Chapter 9: Hostage
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A cascade of incoherent visions culminated in a warm and wondrous atmosphere. A wooden table with three places. A laugh. A stove. Bread. Her dream presented her with the perfect remedy for grief: give back what was lost. Then Turan’s body betrayed her. Violently pulling the antidote from her lips and forcing her eyelids open, just as it had the night before, to leave her wide awake in the dark hours of the morning with nothing, absolutely nothing to do but contemplate her loss.
Turan stared into the darkness of the canopy above her with all the alertness of someone doused with cold water. Alert, but with no wetness to ground her in reality. All that was real seemed alien to her. She could not recognize her life without him in it.
Big man couldn't back down. Like so many insomniacs she tried the obvious and ineffectual strategy of closing her eyes, hoping her body would deliver her back into that dreamlife. She only achieved sleep through exhaustion now. None but that creep at the foot of her bed attended her. There were no more drugs to numb her out.
If she stayed awake long enough, her mind would submit to sleep and dreams, but only so much sleep as her body needed to awake her like this and remind her of the work she had to do. That work was written on the inside of Turan’s eyelids. With her eyes closed she visualised it all again.
They killed him in the street.
She could think the thought now, what he’d had told her she knew to be true. However, at other times she didn’t. She just couldn’t bring herself to accept the knowledge. Turan clung to the desperate hubris that she could figure out a way around the reality of death.
True and misleading.
Her husband was not merely dead. They had killed him. Random fucking nobodies, some would-be, or has-been gang. She saw the one gode him. Big man, what have you done now? His face was demented like a rabid dog. They walked, she and him, and he was sitting there on the table in the fork. Not for my honour. He just dug his hands into his stew, and flung it...flicked it? She could not find the right word to describe the contempt with which that pinch-face grinning arsecunt had thrown brown clumps of his meal onto her husband’s chest.
He’s picking a fight dickhead. That’s what he wants.
All the things he could have done differently. All so simple. Just keep walking, ignore him, maybe scoop it up and taste it. A free snack. A living husband.
Or even just pause to ask ‘why?’
Why did that rabid dog do this thing? A pause and he could have looked around, seen clearly what Turan was only beginning to see. A triangular snare closing in on him. Instead he moved and so did the stew tosser. Her husband to him, him to his feet.
See you big dick, your big fucking dick, see how he smiles even harder now that you’ve thrown his table aside.
He likes it, he likes that you lost control. Succumbed to your rage, to your honour. The smashing crockery, the stew mixing with dust and mud and filth. The real dogs, the actual dogs, moving in on it. Here’s where I could have done something.
Something other than going into shock. Turan was speechless. No sleep or dream was coming, just the onslaught of the same vision, inspiring the same actions that she couldn’t take, that he couldn’t take, because the vision only went one way.
She opened her eyes again and contemplated the terror of just waiting until the sun rose. Until she felt she could get up and out of bed and...what?
With her eyes open she could look at the well worn canopy of the four-poster bed. Her thoughts kept coming as if she hadn’t opened her eyes though. I could have called his name. Turned him around. Instead she’d watched dumbly as her husband tried to grab at the arsehole who’d insulted him. He thought he was going to kill him. Kill him over a spot of stew.
He was getting killed though. The others. The other two just closed in.
He was like this. So afraid.
Shadowy mutts, street dogs, curs. All three of them. She knew them. She had grown up in the streets that raised them. Show your face to them, they're harmless. Show your back to them, their balls fill with their manly juices. They get so brave then, when you aren’t looking at them.
The one who flung the stew was harmless, the next one was the first to just push his blade in. She watched him in horror, doing it. She watched him again. And again. One thrust, one stab. Just buried it in his back.
But how many times must I watch him do it?
Then the other knife. Two. Two knives buried in his back. He was just a man. Just a man in a long line of men and women. That’s all they’d done, and that’s all they’d ever do. They brought about a son. They would raise him, and any others that came along, and they too would go on living.
Now there were two knives in him though.
He was so afraid. So afraid of humiliation.
Turan just stood there, watching again and again as he uselessly, impotently tried to grab at the knives in him. Twisting this way and that. Why am I so useless? Why was she so useless? Why did she just stand there and watch? The first knife went in… that had shocked her. She wasn’t expecting that. How did the two get so close to him? He’d been walking right beside her.
She felt her eyes darting across the room, almost desperately trying to track the moment the knives went in. But she was just staring at an old and faded canopy above her bed.
The first one shocked me. It told Turan she didn’t know what was going on. Her husband’s anger. His fear of humiliation. His need to wrest back a sense of control. That was all familiar. Turan knew it all too well. It was when the first knife was pushed into him, into his back below the ribs. Since then she did not know what world she lived in, she didn’t recognize nor understand a thing.
She didn’t speak, or scream, or move, because she didn’t know what was happening.
The second knife… The second knife had killed her. Killed her because it killed him. She went dead inside. The second knife went in before her husband realised he had the first knife in him, not so for Turan. She could see a partial eclipse of the confusion on his face. He just looked sick and wet. The second knife went in the upper left of his back. Flat, between his ribs. When that happened she realised that what was bad was now worse.
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