Redemption

Prologue

And it was only after a split second that I found myself standing tall amid the blood-borne chamber.

I heard ungodly gulps, from the bubbles beneath and the roars atop. They consumed the sound and silenced the breaths, and the walls drew the same red that I saw too many times before.

I pushed his neck but not to feel his warmth; I was told of his curious reassurance and the comforting stigmas he laid upon my tainted fingertips. And therefore, life had become a stain to his, and my, baneful presence – whatever was alive remained alive as it could be.

The hammer descended at an implausible speed, later crashed upon a solid object. His loathsome essence shattered, dispersed throughout the four corners of the chamber.

Gravity pulled the hammer down to the place it belongs. A gentle push was all I could provide, for gravity did the job for me.

Alas, it was an inevitability. The bubbles and the whispers borne under streams of ink-like liquid. I stood amid the chamber – and the man was everywhere below the four cemented corners.

He – the man, the dead, the plainly lifeless – wetted my shoes and licked my socks. The expanse of the red sea stretched as far as my befouled eyes could possibly reach.

I stumbled to the window and released the hammer to the ground. I saw a flicker of moonlight descending to a landscape devoid of any gleam. But in my eyes, the splendor it made was as clear and bright as the evening star seen from the summit.

I was still blind as I was – alone in the dark.

***

I dearly wish to confess, my most incomprehensible sin; my friend was a murderer, and that she always had been.

She was only one of many, an instance in a lifetime, a mere summer breeze blown away without a legacy or a premonition to mark its past being. Around the eras of her existence, I was acquainted with peculiar signals: they told me that every transgression leaves a mark behind, preserved in the vessels of certain unescapable remembrances. Memories ripened over time, like how the sincerest appearance of pain would mature. Regardless of how many days one has endured over the ages since the unfortunate event of their birth to the world, certain memories are etched into the essence as an incessant reminder of what once had been – an undeniable occurrence.

Judgment, equally inevitable, begins henceforth.

I think it all started on a Friday. Or maybe an hour into Saturday. But as far as I could recall, I was but a single helpless child when my father murdered my mother at the dawn of the martial havoc that would persist for years to come.

Did my father truly mean it, or was it simply the whispers from the pair of scissors he was desperately clutching onto, I did not know, and I still do not. But irrespective of his true intentions, my mother was dead, and my father had never been more alive.

On that night when my family became deprived of candid affection, I met my friend for the first time with a violent penetration of the shimmering light through the splinter on the window. A friend filled with a sense of primitive obsession, ever practical, existent, and absolutely horrified.

For a fraction of a second, I closed my eyes shut and tore myself from the rest of the world, into a place where no meaning and no ill-intentions whispered delirious nonsense. When I opened my eyes the next moment, I witnessed the terror and the red growing rapidly from the slivers of flesh, lying scattered amid shards and dirt and a single gust of wind. Our first encounter was farfrom being a pleasant one, to say the least.