21 Mar 2019

Pernicious Memory by Oleksandra Zhdanova

Mike has just recovered from
the last week knife bite. The wound was deep enough: the blad came in under the ribs and hooked several organs inside. It has cut his back muscle, so that now he is forced to move only in wheelchair until the muscle is recovered.
The wound was not found, this was an ordinary case in their jail. It was built after the death penalty was cancelled to pen thieves with life imprisonment. No one needed them, no one came to visit or wrote letters. Prisoners of those walls were slowly dying inside the jail and were already dead outside it.
Wheels were scratching the old concrete floor creating a slight noise along the empty corridor leading to the canteen. Mike didn’t expect to be hooked again, but the atoms, spread around, froze his body, the head got heavy in one moment and In stomach it felt like indigestion. Wheels stopped spinning. This time he knew whom he was wounded by, the man was wounded by the smell coming from the dining room, that exact smell of dairy porridge with rice and honey, that smell he had heard every morning in his early childhood being fetched to the kindergarten and forced to beg his mom not to leave him there alone again. And that smell, smell of dairy porridge, that Mike had been eating every day sitting on his small chair waiting to be taken back home.
This had been a long time before he graduated school and got married to his classmate soon after, that had been a long time before his son was born, and before they bought their first family car. That had been far before his mother broke her spine after fall from the bike, and before he started taking drugs and his wife demanded a divorce.
Then, sitting on the small chair, he couldn't have imagined himself holding the gun and couldn't have wondered how he shoots his child and takes off the skin from his wife. Small boy could not predict going insane because of the environment he would create.
The smell from the deep childhood traced him to his roots and fetched back to the jail through all the hell he had created and that bitter reminder of everything he had lost because of own addiction made him understand that that small boy had been killed by the drug beast years ago and syne the animal heart had been beating inside.
Mike realized that he was ready to kill the beast. He drove back to his bad, laid down and never stood up to avoid giving a chance to the brute to reveal.

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