Ephemeris

26 : A Cruel Mistress

It was still dark, though dawn could be an hour or two away. Daniel felt warm, not because of the hot weather. He was burning with fever. Suspended over his mattress, looking through his eyelashes, he tried to find some patterns on the ceiling. Though the ceiling was just pure white paint of simplicity and dullness, his irises were locked, glaring at it. He ran his hands over his eyes and noticed how hot his face was becoming. He breathed out, discharging hot air from his burning lungs. Then he sucked in a large volume of air, hearing the sound of his inhalation.

Sadness and anger grew inside him as he reflected on yesterday's dreadful confrontation and revelation. But while he looked at the wall with tattered wallpapers, there was a strange comfort for the awful woman who had told the truth to his very face. He was so illogically happy that the four corners and the four sides of the adjacent room detained her well. His peculiar imagination couldn't resist laughing at the idea that his mother was locked up in a mental hospital, wearing a strap jacket with only a single bed, a ticking clock, and a porcelain toilet bowl as her company. It would be better if she began to chat with those inanimate things deeming that her psychosis stepped up to another category.

Daniel brooded more about her illness. Inside his mind now, his mother was in a bastille, inside a filthy cell, with a tiny window letting in a beam of light to highlight the cold, unsanitary floor. Her legs were shackled. Her wrists were cuffed, collecting the trickling water droplets from a crevice of an igneous ceiling.

Daniel nodded, concurring with his wicked thoughts, for she did deserve to be lonely. The fever had climbed up to his brain ablaze with vicious ill will. A burst of silent maniacal laughter reverberated across his ear canals. It was contagious, so he clenched his teeth, then he snickered.

While he was finishing packing his bag, a quick tremor shook their house—the iron gate screeched feebly, the old apartment building bellowed painfully, and there was a shattering noise of broken glass, a windowpane perhaps. Daniel didn't feel any worry or dread whatsoever. Overnight, he grew too numb, too selfish, and too cynical. He surveyed his trembling room cold-eyed.

Please, Mr. Tremor, it's a pleasure if you wreck this house, getting rid of the morsel of hope still beating in it. Take it away. Since, anyway, the world is about to end, he evilly thought.

He could not quite comprehend the train of thoughts looping in his mind, but brooding made him prideful. And it tasted abnormally palatable. He spun his entire body in mid-air, then clawed the floor, pushing his torso up and stretching his arms out, welcoming the first crack of dawn at his window.

For a moment, before he reached out for the doorknob, he slowly took a deep breath. Woozy, he was probably because of his little weightlessness diving acrobatics. The lad twisted the knob, let the door stay open, and gently prodded a wall to go into the bathroom. He opened the medicine cabinet door, and a single orange pill was floating inside. He plucked it. "Paracetamol," he read the label, "Just what I need."

Squeezed between his index finger and thumb, he popped the pill in his mouth. His tongue jolted when its buds mediated the pill's bitter taste. Not subjected to his control, the salivary glands secreted liquid preparing for deglutition. His tongue pressed the hard palate forcing the moist pill into the pharynx, and the pharynx muscles contracted, pushing it into the esophagus inferiorly. He imagined that the drug was manna bestowed only for his consumption. The medicine neatly glided into his throat, giving him a speedy remedy. He closed the cabinet and saw himself in the mirror. His reflection looked at him directly, and its mouth moved, making a dialogue.

"Daniel," his reflection started, "I know what you wrote last night. You're quitting, right?"

The boy replied, "No. I am not. I listened to my mind, and it gave me muscle and freedom. Leaving her will free me from lies."