My head is a waterfall of blood, and my ears are a marching band that sneers. It hasn't even been the tenth December of my shitty life when the wrinkled palm flew towards my mouth. It left me with a shock that no alphabet of the Ronam Empire could express.

I remember it clearly. Those grudgeful eyes. Those ragged breaths. Those heartbeats that are only a few drums away from snapping my neck in two. The way she looked at me. The disdain and the anger, the contempt and the ire. It was more malicious than Arjanu's grudge for the death of his son, Ibhamanyu, in the epic tales of Lahadharata.

"Spare me of your hands, you vile filth!" chides the old woman as my skull chips away a part of the unfortunate crystal ashtray she smitten on me. Mercy fades to the nonexistent, granted by the universe of the wish that I had always flung far to the sky every single night.

There was no one standing next to me at that time. Not even the woman whose womb forcibly pulled me from the pond of souls in the backyard of the House of God.

The wind brought me no mercy nor help from any. The stillness deafens me, cursing me with the silence of the universe and the silence of my own.

My tears fell along with my weak heart which turns splinters. I wail to my own shadow as I forcefully hold everything at the back of my throat. All by myself, though so many eyes stayed to savour its every drop.

Ever since the first light of these cursed jade eyes of mine, all that I have received are those that exist in a lightless nihility.

....

Ah,

If only it wasn't a pair of hands that grabbed my red nape at that time.

If only it was the cold steel of a scalpel that grabbed my red nape at that time.