Short Story | Alone And Cold By Marjaan Sadiq | The Arts-Muse Fair


ALONE AND COLD

By

Marjaan Sadiq

A shiver ran up her spine as she pressed the knife harder until it penetrated the smooth surface of her wrist. Bright red liquid gushed out of the small cut even before she felt the sting.

She looked up at herself in the wardrobe mirror, her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Her face, blotchy with purple and black, was streaked with thick lines of dripping red where she had made marks of sorrow from one temple to the other, from temple to chin and across her jaw. Blood dribbled into her eyes, obscuring her view. Her disheveled hair formed a curtain around the bloodied face. The front of her white dress was partly soiled. She could not believe that he had succeeded in making her into what she never dreamt she'd be, that he had made her suicidal. Her knees weakened. She gripped the metal tighter.

Groaning wildly she pushed it further into her skin, feeling her flesh tear open as she sliced. More blood oozed out, spilling onto the marble floor. She smiled through the pain. He'd be seething with rage by the time he saw his tainted floor. But she wouldn't be there to clean up, at least not literally. Big balls of tears rolled down her cheeks. How had she ended up like this?  What was her crime?

She had simply married...married a wealthy man whose family hated her of course. But for what reason? For being an orphan? For being poor and homeless? She had never been able to fathom it. This man, her Romeo, lasted only a year, before he became the beast. A gasp of horror escaped her lips, then a loud sob. She had never had a good life. She had slaved and begged for a living. She had tried her best, she had suffered. If she knew what she'd done to earn such a life, it would have been bearable.

All she could do was cry. And so she cried. She cried for her life, for her existence, for the family she never had, for the misery she'd lived through, for the last, brutal two years of her marriage, for the children she had lost to violence, for the helpless child she was and for the broken woman she had become. Lifting the knife shakily to her throat, she made the final slit.

In the moment before she breathed her last, realization crashed upon her; there were plenty decisions she could have made. She could have called for help, gotten a divorce, or thought of something else. She had lived for 22 years already; she could have made it through this.


In her fear, she had made the worst possible decision. Suicide was never the option; she had made it into the option. She felt a deep pang of regret, but it was too late. Her eyes had stopped seeing, her senses were leaving her, and she was falling. Her body hit the floor with a thud. And she died; with a gash in her neck and nobody to remember her. She died as she had lived, alone and cold.

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Marjaan Sadiq lives in Kano, Nigeria. She loves to read. She writes a lot of fiction.

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