"Do you believe in god?"
"Sometimes."
'When other kids in the town played together but didn't let me play with them.
When my dad would beat me up over not doing his bidding and my mom wouldn't stop it.
When witches would come, tear my flesh, eat my heart and my parents won't do anything.
When I feel like no one on the face of this planet can do anything for me, I believe in god.'
That day when Inji started walking back to her aunt's house after reading the café owner's morbid love letters, she believed in god because she wished for something to happen without asking or saying anything about it.
Her hands were cold, her toes were curling, and her heels were on fire.
She remembered that feeling. It was so familiar from her distant memory, the day her mother had made her favorite dish and dressed her up in new clothes.
Peach pink. It was her favorite color. She'd learned that when she turned fifteen, she was in high school and started wearing dresses with long skirts.
She had her first crush on a boy in her classroom that the girls used to call 'cartoon' because he looked like an anime character. Short, wide eyes, brown skin, bowl cut. Her best friend had a crush on his friend and since she was too shy, she would ask Inji to look in his direction and see what he is doing.
When you really like a man, you want to keep watching him but you can't meet his gaze. Because it burns you down and reduces you, strips you off your identity and leaves you in nothing but love.
Inji's best friend was afraid of falling too hard yet she wanted to forbidden fruit so she borrowed it from her. The cartoon thought it was him that she was staring at and he would stare back.
"What is wrong with him?" Inji whined, having had enough of meeting his gaze accidentally.
"Maybe he is watching you?" Her best friend chirped in.
She desperately wanted Inji to be in love too. She didn't want to burn in this fire of longing on her own.
One day, Inji glared at the cartoon and he glared back. The way his eyes widened into perfectly round circles, made her laugh. It was the first time she had acknowledged the presence of a man beyond the biological strata of social order.
The first time she had acknowledged a man on an individual ground.
She was young, and uneducated about it. She didn't have that urge like everyone else, of wanting to merge with the person she liked. It never crossed her mind that there is the final stage of 'love' that everyone knew and wanted but could rarely reach.
Physically.
She only made one mistake. She trusted her mother with everything. Her pains, her secrets, herself. Because she gave birth to her, gave birth to everything that made her.
Even her soul. Inji thought she would know what her soul needed.
Even though her mother would nag her, work her, reduce the existence of only child to nothing but a house maid, she was still her mother.
"They are my parents. They would never hurt me." fifteen years old Inji would tell herself when she would go to bed with aching limbs from scrubbing the floors, washing dishes, picking up things all day long.
Just how much and how long can logic, faith, even love make someone suffer willingly?
Not too long.
The day Inji had lost the will to suffer was the day she had been happiest and saddest. It was a half and half like her whole life had been.
Like her parents loved her, but expected her to slave around for them in exchange.
Like her friends that made her smile once a day, but made her do their assignments, console them, and remain in their lives.
Like her god that was enough in her heart but never in her life.
Half and half.
That day, she vomited her favorite dishes like they were poison because her stomach ached. Her peach pink dressed was soiled, torn at the hem of her skirt and her sheets were bloody. Her throat was sore because she screamed for a good hour, for anyone to hear and come to her help but no one did.
Not her parents. Not her friends. Not her god.
Back in those days, the people in that wretched town were always out. Working, travelling, gambling, living.
But nowadays they were all bound to their beds, to their clockwise lives, their meaningless daily routines.
Yet she was thankful no one heard her as her body trembled in a feverish rush, her soles dragged along the sturdy surface of the road as she returned to her aunt's house. She felt the food she had eaten rushing back to her throat, that slimy texture still lingered at her fingertips and that morbid caricature of torture was flashing in her eyes like the thunder that's started to rumble in the distant sky.
"Inji~ where have you been? Mama was losing her mind!" Jani called out, standing at the porch and waving at her with his idiotic grin.
Everything was cold inside her, as cold as the core of dying star in the far off universe, sucked in the destructive pull of its own gravity. But what was dying inside of her? She didn't know.
'How can someone that's killed seven people in one night be scared of the thought of killing?'
It made her want to laugh but her body was trembling too honestly with fear to do anything else.
"Hey, you look yellow. Is everything alright?" Jani kept battering her wavering composure with unnecessary questions that she wanted to turn around and snap at him with eight years of stress, suffering, pain and tears. But she didn't.
Instead she walked into the house, the door slammed shut behind her and her eyes drifted towards the cobwebs dangling from the roofs. The fly stuck in the middle of one reminded her of the horrifying fate of the woman on that paper.
Why was something in imagination so terrifying? When she had watched people dig their heels into the floor, their necks twisting, fingernails clawing on their flesh and breaking as the poison trickled down their throats?
Death was a mystery even to those who manifested it in their misery and brought it upon others in the form of wrath.
"Hey, Inji? You wanna uh… eat anything? Mom is staying at her friends for the night-" Jani's voice pulled her out of her thoughts before they ate her up alive and she simply holed herself up into that tiny room.
Jani may not be the best person in her life but he was capable of showing concern when humanly possible. He noticed the eerily tremble of her body, as if she was suppression concussions and his eyes brimmed with concern.
"Do you need more blankets? I-I will just them, you wait." He said, leaving his phone into the kitchen and rushed into his mother's bedroom.
The old lady had horded all of the mattress, sheets, blankets, pillows, in the closet in her room. It was nothing less than a war to get her to be generous so Jani thought the heavens were on Inji's side that his mother wasn't home.
Because they both knew she would have let Inji die if she could.
Jani buried her in three blankets, yet the shivering of her body won't stop. He sat there next to her bed, simply watching her with wide, brown, worried eyes as she continued to fight something deep inside of her.
"Do you need anything, like more blankets? Or soup?"
She didn't respond. He bit his lip and felt guilty.
Years of neglect flashed before his eyes in that moment and he realized he could have saved Inji, or made her life a bit bearable if he had only tried.
The day that she had killed those people, or that's what he'd heard, she had come to their house in baggy, soiled clothes. He was playing video games on the couch, and listened to his mother scolding her for coming to their house looking like a mess.
Something had happened to her.
He had felt it in his bones when her silence had rolled down into the tears on her cheeks and she had dissolved into loud cries. The way her knees had given out on their doorsteps and she had started screaming her heart out, he remembered how it felt. He could picture it.
Like there were some inhuman hands holding her by her every limb and pulling her apart. She was shredded into pieces and her heart plopped out of her chest, splashed onto their floor into a puddle of blood and chunks of meat. Each of them beating as her screams continued to fill his ears.
"You know.., I don't hate you. I never had." He confessed, joining his hands into his lap and looked down.
There was nothing to hate about her when everything about her said out loud that she had been wronged. Jani, of all people, knew that her silence was her loss of voice after screaming for help. For hours, for days, for years.
What went on behind his aunt's doorsteps that day, no one knew. Only rumors existed, Inji never spoke about it and her parents didn't say a word till the day they'd died as well.
"It's just…we drifted so far apart that I don't remember who you were before you became… this."
Inji wanted to respond, to tell him to stop pouring more guilt and sadness into her heart. Because if it got too heavy, she would drop on it and once again, there would be a splash a puddle of blood on their doorsteps.
Their respectable, stable, good doorsteps.
"Sorry, I am just rambling. I am going to call the doctor, okay?" Jani said, getting up from the spot and made his way to the door.
Thunder blared, the sky roared like a wounded animal and grey clouds covered the world. Inji's eyes were soaked in hot tears, her clothes drenched in sweat as Jani's words fell into her ears.
Despite the loud ringing in her ears, she could hear a distant sound of footsteps approaching them.
"No! no, I don't need the doctor." She said, in a panicked whisper as she peeled the blankets off her.
Her hair weren't brown, but not too black either and they stuck to her forehead like vines, her complexion had paled and her eyes were glazed. Fear was grasping her from each limb.
Jani turned to look at her, then rolled his eyes. The way she looked, he was amazed that she was even conscious. Her body was trembling, her lips were dry despite being drenched in sweat and her eyes shot towards the vents as the wind knocked against them wildly.
"You don't need a doctor, but I do. I can't have you dying on my watch, Inji. Stop bluffing. I'm going to make a call-"
In ancient Hindu scriptures, it's mentioned that the universe would stir in discomfort when a devil would manifest itself into the shape of a human and be born on this world.
In her blistering hot temperature, Inji was able to recall that one bit because her universe was shaking, shuddering, letting its discomfort known through the growls of the sky, flashes of thunder, untamed wind.
Or perhaps she was just delirious as many would say.
As Jani walked towards the living room, she could see the cracks under the main door flashing in white and a shadow fell on it. Her voice died in her throat, as she gripped the blanket.
Like death had grasped her soul and wouldn't let go, her body was frozen. The sound of the doorbell filled up the atmosphere. She gasped.
"Who is it? Can't you see the weather is killing right now, buddy?" Jani whined, dragging his feet towards the main door.
"D….Don't…. Open…th…" Inji touched her throat, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she felt the roughed up texture of a rope against her fingertips.
"Coming! Goddamn it! Who is it?"
The only thing heard in the wind, the thunder, the fear, was Jani's footsteps towards the main door and the doorbell.
At that moment, Inji knew.
That her devil had been born many years ago, but her universe acknowledged his presence tonight.
What did it want? She didn't know but she feared it nonetheless.