Mattresses

It was little more than a ribbon of light, stark through the tangent
of loose canvas that was ripped. Through this slit came flashes of
incandescent desert burn, etched painfully onto her tired eyes. She
drank in this shock of light, the nonsensical blurrings that she knew
was the desert, her desert. For six hours now, she had sat on the
slatted wooden bench in the back of this truck, passively rolling with
each rut and dip, twisted around to look through the rip in the canvas.
The soldiers opposite slept sitting, using their rifles as stabilisers.
The truck never faltered in its speed as it went onward towards the
prison.

It held no fear for her, the prison. Not because she was a brave human
being, not because she had built an ideological fervour to cauterise
her feelings. The prison held no fear because it was better than the
current void, better than her futile grip on the few remaining vapours
of her previous life.

Six years ago they had been troubled only by the strange aggregate
temperament of a couple who lived so closely bound. The arguments, at
the time, had felt like trouble. But when the troops came and rounded
up half of the town, had them standing in dusty formations in the
town's decrepid square, she knew that this was real trouble, tangible
and deadly.

Her relatives went away in the soldier's trucks, but they were
reassured by the officer's calm diction. She remembered how the officer
had sweated in the rural heat, his cap slowly darkening, in the soaking
up of all his soft city sweat. The officer had spoken in a slow and
exaggerated calm of how they had nothing to fear, nothing to lose, he
spoke of her relative's return as if it were a foregone conclusion,
only obscured by some petty form-filling. And then he left.

The relatives never returned, and in place of the softly spoken city
officer, they had his antithesis, the sergeant. He didn't speak, he
shouted. He shouted the most foul and brutalising obscenities at
anybody within eyesight of him. He beat everyone with his riding crop,
his own soldiers, old women and children. He even beat himself when it
all got too much, thwacking his own leg with such mechanical rage that,
on calming, he would limp back to his waiting car. More and more people
disappeared under the sergeant, until there were just a few families
left to furrow a groove between each other's houses.

They survived by bartering, they bartered for food, water and news.
They bartered their wine and the virtue of their sisters, for
relatives. Many deals were never honoured, or became devalued by the
inflation of abuse. One soldier obtained from a family every possible
combination of vices, and then in return delivered only a single bullet
to the head for each family member.

She had fallen asleep, due to the soporific mixture of the desert oven
and fumes from the truck, that streamed through the gap in the canvas.
A sudden lurch had thrown her against the upright boards that lined the
truck. Her mouth bled, and a metallic taste, her blood, felt beautiful
to her mouth, a mouth that had not been kissed since the day that the
sergeant had taken her husband away.

She was dragged, still clinging to his nightshirt hem, her voice a
klaxon of shrill horror and refusal. The soldiers tried grabbing her
arms, to disengage her from her husband who was lost to his shock. But
like a child she simply relaxed her grip just enough, to clamp again
from another angle. Rifles were poked at her ribs, but she curled
herself up until the barrels were deflected. They eventually grabbed
reams of her hair, and savagely ripped her from her husband. The moment
of separation was final. He was gone. She sat on the street, surrounded
by footprints, now empty, and wailed like a baby. Clumps of her
bloodied hair lay on her shoulders and chest, separate and ugly and
forlorn.

The next day she waited until she heard the thrum of their cars, on
their daily excursion into the town, and then raced to plead with the
sergeant. She composed herself enough to recite the litany of pleas
that she had rehearsed all night, her appeal to his humanity on the
basis of her practical need for her husband. He didn't even falter in
his quota of shouted orders, abuses or threats. She hung onto his arm
for about two seconds, before he shrugged her off as if she were a
horny street-dog. Determined, she walked behind him as he strutted
around the latest looted acquisition, she demanding justice from the
back of his pneumatic neck. He ignored her. From within her shawl she
pulled out her husband's knife, took a second to line up her hand with
his rolling walk, pulled on his forehead with her free hand, and tried
to slit his throat. He span, clutching his nicked throat, and
headbutted her.

The truck slowed and through the gap in the canvas, feet, buildings.
They had arrived at the prison. And ahead of her lay the cell and the
final indignity of death, the wrong kind of homecoming for a woman who
only ever wanted to go back to arguing about the cost of new
mattresses.