We Will Not Be Taken Alive (part II)

I rose before the sun had time to promise his curse. Echoing from my sleep her sobs rang out, a spectral siren. Daily now, I awoke from the phantoms of her moans, or the shadow of her blood crawling across the linens. I rubbed her twisted expression from my eyes as I set the water to boil on the stove.

The stillness in the house was dreadful. In its overwhelming emptiness the screaming silence beckoned the imagination to draw upon it the most ghastly creations of manifest horror. Like a spurned sorceress, the darkness satiated on my misery. It consumed my grief in gnashing teeth and with slurping satisfaction. It gnawed at all things. My fear being only an taste, it licked the flames on the stove and sneered. It rolled into the pantry and swelled. With silence the silence grew, and as it lapped at my feet they too fell quiet. It dined on the very dust and air until I was choked.

As it swallowed it surroundings it so mutated everything within its reach that the very room was transformed into a pathetic reflection of its own hollowness. With building pressure the void pushed in all directions. It weighed upon my shoulders and squeezed my skull. It pressed against the walls and the floor and the ceiling until it shattered them to nothing with its breath. I released the grip I had on the table ready to be swept off on an empty wind. I was ready to be sucked up into the blackness, or to be erased, or dried up and disintegrated like the wheat in the field.

The kettle's steam whistle cut through my skin and my blood and my bones. It shattered the crystalline sarcophagus into the sharpest though most invisible splinters. I opened my eyes to the relief that the house still stood around me on all sides. And from the window I saw the first purple hues in the distance indicating the impending day. That fainest light calmed my disturbed nerves. I poured the water into the coffee grounds. Holding my face into the steam, I soaked in the moisture. I soaked in the quiet. The predator now dismissed, banished with the kettle bell, there was a serene calm to it. And then, in a flash I smelled her. The lavender she kept in a sachet in the wardrobe passed through me and was gone. I began sniffing like an old hound, all around me, searching for a scent of that scent. All I found was coffee, but in my heart I saw her smile. I felt it, the way she smiled when I was young, when there was wheat and corn and vegetables in the garden. She looked happy.

I set my mind to my day's work. There was great work to be done and to be done soon, and though these few gruesome moments were all I truly owned, all I truly felt, they were spent, and I had little choice but to start moving.