Sirine

part: 1

Sirine

      Four years have passed since this story happened. Has it become a story? I'm still afraid of everything, afraid of every spot of darkness... Bouzina was a small, perhaps forgotten, rural area, but it was a turning point of fear for me.
More time had passed than I imagined. I did not intend to go to that miserable countryside. I only leave Tazoult Road in my city of Batna in Algeria twice a month, once to visit my sister Sarah in the the psychiatric and neurological hospital in Al-Ma’athar, to make sure that she stills there. And another during the day to visit my parents’ grave. I made sure to bury them here in the Bozoran cemetery, where they are close to my visits. 
Days passed as I tried to forget the way in which they died, and the horrific way in which I found my father cutting up my mother’s body into small pieces.
I found my father sitting in the bathroom in a pond of blood, he was busy cutting something. I thought he was preparing the rabbits he later caught in the forest for dinner, but was he doing that in the bathroom? 
I wanted to ask him. I took two steps and had barely finished the third one. when he turned to me and said: You came back in time, help me to cut up your mother. My sister Sarah was sitting on the bathroom floor in her blue pajamas, watching what my father was doing in silence and a strange smile was drawn on her face while her eyes were bathed in black kohl.
 “Youssef, my son, reply to me... Be an obedient son...”. My father said.
I could not collapse neither escape from the room, so he threw a knife at me, intending to kill me, but it swerved to hit my shoulder. I ran towards the kitchen, blood was seeping behind me, where I found my mother, or rather what was left of her, some of it piled up on the table, the floor, the head in the sink. The floor was sticky and disgusting I didn't have enough time to vomit or scream, but I ran away, and it's strange that I still calling him: Dad
...Don't... stop... please... dad... He looked at me with hatred and evilly.
He seemed to be possessed by something more powerful than his inner awareness, this was not his nature or what he had been before that day. 
I thought to go up the stairs or return to my sister Sarah, but I could only escape forward, and in an unexpected moment I decided to escape into the basement and close the door, but he pulled it forcefully towards me, and I fell down the stairs. He began slowly descending towards me, while his face turned red and his eyes became completely white. 
I hurried to go up to a table that was under the ventilation window that we usually leave open to ventilate the basement. In that day the amount of fear made every small hole in that house seemed to be possible to escape from.