Wounds by Shahrukh Jamal

He fiddled with the knife stained with the dense drops of blood and looked at it distressingly as the red drops trickled down from the knife on the black tiles of the kitchen of his home, the one with dead walls and dim lights.

It was 1:30 am, the time when usually on other nights he’d dream about the peaceful room of his parents, untouched by the misery that would come with fights, arguments, pulling each other’s legs and dragging each other’s ancestors into it. The sound of the water draining out from the thin blue pipe, fitted to the RO, and falling on the surface of the sink was the only thing he could hear, apart from the tick-tock of the old clock that hung on the wall of his room, right above the poster of Michael Jordan. He could see him from the kitchen which was attached to his room, lifting himself up to put the ball into the basket, and for a moment he dreamt about a life just like that famous basketball star, too busy to get affected by the chaos his parents, both aged fifty-five, brought.

Sweat raced down his temples, and made his t-shirt stick to his skin, and he began feeling queasy, uneasy, and restless. How quiet it is at this point of time, he wondered. Right beside the kitchen, after walking a few steps through the gallery, maybe eight steps, was the room from where abuses and screams and sounds of the breaking of lamps and showpieces and thuds at the door when things were hurled, had become a trademark. That was the room of their parents. He would hear them every night, especially when he would try and deafen the noise by engrossing in a novel (right now he was reading Stephen King), and assume that they perhaps never loved each other. All those pictures that he had seen of them, holding each other’s hands and playing with him, all those stories he had listened to, right from when he was six-years old to today when he was twenty-two, seemed nothing more than a sham. A big sham.