Chapter 1
I do not remember when I began to rot. I was never hit by a car or struck by lightning — no, nothing so clean. It was slower. Like paper yellowing in a drawer no one opens anymore.
I am sixteen. A cursed age — old enough to see clearly, but too young to run.
16 Rue des Lilas, a house already ruined long before its foundations ever cracked. Silence rots inside it, shouting festers, and what remains unspoken presses heavier than stone. That it continues to stand feels obscene. The walls ought to have confessed everything by now.
I tell myself, every day, like a condemned woman tracing the edge of her own sentence: "Hold on. Just hold on. At eighteen, you will be free. Just two more years. Two."
But time doesn't pass normally in this house. No. It drips, like water from a cracked ceiling, mocking you with how slowly it falls.
And tonight — of course — it begins. The ritual.
CRASH
A plate shatters downstairs. The house exhales what it has been holding.
I go down. I always go down. What else is there to do?
There she is — my mother — holding her cheek like she’s trying to press the swelling back into her skull. Her eyes are empty, blank, dead. And there he is — my father — wobbling in front of the television, muttering curses not even the devil could translate. He’s lost in his drink again, like he always is.
Every scene plays out like theatre we’re all forced to attend. Same actors. Same lines. Different night.
My father was supposed to be something. A footballer — talented beyond belief, they said. He could’ve had a future. But no, his parents — those wise, cold bastards — said no. Said football wasn’t a career. Said he should get a real job.
So he did. He got a job. A tie. An office.
And then one day he got the call: his younger brother had been signed as a professional archer.
That was it. That was the moment.
He unraveled like a suit coming apart at the seams. And all that was left of the man was a shell filled with cheap liquor and old sports commentary.
Now he sits in the same armchair every day, yelling at a television that doesn’t even care he’s watching. Selling off his memories one by one just to afford more to drink
My mother — if she ever had a dream, she buried it. She married him and that was the end of her story. She gave birth to me and never let me forget what a catastrophe that was.
I’ve heard her say it. Whisper it. Spit it like venom. "I wish I never had her. She ruined everything."
Do you know what it does to a child to hear that? And worse — to believe it?
But I never cried. Oh no — not for that. What’s the point in crying when no one listens?
So I stopped hoping. I stopped asking. And I started counting.
Two more years. Two more years and I walk out of this place and never look back. That is — if I survive that long.
This house doesn’t bleed, it devours. And I am slowly, silently, being digested.
