’t possible, until Science has done it – they would aid me find my ultimate path for I will then be able to undo all my sins, rub every dirt of his skin from mine, and go forgetting everything good and bad one by one in a drift of memories that must slide past me if I wish to keep travelling on twisted legs until I have hit my own existence. I will leave my mother at rest. She will never have to have me. I will never have to see the night when I was molested for the first time, and yet, was stupid enough to not know what his fingers inside me should have sought my consent prior to pushing their ways into my body almost everywhere. I will never have to see the nights of my abuse that followed when he ripped my soul again and again, making the absence of light in my room the viscous black of that night when he did it for the first time on the same bed I now sleep on with him, to be molested for the eighteenth time. I will only have to bleed like a child, not as a girl, never as a woman. I will scrape my knees on the dry soil of the Palhish’s Playground every day, then break my wrist against the iron rim of the bed under his force on me. I cry. I cannot keep quiet, although a part of me is somehow willing to. I can let the same scenario unfold tonight, and wait for the third Sunday of next month when he will sneak into my room again after everyone will have fallen fast asleep to smear me again with the same mud, and so on. And so on. AND SO ON! My mother’s face crosses my mind again. Gathering all the dregs of my hope, I whisper to myself again this time, “Mom, what will you do if I tell you that someone from this family has made me a whore in my own house? Will I hurt you too much if I tell you that I am no longer your Vestal Virgin, your virtuous young lady? What will you say if I tell you that I allowed him the first time because I barely knew what he was doing to me? Will you believe me, or will you push the entirety of the blame on me? I am sorry to ask you as such, but you have learnt to see me with red eyes of suspicion so well that taking just one step out of this room is taking the hell out of me. Will you see me as victim or as your daughter? Which one? Am I just another victim of something I cannot speak about because it is so deeply connected to the stature of my family? But you see mom, I have stitched my mouth for long enough. I am bleeding through the yarns now. Will you push me away for must I tell you how filthy I am now, or will you still dare to hold my hand? Will you still love me despite the cognizance of the disgust in you for me which may burn every part of your body alive whenever you will see the redness, the rashes, the scratches of both of our nails, the bruises and the marks of his wedding ring on my skin almost everywhere and so visibly? And will you push past all revulsion, all deprecation, all disfavor when you will come to discover with time that there is a lot more scars that I will never show you, a lot more of them that I will always hide?”

He undoes the knots and rips them from the centre of the back of my nightie. He is a beast now. “Why, won’t you give it to me tonight? I demand it! GIVE IT TO ME!”, He shouts into my ears, both his hands scratching my belly inside my negligee. I don’t move at all and he kicks my spine twice more. Before I know his next move, his left hand glides underneath the lower half of my lingerie while he sinks in the nails of his right hand on my stomach and does so until he reaches my breasts again. He takes me in his clasp and judders the whole of me once like a box of different colored gem stones he devours the sound of. “What the heck is it with you virago, you slut! Look at me. I said look at me!”, so he shrieks and mauls the skin above my ribs with his nails five times.

I am bleeding everywhere. “Blindness. Utter blindness must smudge your eyes for you don’t see it. Oh, you don’t uncle Fred. It overwhelms me so completely that I am petrified, crippled, exasperated and beaten time and again at my core. This hellfire – God! How infernal it is! – gets the better half of me as to become the whole of me in the process. This protest that you don’t even hear in a whisper is a clamor of pandemonium that I am terrorized by day and night. What you do on every third Sunday on this bed with me repeats itself every night in my head as a nightmare. When the hell will I be set free? HAH! YOU RUFFIAN! YOU Voracious monster! I hear the sound of rebellion deep inside and you won’t trust me if I tell you that I am deafened by it. You burn me inside out but I am only the more agitated. Oh God!”, I quell my sobs and continue, “You f*** me from the back and then f*** off. Do you see how I burn? The flames have always been there on my visage, only if you cared to notice. But devils don’t give a damn, do they? I burn in agony until my madness stains my bloody face crimson, mauve, turquoise, all making a spectrum of indigo yet, a distorted rainbow it appears to me with all the stain of my blood on my cheeks. I am red cold, untouched, so damn uninterested, and tasteless to the hilt. You give more to me and shudder me as the whole of you shakes with my body as well. Alas! I’m still way too far from listening to whatever your dirty mouth spills out. I can only spit on your face. I cannot care less about the shit you ask from me. I don’t give a shit anymore! Do you hear me? Hear me for you’ll never come back here; I will never have you here. I barely attend to your bloody directions. Your offer fails to seek my notice. Here, take my pity! I pity on your cold machismo, you horrendous rapist! You ought to hover in limbo and may my Lord slay me tonight if I be wrong to claim that the devil won’t give you a hand. You will dwell alone there. Whatever the hell the walls of your heart will be fortified within will pour out as nothing more than blood that will stink the worst! And until then, you will have me entirely bereft of motion, like a dead cadaver in a coffin because you have failed me. You cannot yet move me. I will lie still for you to do it. But the devil must be seen once. You want me to look at you, don’t you? You just asked. You won’t be more regretful in your whole life for asking this from you. I have been obedient so far. To do hell with all my politeness and submission you butcher! Here, I bow to my ordeal and your disgusting demand for one more time for I call it my last. DID YOU HEAR ME? I.CALL. IT. MY.LAST! Oh, you’ve incurred it on your own. You see, this is your demand. Hence, as you wish, for the last.”, I utter and turn around to see him for the last time. My negligee is bloody again, but the room is mine for the next third Sunday, and the fourth Sunday and beyond it. The weight of his body is on mine. God! He is heavy, heavier than ever, and will be even more so as these seconds of this last nightly hour that remains will pass me by, but I am the lightest on Earth.