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I looked up to where Leila was standing. As each second passed, she drifted away from me even more. The vivid picture I had of her was dissolving. My memories of her were growing indistinct. I continued to stare at her blurred image until she slowly disappeared from my sight. My caged emotions released into the open air and Leila was gone for good. I felt a sense of relief now. Papa was standing above me. I looked up at him. “Papa, it’s not your fault.”  I closed my eyes. Now I could move on.

It broke into a million little pieces. I stood there frozen, but not shocked by my own audacity.  He turned around. The fierceness in his eyes pierced my throat.  Slowly, they softened, laughter stretched out from within his rotund belly.

“Now why would you do that?” he asked, scratching his forehead. “Throwing things at me isn’t going to solve a thing.”

He walked into the kitchen and asked Julia to clean up the mess before he left the house. She was used to the shattering sounds. Once a week at least, she would scurry into the small room to pull out the ufagio. Even though there was dustpan, she insisted on using one of the newspapers piled up on the dining room table.

I lay down on the sofa and flipped through the channels, but gave up. Rolling over onto my stomach, I stared out the window at the garden. I could barely see beyond the bars that kept us away from the world outside, I laughed. She had washed the curtains in the living room and hung them up after they had dried. One was longer than the other. I studied them from top to bottom and realized that she had put two different curtains up. I walked into the spare bedroom and in fact, she had.

I crawled back onto the sofa. Too many pictures filled my head and I couldn’t bear to think anymore. My head hurt from the ridiculous thoughts that encircled my brain. I wished they would stop. The voices inside my head had begun again and I wanted them to go away. The last time this happened, I woke up with a bloody knife in my hand.

Sleep. Blank slate. Shutdown. I must have drifted off. I woke up several hours later, my hands were red.  I thought I had gotten rid of that damn knife.