Darcy Goes To Work
Darcy decided that she had sat by the fridge long enough for the shadows to seep in from the window grills. It had begun to rain and the storm was matronly to care into every homes. Daniel's rage parasitic to the roving climate always invites rain without fail. Darcy had wanted to grin at her grim observation was hindered by the ungenerous black eye stinging on the right.
What is the time now, Darcy wondered as she gotten up from the floor. She had work to get to. Avoiding splinters from the broken blender and the porcelain plates, she ran the tap at the sink. Daniel won't be back for hours, she would have to clean up the mess before he gets home. With a damp rag, she pried the bruises and blood off her discolored cheek with abrupt grimaces. Darcy wondered if they could afford another blender? Do they really need one? It's only good in making cocktails in this home. Alcohol always give Daniel an excuse to act up. The vicious circle with Darcy at its mercy. She also wondered if her body would ever get used to Daniel's rage?
She thought about the times when she was being little, with Dahlia. Their father used the belt on them all the time. Time is a funny thing. Human is the funny thing, that it. With enough time, human can get used to almost everything. She had gotten used of the belt by the time she turned eleven and she didn't even winced once. Then their father had decided that the time for corporal punishment was over in their household and never laid another hand on the girls again. How funny humans can be? She ran away from a home that had decided not to beat her ever into this home that hits her every other day. The cycle again. Will Daniel come to that epiphany that her father had? Her right eye throbbed wickedly at that hint of suggestion.
Mopping away the glasses and her blood off her kitchen floor, Darcy went for work downtown. It was a school night and the evening bus was packed to hilt. The shingles and the concrete roofs were drummed with the machinations of the monsoon. As Darcy had stayed before the school, she had a seat by the window staring listlessly at the wayward rain before the wet kids trampled onto the bus. The city cried its teardrops down her window panes. Her murky reflection showed a middle age woman, malnourished and black-eyed. Though the wind sewed her bones, it smeared a numbing frost on her epileptic cheek. Her eyes, uneven and seemingly hollow glared at herself in the splashing lights of the evening traffic had tried to explain that it had almost always rained whenever she was hurt was nature’s compensation for her inability to cry. It’s hard not to get self philosophical and spiritual when you are always with yourself. With no one to talk to. And when you have no where else to run and hide, you’ll seek comfort in that space, no matter how claustrophobic, will shelter a womb for you to crawl inside. Just to die in there so you could live another day. She looked to the urban infrastructures and its unnatural lights for an escape.
There will be none, Darcy had decided long ago. She would have left Daniel if she could, but she couldn't do it. The sacrifices she had made for their relationship and they had gone through so much together. She still loves the young poet. It was this love that burns her most than his rage. Perhaps if one day, both her heart and the clouds could stop crying, just like when she was eleven again, when the alligator belt with silver buckle stop breaking her soul, then she could be forever free from men. The groundhog days of Darcy Kathiravan are in prefect sync then, she thought, with all that ever will be in her future. Imprinted on every reflection on the windows, the buses, the gutter puddles, the moonshine and every broken blender was her future on the kitchen floor with Daniel and the thousand puzzles of glassware.
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