Tales of Disturbance

Cassie

Yes, they are unreachable, unfindable here. This is what they tell each other as they lie awake most nights, waiting to be found. 

The early morning raids are well known: the silent vehicle, the footsteps, quiet then loud. The intrusion. The quick drug you in some vital artery.

The News if it can be believed, warns its remaining citizens. Three or four guards in black balaclavas, armed with stun prods, or something more sinister, enter at the break of dawn. It has happened to others. Friends of theres. 

Sometimes, they hear, there is a photographer with a silent video camera to gather footage for state propaganda. This is the part that disturbs them most. Cassie has nightmares about this cold, objective documenter of pain. This figure is somehow cruelest of all.

She moves towards the stove. The rough wood is cold on her bare feet. She shivers and lifts a chipped cup from a shelf and a battered coffee pot. She does not recognise the greyish hands that grip these objects, the web of pronounced veins that travel across them like arterial roads on a braille map.

She lets the coffee boil, walks to retrieve a tattered mustard cardigan. This she throws around around her shoulders, allows herself to feel the momentary warmth.

She looks around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Only the furniture stares back at her, the brown sofa vomiting yellow upholstery, the coffee table with chunks missing. The holes in the rough floorboards. The bare stone walls.

Where is Luke? Has he left early? It is possible she did not hear him. Her dark eyes flicker around as though he might be lurking somewhere in the sparse furniture of the bleak living room.

He sometimes slips out in the pre-dawn before she is awake. Luke cannot lie in silence. Thinking is a trap, he says. She knows this too. The truth waits for you there, like a thief round a corner.  And truth is pain; memories play grainy films of how things were before they lost everything. the child they lost. Their house by the sea. These things are more painful than anything the state  could ever do to them. 

Yes, truth was worst of all. It could savage you like a wild dog. Rip out your bones. Truth was pain inside. Then perhaps it was better than dogma, which was all that was left outside.

The coffee is ready. She pours it, thick, black as oil, into a rough pewter cup. For a moment she cradles it with both hands staring at nothing with lost, faraway eyes. Then she knocks it back in a beat. The rancid liquid crawls down her throat. She gags; forces herself to focus on the heat of the liquid in her mouth and throat, the comfort of something warm in her hands.

It's lighter now. The world opens a dim, grey eye. The rain comes finally, apathetically. 

An irregular smattering on the glass; a dead beat drill on the roof. She watches as it slowly thickens the ash to sauce.

There is nothing wrong, she tells herself. Luke has left early for work, a boring, normal day. 

Yet, in some undisclosed pit of her stomach, there is something worming. It takes a moment to identify the feeling as Fear.