Cauldron Anthology Issue 15 - Crone 1st | Page 28

The movie , which was a thriller of some sort , started with a blast . She was switching between watching it and watching her husband who did not seem to recognize the scene of a man being decapitated . He paused the movie for some reason then he hung up . May he get killed in a car accident on the way to work so that I get freed from such presence , she thought . He looked at some messages he received while he was on the phone . He kept receiving messages from different apps sent from different kinds of people . He did a fast-backward and restarted the movie . Then he called a colleague while the scene was being repeated all over again . She found herself stricken dumb , her rage now breaking her bones . And yet , despite all that pain , she was unable to utter a word at what was happening . She felt that she was intruding in something private and indescribable , something bigger than her , foreign and new . This irritated her even more . For some reason he muted the movie and carried on his conversation which was stretching unnecessarily . He burst out laughing and answered “ what next ? Giving them hope sure , but without carrying the project to its end . You know ? We just cannot allow all these minorities to invade the spirit of the academic space . It is a closed system for a reason .”
She frowned for she realized suddenly that earlier , when she was in the bathroom , her arms had never moved
She was oblivious to the living-room and all its contents for a while . She was going through the files stored in her mind . She was trying to answer the question : “ what should I do when I want to kill my husband ?” She chuckled to herself as she imagined herself googling that question . She unlocked her own phone to do exactly that . Why not ? But she was distracted by the next scene of the rotten movie . She became aware that the unfolding scene was showing a man apparently being woken up , apparently a cop , apparently the man to be assigned the task of finding the killer . Apparently he sighed , and that woke up a girlfriend-wife-whore-unknown woman . He drank in her nakedness and they kissed and started to move faster and adjusted their sleepy heads …
She looked at her husband who was complaining to his colleague about some joint pains now . Maybe he will not go back to the faculty that a ernoon a er all . His absent eyes were making her more uncomfortable than the scene itself . She sneaked another look at the couple , heaving and sweating . She feared that he ’ d suddenly augment the volume . She feared that the colleague would hear inappropriate sounds . She imagined their moans and considered it her own , raining with the storm that was threatening to break at any moment . It was all wrong , unnatural to say the least . The intermingling of all these happenings , themes that should not be disclosed to one another . They were meshing together and pushing her to the margin of