Ashes Reverie

chapter 3: Voices (i)

Slowly, all the covers turn wet with some liquid. She's trying to cut the innermost layer of skin from one of her fingers. She's holding a blade that she stole from her father's drawer. She knows a blade is something sharp, something that might be able to kill her if she cuts herself with it, but she doesn't know exactly where to start. She's panicking, and finally, she begins cutting her left hand's middle finger. Blood runs down her hand and drips onto a white sheet, the cover of a large box. She sits on it to hide herself because no one comes to the storeroom at this hour.

She keeps trying to figure out how to die when, suddenly, the doorbell rings. It's her mother; she's back. Her finger is almost cut, just a thin piece of skin still attached to her hand. The sound of the bell pulls her back to her senses. Until that moment, she had only been hearing the voices in her head. With the doorbell ringing again and again, she finally realizes what she's been doing to herself. She looks around in panic at the mess she's created—the blood covering the white sheet, the floor, and her trembling hands. She doesn't even understand what she was doing or why.

She grabs some old clothes, rips them apart, and makes bandages to hide the wound from her mother. The rest she cleans in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep.

Naima returns home after a few days, still angry, and somehow that anger is also directed at her. Floral notices it and feels terrified, thinking her mother might beat her for what she has done to herself, though she doesn't even know what it means. Scared, she does everything she can to avoid her.

At midnight, she starts cleaning the white sheets again. She thinks she's done, but a few spots remain untouched because the sheet is too big for her to handle alone. After finishing, she returns the sheet to the storeroom.

"What are you doing here, Flora, at this hour?" her mother asks angrily.

Then she sees the sheet, still damp and covered with faint bloodstains.

Her anger grows. She grabs Flora's arm tightly and yells, "What the hell? You destroyed the sheets! What have you done this time?" Her grip tightens more and more.

It's the same arm with the injured finger, and the wound opens again, bleeding badly; it should have been stitched.

Her mother notices and grows even angrier. "What did you do now? You destroyed all the white sheets!"

Flora doesn't respond. Voices echo again in her head, drowning out her mother's words.

Her mother scolds her for a while, then leaves her alone in the storeroom.

Days turn into months, and months into years. Life continues the same way. She spends her entire childhood enduring her mother's neglect and her father's cruelty.