kareem hasim [D11] fin

My father once took me aside, closing the sweeping double doors of his study as he did so, and sat me down opposite his big, leather chair. I remember him waiting, as if I was supposed to speak first. He drummed his fingers on the stained oak desk, waiting a little while before eventually leaning forward and admitting the awful truth.

Of course he did it. The night he came home there were scratches on his face – his shirt torn open as if he had been attacked by some feral creature. But our family has boundless influence so everyone just looks the other way. It’s easier.

He started moving her things around about a year ago. Her medicine box, her favourite pair of shoes. It was little things at first, and only every now and again. Then it was her reading glasses, a newspaper, the baby. He’d blame her age, and she thought she’d lost her mind.

It continued like that, for a while. I watched from behind an almost-closed bedroom door.

Terrible word: almost.

When his gaunt eyes locked with mine, I shut the door like it was final. Like that was the end of it, like if there was a God, he’s make it so the door would stay shut - but my father’s thunderous footsteps made my butterfly heart sink in my chest.

It’s a bitter man that does wicked things just to prove to his son how harsh and terrible the world is outside these four walls.

Mrs Coutts, her brother died on the dirty streets of Eleven, struck down in his youth by jealous rivals. She spends her evenings peering through her thin white curtains into our troubled home, observing all the things my father did.

One night, she came over with a bottle of vintage wine. That wasn’t all she brought. Her smile and her words promised much, and oh how my mother cried upstairs. Me and my sister comforted her until it was over.

And when it was over, and my father had defiled his wedding vows, she asked him to elope with her. He struck her across the face with the back of his hand.
She screamed and called him a heartless bastard. So he wrote a letter to her employer, and now she lives on the streets and begs for raw scraps from the butchers.

My sister is all that’s good in the world. There are few truly innocent people left. Everyone I know, every grown man and woman has a dark place in their mind that was allowed to overgrow and fester, society's safeguards failing their humanity. Her smile is candlelight in the bleak winter nights. I know he will never touch her so long as I breathe.

She had a violin that she loved more than anything else in this world, played her little heart out every other night. Oh how she could play, and oh what a musician she was going to be. He sold it to buy himself a new dinner jacket.

Bad things happen to everyone, it’s hard to keep being yourself after they do. What makes you a good person is how many times you pick yourself up from it. It would be easy to succumb to hate, to fear. Mother would have said something like that when we were younger, and she was prettier, and he was away more.

When she ran away, something broke inside of him. Not his heart, if he even had one. Some kind of twisted pride, like his reputation had been stained. The Peacekeeper who could not keep the peace in his own home. I begged him to not go looking for her, I begged him until he was forced to lock me in my bedroom.

Of course he did it.

Of course. What else was he going to do?

But he gets away with it. Like he always gets away with it.

Until I decided that he shouldn’t get away with it. Because if he can do that to the mother of his children, his children who he locks away and beats and wouldn’t know how to love if love was tattooed instructions on his forearms.

Then he would do it to her.

And I’ll never forget the look on his face as he stood in the garden, the kitchen knife stuck awkwardly from his neck. He just stared at the sky like he was watching a bird fly over, just staring. And then falling.

And that was the night I discovered that blood is silver in moonlight.