The Envelope

constructive criticism is always welcome

                         

 

   ‘The walls are getting tighter. The billion white tiles shine with my reflection, mocking me. Tighter, bigger, threatening walls. The bed-spring squeaks like some annoying bird, I wish I could smash its little heart. The walls. The walls. Stop the walls. Rain drops smash on the window. They hit it and then tumble rapidly and branch into others and swerve like swift currents and outrun each other and rush and gallop and race and become more as one drop branches into three others, and they twist and are determined and they move and speed and tear along…the door opens. The head of the bird falls heavily to one side…’

    The voice on the tape fell into darkness and pinched her skin.The whole afternoon her walls had been ricocheting his paranoid groans, the re-winding of the tape and now and then the squeaking wooden floor under the pressure of her chair. She heard it again and again. She re-winded it. One. Two. Three. Countless times.  She had bribed a hollow-eyed doctor at the psychiatric hospital to tape her son’s interviews.  Since she could not do his washing, listening to what he had to say seemed as the only motherly care she could give him. She never went to visit him, of course. She tried once but he bit savagely into her velvety skin and kept the chunk of her cold meat in his mouth.
'It’s an instinct. " the nurse who cleaned her wound had said.- They all go back to their basic instincts, you know. You shouldn’t be mad at him.'
 'Oh " she had half-smiled.  The thought that he had bitten that girl with the same teeth made her shudder.
'Like sharks, you see.-said the nurse- Terrifying, but with the right hands you can do miracles, like putting them into deep tonic immobility. The right hands, you see. It’s all about the hands.'

 

Five girls, they reckoned. Five girls his hands had strangled. It was all about the hands.

   She re-winded the tape again. She wasn’t listening to the words any longer, she was trying to catch something. Some shred that would lead her to the past. She tried to remember any episodes with birds from his childhood.  Episodes that had remained elusive from her, episodes that had been the reason why he had turned out that way. Or tiles. She remembered how they had re-done the bathroom one summer. Pinkish tiles with flowers in the right-hand corner. They didn’t match the small bathroom and made it look kitschy. She had dropped the hair-dryer once and broken one of the tiles. It seemed to her that breaking this one tile had changed her son and had made him the monster that he had become. And all of the sudden this broken pinkish tile had been a reason to kill a child and it seemed to her that everyone knew about it. The newspapers, the mothers and fathers, the doctors. They all avoided saying it, but she sensed that they knew about the broken tile and believed it was the reason for everything. She was used to shrugging her shoulders, as if to say: ‘I can’t go back to that summer and choose different tiles. If I could, I would have never touched the old ones.’ She was used to blaming it on little things. Like the time she had sent him to school wearing a shirt with an oily spot on it. Or the time, she had slapped him for drawing on the wall with her lipstick. Or the time she blamed him for taking money from her wallet and remembered later she had spent it the day before on a book about origami. Nobody asked her about these times, but she felt everyone knew about them. And everyone like her blamed her choice of tiles.

 

  'I disdain their panic and hesitation. They are mine now. Forever. They will become like all others. They all like to be strong. They all try to satisfy their filthy, sordid ego. A clumsy, pointless effort. They want me...want me so inconsolably and frantically that they burn in their abominable, vile lust. They are weak and cold and scared. Their eyes are screaming. Their scream is just like whizzing and hurts my head and I have to stop it. There is nothing they can do. They lie there, abondoned and profaned. They pretend to be the victims, oh, how they pretend to be the victims. With their buzzing and kicking and looking in every direction. They are the monster. They darken my days and make me wince away from them with revulsion. They lose. They convulse. Feeble. Mine.'

  

   She moved on her chair and tried to find a more comfortable position. The floor squeaked as if just to slice the silence open. She had bought envelopes the other day. Brown ones, with a strip that you pull, new ones that you don’t have to lick. She re-winded the tape again and put it in the envelope. She wrote the address as if she had written it a dozen times before, stringing together ink dots like rosemary beads that seeped through her hands. The last victim had only a mother. Newspapers put her name in bold, as if doubling it would make her two. So, she addressed it to her. She had never sent the tapes before, she never even thought about it. But the other victims had mothers and fathers and she felt somehow threatened. This one had only a mother. This one was his last one and she felt somehow religious about her. She crucified him. She wanted her mother to know. To see the shred to the past. To blame the tiles. Or particular wounds on his knees or wrong birds waking him up in the morning. To feel sorry for him.

 

 

   A week later, she was holding a rain-drenched newspaper, the floor squeaking under her burden. The mother had been found in the middle of a field. She didn’t read the whole story. She stood in the middle of the room thinking of broken pinkish tiles with flowers in the right corner.

 

Reviews

[Lilly Negoi]

brilliant! i love how you captured her feelings, her thoughts, her inner struggle, and how you inserted the recording fragments in the picture. perfect!