Struggle

He swam towards her, swiftly, the adrenaline flowing in his veins; making him feel a state of existence that heightened all of his senses. His fluid motions seemed one with the waves that he silently cut across.

As the last shred of consciousness left her, giving her a fiercely-desired reprieve from an all-consuming terror, she saw him approach her.

Her eyes opened to the room that had come to be her living quarters for the past 3 months.
His house. Her house, her home, her prison?

She wondered when he would take her out on that boat again;to leave her in the deep waters to drown. She couldn’t swim. He knew that, like the hundreds of other things he knew about her. Remnants of an irreparable past….
This was the third time he had thrown her aboard, bound and tied, struggling in vain. But, somehow, the moment when her mortal fear of death turned to acceptance, when she gave up on life and resisted no more, he appeared out of nowhere to take her back to the mortal world.

He enjoyed it, she knew. Watching her dread, her hopelessness, her surrender to the inevitable. She wished she could curse him; call him a sadist in her head, at least. But she couldn’t.
It was his overpowering sense of indifference towards her, her, not the body that struggled in the water, which she could not understand…

****


He watched her, his hands clutching the cool, metal railing of his boat. His knuckles white, his face expressionless. She didn’t fight today. Her lithe body did not thrash against the rising water.
He noticed her eyes. They had something in them that he couldn’t completely fathom. Was it hope?Did she think he would come again and hold her half-conscious body as they inched closer to the boat? Maybe it was…

The knowledge of her look gave him a sense of defeat. Then slowly, he allowed himself a smile. Today, he wouldn’t go. Today he would wait till he saw her last breathe being snuffed out. He wouldn’t go; for the sake of that one moment, that one look in her eyes when she would realise that he wasn’t going to come to save her today. The eloquent look that would say everything that was ever said, or should have been said between them…

Today, he watched her die.

Her candy

She looked down at her toes as if she was fascinated by them, like she had never looked at them properly before and they offered her a whole new world of exploration. Finally, after the coaxing power of her friends was exhausted, they ran off leaving her alone to look from afar.
He had come again today, as he always did, every weekend every month of the year. He had a bright blue bag out of which he extracted various colors of crisp, bright paper within which there were a myriad collection of candies. The candies had the most amazingly different flavors…musk melon, rose, cherry and lemon.
She closed her eyes. She knew the scene before her eyes without even looking at it. The children surrounding him, happy, squealing, their hands outstretched to gather the candy he had come again to distribute. Again.
She had wondered often why she didn’t join her friends when they went to acquire the candy. It was not like she didn’t want to taste them, to enjoy their sweet roundness lolling around in her mouth….so then what stopped her?
She didn’t know, couldn’t find the answer to the problem even after so much deliberation. Perhaps it was a prevailing shyness or a strange inhibition that told her that asking for something she wanted would be a mistake. She should wait for the thing to come to her. Was it an odd sense of pride??
She had seen him smiling at her often, a kind of invitation or a question in his eyes…She wondered if he would come and give her the candy after he was done with the others. He never came. She gradually got tired of waiting.
Now, she speculated if she was waiting for him anymore. She quietly limped back towards her house in the next street. Her prosthetic leg was giving her a little trouble that day.
A few weeks passed, when she wasn’t able to go and play outside on weekends because of a persistent cold that had left her weak. she thought of the candy man and his sweets as she walked towards the garden today. But today he didn’t show up…and she realized: She didn’t care for the candy any longer; perhaps she didn’t all along….
This thought gave her a calm feeling of liberation. She was free again.
She felt older, wiser….but she couldn’t pass up this opportunity to indulge in these outdoor games again. She yelled as one of her friends came up right behind her to catch her and she swiftly hobbled to her region of safety.
Her clear laughter rang through the garden. She was saved. Again.