Ides from a Third Sunday (Part B) )(Alpha) 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 a 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. His 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.

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