Acquiescence

In a voice soft as a lullaby, sung by a mother tip-toeing  from the pastel-painted room wherein, spread-eagled, lay her sleeping babe, tiny fingers folded and sucking blister still anointed with a gleaming drop of bluish milk, he said, ‘You will.’

I too spread-eagled, but not from choice: wrists and ankles tethered with coarse strips of chemical-impregnated sacking which irritated my already-chafed-to-rawness tender skin.

My voice just as muted. My screams had been silenced with breath-taking brutality, as evidenced from the grape-sized bruises to my throat, if not my now fear-flaccid lungs.

And because I knew I had no choice.

Takes two to tango

Garlic breath and vindaloo-derived stomach-gurgles undoubtedly a counter-indicator to a night of passion, even had I believed his claim of a magnificence of other attributes. (Such claims, from experience, I had learnt to divide by two or even three to come somewhere near the truth.)  

Yet his conversation was stimulating, his sense of humour (from whence derived his self-promotion) on a par with mine. So we had reached the door of my apartment before I finally decided ‘No’. Whereupon he proved himself much the faster at bundling fake civility out of sight. To reveal a knife more magnificent than mine.

Pause for thought

The apricot horizon – a peeping edge of silk beneath a sky the colour of a two-day bruise, evidence of a punch dealt by a man who swore he loved you – put me in mind of a petticoat, worn beneath a frayed and mud-thrawn skirt ferreted from a bin  by a long-unwashed bag lady.

Perhaps a souvenir from a past life of material luxury whose constraints – parental inquisitions – she found unbearable.

Wishful thinking? That the high can fall as far as I who, almost, had to climb to reach even here? Whatever, the edge  – The End – was where I headed now.