neelwrites/thursdayphotoprompt/behinddevil’sdoors/fiction/02/06/2017

Thursday photo prompt: Knock #writephoto

Behind Devil’s Doors  

Thursday photo prompt: Knock #writephoto

By Neel Anil Panicker

The full length wall room mirror is plastered with a golden edged sticker that boasts the legend “The Lord’s House is full of love.”

Looking into it, Pramila runs her fingers over her badly battered face, the little finger tracing the knife scar all the way from below the left eye to the lower jaws.

As she turns around, her eyes, swollen and bloodied, fail not to notice the imprint of strong male hands just below the left collar bone.

On closer examination, it also reveals five linear marks, much like those left behind by a screeching heavy duty truck tyre.

For a moment her frail body convulses as her benumbed brain remembers the bestiality of the previous night.

Like a statue she stands there, her body and mind as if in limbo, transfixed, unmoving, stony, and lifeless, God knows for how long.

Then slowly, she stumbles back to her senses and peers beyond at the reflection of the man on the bed, a man who barely a week ago had sworn in front of the holy fire to love and protect her from all danger, a man who was her lawfully wedded husband.

He eyes hover on his naked maleness, on the massive six foot hairy frame spread-eagled on the master bed; on the oversized head that juts out of hard boned rippling muscles as if it were a enormous ocean liner’s enormous hulk.

Her gaze falls on his eyes, a bulbous blood red, emitting sheer evil

even when closed.

©neelanilpanicker2017 #thursdayphotoprompt #fiction #251words

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Her eyes further travel down and take in the hairy hands, oversized and resembling a grizzly  mountains bear’s, at the tightly locked fists__small little iron balls, they seemed to her.

These were the very same hands that had last night and for every previous night, unbuckled the leather belt and assaulted her mercilessly, unmindful and unmoved by her heart wrenching cries and copious tears, her vociferous protestations and gut splitting pleas.

Her mind’s video plays out the scenes of horror; the blows, the beatings and the beratings, reliving  the pain when those fists had landed, first on her spine, then her head, hands, legs, and finally on her face, the brutal impact sending her careening to the corner walls, smearing the hexagonal shaped mosaic floor in thick veins of blood, her two front teeth a flotilla of broken dreams.

And so it runs, like a slow motion movie, unspooling one torturous reel after another, as the  happenings of the last seven days and nights come alive like with a frightening fury and traumatize her deeply scarred psyche with an intensity she can do without.

Stark images of one man’s untold brutality, slow and hazy, come into focus…the belt beatings, its brass knuckles tearing into supple flesh, the hands and legs contorting in murderous pain, the stilted voices of protest dying a million premature deaths…

She turns around and stares one last time at the man who had made her life a living hell.

There he was, even in his sleep, managing to send a shiver of fear down her spine.

And then something strikes in her mind. A long buried memory from school comes alive…her teacher, the English teacher’s words…Pramila, remember, to quietly suffer injustices is the biggest injustice that one does, not just to oneself but to society as well.

The words, long forgotten, now jolt her back from her stupor.

She then and there resolves to fight back the injustice meted out to her.

And then her eyes constrict and her lips tighten as her mind toughens with a new found fierceness.

She was going to give as good as she gets. Blood for blood, tooth and tooth, an eye for an eye.

It was payback time and at the receiving end was her newly minted husband, a demonic two-horned, evil eyed, alien skulled, wide whiskered monster in a man’s clothing.

©neelanilpanicker2017 #thursdayphotoprompt #fiction