Medusa

           (Photo by Ivan Aguirre)



    My wife. Madeleine.

One can take a strong whiff of danger the moment those cold eyes fall on their face. And yet, once she lays her eyes on you, there is no turning back, no running away.
This is what happened to me 7 years ago.
I didn't like her at all when I first caught a glimpse of her on that unfortunate evening of my brother's New Year's party. I thought that on the whole she was a bit too much of everything. Her voice too husky, her body too bony, her fingers too long, her clothes too expensive. Yet everyone seemed enchanted by her every word, men and women alike. I should have left right then and there but no. Curiosity had taken the best of me and had burnt me whole in the end.

I look behind my shoulder. She always knows when I am thinking bad thoughts and always punishes me in a way that only now I begin to comprehend.
It happens at night, when in the last moments before sleep finally traps me in its web, I begin to realise that I never stood much chance anyway; she pulls the right strings, the great puppeteer that she is. She decided to marry me. She decided to come to this house. She decided who are friends will be. And she doesn't even have the courtesy to tell me in words. Not even that; it happens from within.

At last I close my eyes. It is right at that moment, just before I lose consciousness that I feel her cold breath running inside me. I hear her pounding heart pumping its poison, draining my soul, turning it into ash. I see her eyes chasing my life away, driving it out of me in fear and despair and I willingly give it all away and die lest I live and go through it again.

 But in the morning  I do wake up again, dead cold and mutilated. My soul eaten a little more. Always I little more, never too much, each night. I am not  me any more. I am her.
 I stumble out of the room only to meet her cold eyes.
 She is licking her lips and turns back to the paper on her lap. With a slight move of her long finger she points to the door and the doorbell rings.
The fresh air makes me want to weep though I can't. I want to run out barefoot on the street, escape her grasp, feet glued to the ground and my brother comes in.
I once tried talking to him but the words couldn't come out, like dogs they were on leashes, I coughed and spat and my lungs turned to stone.

 He licked his lips in return and asked: "How is Madeleine today? Is she in?"

"Madeleine, my cannibalistic witch of a wife?" I shout mutely but then her eyes bend on my spine and I cough in repentance. I know there's not much left of me. It won't be long now.

 "She is inside." I say and the corners of my lips are forced upwards.

The bitch.


After I am gone, I know he is next.