Chapter 1: MONDAY the TENTH of JULY
"Mommy?" A little girl of five years of age, wearing a pink transparent night gown asked of me.
"Yes, baby girl?" I asked back, as gently as I could.
"I had a nightmare again. you, daddy and me were having fun, eating food, and playing games and then---daddy wasn't there anymore. He was dead"
Reports came to me some months ago. All the reports included a photograph of my husband--both before he enlisted and thereafter.
They wrote the location and the assumed time of death. The Council was unable to verify whether the corpse they had found was indeed that of him or of someone else.
I ended up having to do the verifying process myself, unbeknown to my only child--my only daughter. That was exactly two month ago, today. Madison has been experiencing the same vivid nightmares as I.
His body, found torn in so many pieces, took hours to find all. The intestines were the ones, the Council were most perplex the most. As my husband's intestines disappeared without even so much as a trace. They search miles in a radius from where his dead body was found to no avail. My husband was marked as beast attack.
The first sight was all it took to bring me to my knees.
"Sometimes," the coroner had informed me. "the first sight was marked with confusion; and as the misses realized their husbands were certainly dead; the grieving process had begun"
Mine did not go as he foresaw, however. As someone who had seen the most bizzare of unexplained incidents especially those that occured in the slum, I thought nothing could scare me anymore. I thought I knew myself better than that. However, an unforeseen event occured. Tears flew down from my eyes and flew some more. I cannot remember the last time I cried this much. It has been so long.
I laid upon a heavily misshapen body in horrific angles and positions that made me shriek and jump away.
The coroner had told me the body would look different from the man--from the husband I knew so well and had married for more than ten years.
However, those words rang no bells of warnings nor did his fastidious words in the ancient alchemic formulae of half-truths and half-lies compel me to prepare in advance.
I went there expecting to see a familiar face, but what I found was nothing short of a direct confrontation between man and beast.
A punctured head embedded by a sizably heavy force with a pointy end. Those were the words the doctor informed me after my earlier distress had faded from my memory and replaced by grief.
The doctor explained a poison rested deep within the blood vessels of my husband and that I should avoid touching any open wounds.
"There were nothing but open wounds" my eyes yelled at him in a lengthy and maddening stare, till the doctor could no longer hold the awkward atmosphere and speedily walked out the room.
I spent the entire night there….
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