Broken Glass
She sat staring into the broken eyes of her mother at the kitchen table as she listened to a lone dog barking farther out into the cold night. It was always the same animal and always, it sounded like it had been fatally wounded. The dog served as an oracle at times, foreshadowing a nightmare that mother and daughter both dreaded. An oracle that punctured their silent mealtimes together, bidding them to prepare themselves.
The girl’s mother looked outdone, exhausted. She chewed the plain rice but slowly as though not intending to break the always-conformed-to silence between her and her daughter. On her frail body was an old fading jacket with scattered holes on it, tattered at the sleeves like a rat had gnawed them. Her face was a drowned corpse, drained of life and color, eyes black from pain and insomnia.
The girl wanted so badly to ask her mother if it hurt. If this time it hurt more than the last time. Because last time it had been the wrist, it had hurt so much that she hadn’t washed the dishes as thoroughly as she used to, which had unfortunately led to more pain. The girl remembered her mother dropping a plate by mistake when she had reached her limit. The girl, barely seven years old now, looked searchingly into her mother’s eyes. When her mother made contact the girl guiltily looked down into her own plate.
‘Eat, love,’ her mother urged her in her ghostly voice.
She picked up her spoon in a manner that implied the difficulty and weight of the task given her. She stuffed half a spoonful of the rice into her mouth. It tasted like metal. Several spoons in and she heard the door handle shake and twist. Her mother’s eyes flared like car lights in a foggy night. She leapt to her feet and like every night like this one, her daughter saw her run around the kitchen like a frightened mouse. Amidst the shaking and twisting of the door handle she stopped at the center of the kitchen.
‘What are you still doing there?!’ she yelled at her daughter. ‘To your room, under the bed! Now!’ she swung her arm behind her.
The order thrust the girl fully awake. She dropped from the chair onto her feet and in her flowered pajamas scurried soundlessly out of the kitchen, turned left into her tiny bedroom and slid under the bed. She used to crawl, but she had become so experienced at the routine that such maneuvers had become easy for her. Even from under the bed she could still hear the door handle, her eyes wide open, glossy and her teeth against each other. She waited for the next part of the night.
She heard the long eerie creak of the wooden door being opened, then the short silence that followed after. At this point she could hear her heart in her ears, her mouth opened as she breathed. Her eyes grew moister. She waited for the silence to succumb to the next part; the two muffled voices. One of the voices was light, a low tone, obviously her mother’s and the other deep, gruff and at some points of the incoherent conversation, inconsistent. The muffled voices transformed into mumbles, groans then the back and forth squabbles, the volume getting higher and higher at each transformation.
There was a curt silence. The girl waited, silently, in the painful stillness. It was too unnerving, the silence. She hoped for a sound, any word to break it because she knew that after the squabble came something even harder to listen through. But her hopes were unrewarded. She finally heard it. A piece of furniture moved, by the sound of it probably a chair. There came the boom-boom…bang-bang! The furniture was taking the worst of it. A cup fell, or most probably flew and crashed, the sound of the scattering pieces filling the house like coins flung onto the floor.
The girl covered her mouth when the tears started to stream down her face. She was crying, loudly, but the rule was; she had to be quiet no matter what. “No matter what,” her mother had repeatedly told her after the first night. But for the little girl on her belly under her bed almost every night, staying quiet was becoming something she could not get used to because each night got darker and colder than the last and the longer she stayed under the bed, the louder and more painful the sounds got. And so she decided to do something she had never done before. She wanted to see. She decided, reluctantly, to break the very rule her mother had firmly told her to obey.
She slowly crawled from under the bed and walked to her door. She peeked along the short passageway in the direction of the kitchen. The sounds were much closer from here. She stepped in the middle of the passageway, stood there for seconds enduring the booms and the bangs. One foot in front of the other, she began to walk towards the kitchen. With each step the grunts and groans and the fight for breath came closer to her like an oncoming train. She suddenly heard something that jolted her heart into a fury of pulses. It was a novel sound. The sound of whimpering and coughing, then more whimpering. It was almost familiar to the dog that cried on such nights as these. Those cries in the kitchen stung the little girl’s skin in the most unusual of ways.
When she got to the entrance of the kitchen her legs fought her mind on whether she should walk through or not because she knew she was not prepared to see what awaited her in that room. Her legs won the battle however and she walked right in. “Never!” her mother’s words rebuked her inside her head. “Do you hear me?! It doesn’t matter how loud it gets, you stay under that bed, do you understand?!”
The girl had always hesitated.
“I said do you understand?!”
She would give a nod, and so walking into the kitchen she knew how serious the rule she was breaking was. But she was only seven years old and for someone her age, curiosity was partly to blame for breaking that one commandment. The noises, the booms and bangs, the breaking cups, the cries and her mother’s wounds and bruises the next morning; she was now determined to see for herself.
The chairs and pieces of them were scattered all over the place, the table down on one of its sides. Pieces of glass and enamel littered the black-and-white checkered floor like severed flower petals. She only had to walk a little further into the room before she satisfied her curiosity. Her mouth partly open in surprise, her small black pupils dilated. Her body shook in fear, her heart quickening.
He was on top of her, just behind the fallen table with his fist in the air, catapult ready and balled into a tight fist. His unkempt hair made him look more terrifying, a long-sleeved formal shirt on his body, necktie rebelliously askew on his throat. That same painful silence came back. The girl had brought it back. Her father was the first to look at her, eyes hot with blinding rage, foaming at the mouth like a Komodo dragon, two of the knuckles on his raised fist painted red. He was breathing fire, like he intended to burn the victim underneath him.
The girl’s mother looked up hopelessly, mouthing jumbled words. For an instant she turned her face to look at her daughter. One of her eyes was closed now, a large part of her upper lip torn to look like she had a cleft lip, face wet as water itself from the tears. She mumbled a few words to her daughter then said, “Your room….go…back to your room.”
The girl, still shell-shocked, turned around and ran…
