The Woman Who Blasphemed

The drip, drip brought back the memory of those screams. She could smell the crimson from that day, or was it crimson, salt, left behind by the blood and tears of some other prisoner.

Were they abused? She wondered.

How were her children. She thought of them a dozen times a day, she asked the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to keep them safe. Jamil she had long ago realized would be spared his father's beatings. That day only brought it to her conscious. She had always known. But she saw it that day. Her beautiful daughter Maryam, that was who she was more worried about.

Drip, drip. Splat. Splat.

The water smelled bad. Sour, of shit. It tasted even worse. She had been forced to drink it, they had starved her, and deprived her of water for a few days. Was it days? She didn't know. There was no night and day in this place. Just the collective quiet and screams for food, for water, for mercy. Confessions of sins that the prisoners had not committed, anything to get out. Most harrowing were the screams. The whips, the flays, the screams. She winced every time she heard one. She shivered the first time she had heard one. She shuddered as she thought of that. The hair on her back rose, she pulled her arms around herself.

It was unearthly. Not an animal's scream, not her screams when her husband beat her, not even when he had hit her with a bat. Not the screams of the dog that those kids had cornered, and were poking with sticks, some throwing stones at it, as if it were the devil himself. No, none of those screams. This came from a deeper place. This was a scream from before civilization. From before language. This was a scream, guttural. Loud, screeching, very much in pain.