NAMENLOS ( Englisch )

MADDY

I counted the bruises on my arm as I waited for the creak of the front door.

Seven new ones since last week. Three of them were fresh—deep violet, almost black, with a yellowish edge that told me they were about two days old. I knew the colors of pain better now than the colors of the sky. Lavender was the color of an old injury, three weeks ago. Yellow meant it was almost healed. Violet meant it still hurt when I touched it. Black meant he must have really hated me.

Nic had shoved me against the edge of the bathroom cabinet the evening before last. I remembered every detail: his whiskey breath in my face, the way his fingers wrapped around my neck—not to caress, but to squeeze. The impact of my spine against the sharp wood had knocked the air out of me. I hadn’t screamed. I had long since learned that screaming only made him angrier. So I bit down on my tongue, tasted blood, and waited until he was done.

He was never done. He only stopped when he got tired.

Now I sat on the cold tile floor of the bedroom. His bedroom, because I owned nothing in this apartment. Not even the air I breathed belonged to me. He controlled when I was allowed to eat, when I was allowed to shower, when I was allowed to sleep. Sometimes he woke me in the middle of the night because he needed me. I had learned not to ask what he needed. I had learned to simply be there.

Outside, I heard his car. I recognized the sound from far away—the too-loud engine, the frantic gear shifts, the SUV roaring before it came to a stop in front of the house. He always drove too fast. He always lived too fast. One day it would kill him, but I wouldn’t be there to see it.

The driver’s door slammed. His footsteps on the gravel were uneven, unsteady. Drunk. Or high on coke. Sometimes both. I pressed my hand over my mouth until my knuckles turned white. My heart pounded so hard I thought he might hear it.

The trash bag beside me was black, thick, and odorless. I had taken it from the kitchen two hours ago, when he had left for a “business meeting.” It was always a lie when he said that. He met up with his buddies to drink, complain about their “old men,” and brag about how tightly he had me under control. My little one, he called me. She does everything I say.

I had stuffed only the bare essentials into the bag: two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, a bra, underwear. No socks—there hadn’t been space. And Maddy’s teddy bear. The bear was old, its fur matted, one button eye missing. My mother had bought it for me shortly before she died. I had been five, too young to understand that she would never wake up again. The bear was the only thing that truly belonged to me.

Three hundred dollars. I had hidden it under the mattress for months, bill by bill. A few dollars in tips here, a few there. I had worked briefly at a diner before Nic forbade me from leaving the house. He hadn’t forbidden it directly—he had simply called the owner one day and said I was quitting. After that, he hadn’t looked at me for a week because I had “embarrassed the family.”

The family. His family was the mafia. I was just the piece he had taken.

No papers. Nic kept my ID, my birth certificate, everything, locked in his desk. In his office, which he always kept locked. Like a leash. Without papers, I was no one. Without papers, I couldn’t fly, couldn’t take a bus, couldn’t even rent a motel room. But I had heard that in Texas there were smaller towns where you could lie low for a while, as long as you paid cash. Thirty hours by bus. Two hundred dollars for the ticket. A hundred for the first week in a motel. After that, I would have to find a job.

The front door flew open. The bang echoed through the entire apartment.

“Maddy!”

His call didn’t sound like love. It sounded like ownership. Like an announcement that he was here now and I had better be ready. I knew that tone. It was the tone that came before a storm. When he called like that, something would break. Maybe a plate. Maybe my face.

“I know you’re in here, sweetheart.” His voice came from the hallway. It was slimy, honey-sweet, but underneath it pulsed that cold anger I knew so well. It was like a knife he kept hidden behind his back.

I smelled the whiskey before he reached the hallway. It wasn’t the good whiskey his father drank. It was the cheap kind that smelled like glue and desperation. Nic staggered against the wall, chuckling softly to himself. “Come out, sweetheart. I brought you something.” A glass. Maybe a drug. Maybe his fist.

I stood up slowly. My legs trembled, but I forced them to be still. The window behind me was already cracked open—I had unlocked it an hour ago while Nic was still out. The yard lay in darkness. No streetlights. Just a high wooden fence, and beyond it the backyards of Los Angeles, a maze of trash cans, clotheslines, and sleeping dogs.

His hand closed around the doorknob.

In that moment, I grabbed the trash bag, yanked the window fully open, and threw it out. It landed with a dull thud on the damp grass. Then I swung myself over the sill—my hands gripping the frame, my feet searching for purchase on the wall. I had never been athletic. In school, I had always been the last one picked for dodgeball. But fear makes you strong. It makes you fast. It turns you into an animal that only wants to survive.

“Maddy?”

The door flew open. I heard him enter the room, heard his confused snort when he saw the empty space. Then the open window.

“Maddy! Goddammit!”

I jumped. The three meters to the ground felt like falling into an abyss. I landed on my knees, scraped the skin raw, but I didn’t feel the pain. I grabbed the trash bag and ran.

Behind me, I heard Nic shouting out the window. “You stupid bitch! I’ll find you! I’ll find you everywhere!” His voice cracked, went hoarse with rage. I heard him crashing through the apartment, probably looking for his keys. He would take the car. He would search the streets.

That’s why I didn’t run toward the street.

I ran through the backyard, climbed over the wooden fence—the boards were rotten, a nail tore through my T-shirt and left a bloody scratch across my shoulder—and landed in the next yard. An old woman screamed somewhere when she saw me, but I didn’t listen. I kept running. Over trash cans, through bushes, under a clothesline where damp sheets slapped against my face.

The cold crept through my thin pants. I wore only an old pair of sneakers without laces—Nic had taken them after I stayed too long in the park once. “You don’t need to run away,” he had said, “you belong to me.” My feet slipped inside the shoes, but I kept running.

My lungs burned. Every breath hurt. But I couldn’t stop. If I stopped now, he would find me. And if he found me, he would kill me. Not right away. He would punish me first, for hours, maybe days. Then he might let me live—but without teeth, without hope.

After about ten minutes—or maybe it was twenty, I had lost all sense of time—I reached a busier street. A 24-hour diner cast its harsh neon light onto the sidewalk. I stopped, gasping, leaned against the wall of a closed shop, and waited for my pulse to calm a little. No car in sight. No Nic.

For the first time in six months, I breathed freely.

I stepped into the diner. The bell above the door rang sharply. A tired waiter with sweat stains on his shirt looked at me, shrugged, and pointed to an empty seat at the counter. I sat down, placed the trash bag at my feet, and ordered a coffee in a hoarse voice. Black. Strong.

The cup was hot, almost too hot to touch. I wrapped both hands around it and felt the trembling slowly subside. The smell of coffee mixed with the scent of old grease and cigarette smoke that had seeped into the upholstery. It smelled like freedom.

Only now, in the safety of the harsh lighting, did I realize what I had done.

I had fled.

After six months. After one hundred and eighty days of beatings, humiliation, and nights where he had taken me however he pleased—rough, without tenderness, with words that made me smaller until I thought I would disappear. You are nothing. Without me, you are nothing. You belong to me. I had heard those sentences so often they lived in my head, like an uninvited guest that never leaves.

The coffee burned my tongue, but I drank anyway. The pain on my tongue was a good pain. It belonged to me.

My thoughts spun. Where now? The bus station was maybe a mile away. I had no phone—Nic had taken it after he once saw a text from a former coworker. He had smashed the phone and then screamed at me for hours that I was a whore. The coworker had only asked if I wanted a new job.

I had no friends. No family. My mother was dead, my father had never cared about me. I was alone in the world, and the only person who wanted me was a violent mafia son who treated me like his property.

And yet. I was here. I was alive. I was breathing.

The waiter refilled my cup. “You okay, sweetheart?” His voice was tired, but not unkind.

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

The lie tasted bitter, but I had learned to believe it.

Outside, a car drove by. I flinched, my heart racing again. But it wasn’t Nic’s SUV. It was an old pickup that slowed at the traffic light. The driver glanced over at me briefly, then drove on. I exhaled.

I didn’t know what would come next. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty: I would never go back to Nic. Even if I had to die on the street. Even if I starved. Anything was better than his hands. Anything was better than his nights.

I finished the coffee, paid with a crumpled ten-dollar bill from my stash, and left the diner. The air smelled of rain and diesel. The sky over Los Angeles was a dirty orange, lit by the city’s glow. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders—a thin denim jacket far too big for me—and made my way to the bus station.

The streets were empty at this hour. Only the occasional taxi or a homeless person lying in a doorway. I kept my gaze straight ahead, clutching the trash bag tightly. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t look back.

At the bus station, I bought a ticket to Texas. Somewhere in Texas. The clerk eyed me suspiciously—a young girl with torn pants, bruises, and a trash bag in the middle of the night—but when I paid in cash, he just shrugged and handed me the ticket. The bus would leave in two hours.

I sat on one of the hard plastic benches, pulled my legs up, and rested my head on my knees. I wedged the trash bag between my feet. Two hours to wait. Then thirty hours on the road. Then a new life.

I closed my eyes and saw Nic’s face. His dark eyes when they turned cold. His smile when he hit me. The way he pulled my hair when I didn’t obey fast enough. You belong to me, he had said. Forever.

I opened my eyes again. A single tear rolled down my cheek. I wiped it away.

“No,” I whispered into the empty hall. “I don’t.”

The bus arrived on time. I got on, took a seat by the window, pressed the trash bag into my lap. As the engine roared to life and Los Angeles slowly faded behind me, I felt something inside me break—but something new was growing too. Something hard. Something that was no longer willing to be beaten.