It was getting late enough to be worried. I once again stepped into the balcony and looked down. Except for a drenched street dog that was lying down miserably near the gate, there was not a soul to be seen anywhere. Rain water had puddled under the lamp post. A breeze ruffled the mango tree in the courtyard and a few twigs fell down and broke. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Did I hear a soft knock at the door? I turned back.

I slid myself through the balcony door and the smell of sweat stained paranoia hit me again. I passed the bedroom and approached the stairs. There are eleven of them, each faintly lit by the dirty white glow of the fluorescent that hangs above. I walked down to the empty living room, passing the bare walls, unmarked by memory, and stood in front of the door. I unlatch the bolts and nudge the door open.

Fresh petrichor washed over my rapidly ageing body but that was all. He wasn't there. I stepped out to the grey world outside. The mud sensed my bare foot and seeped in through my toes slowly- thick, viscous and bubbling- so very much like blood. Hers. I had watched her blood ooze out of her lifeless body, collect to a droplet and-

Plop! A raindrop landed obliquely on my check. A crow preening itself on the mango tree cawed loudly and took flight. Where the hell was he? I looked at the battered watch on my wrist and it showed 7:33 pm. He had written he would be here by seven. Then it clicked. Of course, he wouldn't meet me here. I went inside the house, wiped my feet, put on my boots and picked up the jacket and the keys from the floor. Deliberately, I left the umbrella leaning against the wall. I did not want him to be intimidated. By anything.

I felt strangely calm; yet kept thinking how all monsters are a human creation.

The gravel crunched under my feet and the low roar of thunder seemed to chase me. I walked, head down, thoughts scrambled.

Everything was like a rain cloud- unstable.

As I passed the tree and opened the gate, a strong wind pulled at my clothes. A stronger force pulled my existence to my past. And into that abyss of memory, I fell. It was inevitable really, remembering the accident. To be honest, it was fitting. Every story needs skewed timelines.

It had burned us. Not in the way fire burns you, but in the way anger does. Warm, fluid, mesmerising heat spreading to the tips of your fingers, leaving a slight aftertaste in your mouth, clouding your brain. Drawing blood. In the end, baffling you with the randomness and abstractness of the thing and the detailed and realistic destruction it brings. The accident did that to us. A metaphorical storm, two months fourteen days prior to today's literal one.

The knuckles steering the car were white and the face that belonged to them was red with excitement. The evening was dark and stuffy. After much compelling, I had let my seventeen-year-old son drive. His seven-year-old sister, was humming a tune I don't remember now. My son looked at me- "Told you I could do it, Papa."

My wife smiled at the rear-view mirror. A happy anonymous family. My son opened a window to let the air in and the truck smashed into us.

It's uncanny- the way you can remember every thread of detail that weaves the fabric of your reality. The dark evening was showing stars through the fractured windscreen. Systematic, perfectly aligned gashes sliced through my son's face and arms. I did not hear screams. We were flying through the air. The evening was smiling at us. The rear-view mirror showed my wife's head smash into the door and my daughter's neck jerk in an odd way. A mangled piece of metal cleanly slid itself into her stomach. Sparkling, beautiful fragments of glass embedded like a puzzle on my son's face. I felt my head being smashed into the window again and again and a cold wind of pain ripple through my ribs.

In a strange way, it was aesthetic. Beautiful and angry; soothing and irritating; calm and violent.

The car flipped over, tearing through the darkness and the empty air. The metal, glass, flesh, bone and blood formed an art no artist could ever create on a canvas.

Clean, synchronized, numbing and brutal; pain hung inside the car, enveloping us in a cold, caressing hug.

As the pain soothed my head and closed my eyes; I thought I saw the evening outside turn into night and the bright hopeful stars laugh at us.

I couldn't reciprocate the gesture.

I woke up with my head screaming with a concussion. My body was lying broken among the hospital linen and my soul was in pieces from the pain.

My wife woke up with fractured ribs and limbs and severe lacerations on her faces, arms and waist. And with an emptiness that never filled.

My son woke up with his face badly sewn up and multiple injuries on every inch of his body. He woke up believing that only if he hadn't wanted to drive, this wouldn't have happened. He woke up breeding a creature called guilt that would cause insects to crawl up his brain and turn him into a monster.

My daughter did not wake up.

The accident took all names away, scattered them into the deepest voids of nothingness. Names don't have meaning anyways.

The rain was pounding now and I was drenched. I changed my mind about going there. I wasn't ready. I knew I will never be. I decided to go to my sister first. It's Friday so her husband has gone off to work. And they don't have kids. She's alone.

And time, finally, catches up with my narration.

Fifteen minutes later, I ring the doorbell of her house. I take off my jacket and she gives me a towel to wipe myself.

"What happened?" she asks.

I look at her face- shocked, large, fidgety eyes which are so much like mine. She's a year older; darker hair, sallower skin.

"He sent me a note." I reply. She sighs and looks away. Suddenly, I regret coming here. She opens her mouth to speak but I cut her off. "I don't want to hear it."

She sits down on the couch and I on the armchair facing her.

"Who killed her?" she asks, whispering.

"He did."

"Call the police."

I give her a hollow laugh, "I won't let the police handle this yet. I need to do this first."

"What if the people find out? And when they do... Tell me. Please. What happened that day?"

I didn't realize that I had begun to speak.

"People won't find out. You know the house- cut off from the other ones. So, they couldn't have heard the shot. I've buried her in the backyard. He was different ever since he blamed himself for his sister's death. He became detached. Vague. We didn't take him to a psychiatrist because we didn't want him to be declared insane. We were too dissociated from everything for therapy. We couldn't talk. All of those things were a mistake. We didn't send him to school either and I couldn't bring myself to go to work. There was this thick tension in the house which only increased when everyone confined themselves in. He used to lock himself up in his room for hours at a stretch. And my wife was done. She screamed when I touched her and kept talking to herself in hushed tones. She kept having random fits of hysteria. I watched her destroy herself and I didn't try and help. I was just an observer. No one talked. I guess it would have subsided in a month or so but three days back, he broke.

"It was about eight in the evening and he crept down the stairs to the living room. He was holding a revolver I had bought two years back- after the robbery at our house. He came up to us and started giggling to himself quietly. Then abruptly, he started screaming at us. She didn't even look up. She was sitting on the couch, looking at her hands. I got up when I saw the gun and made my way towards him, asking him to be calm to put the gun down but he...he had this look you know- delusional. And he said- 'The devil sends his regards', he pointed the gun towards my wife and when I lunged at him, screaming at him to stop, he fired.

"One to her head and one to her chest."

I am shaking now and when I look up to my sister, I see that she is scared. She has curled herself up and her eyes are bulging.

"How...you..." she starts but can get no further.

"My son laughed manically and ran out of the house and I stared at my wife. She was still. She was just flesh and bones. Nothing else. Voiceless, nameless, dead.

"I think I dug up the hole and buried her. I was in a trance. I found the gun lying on the floor and left it there. I took my jacket and the umbrella, unlatched the bolts, locked the house and checked in to a motel. That's where I've been for three days. Today, I got a note from him telling me to meet him by seven. I don't know how he found me."

"You're not..."

"What choice do I have?" I look out of the window. The rain has stopped. I get up, pick up the jacket and open the door. "Can I get your car keys?"

"No." She looks frantic. "Your son..."

"You're wrong. You've always been wrong." I say and close the door on my way out.

Often, I feel that my life is a poorly written book. I feel like I have no past or future. Just events that matter over a particular phase of time. I don't feel like I exist and wonder if someone is penning me down, making ink flow through my veins instead of blood. I feel like I'm being eaten inside out by something I can't see, cannot hear. I know there are much more serious adversities people face, and that my problems are nothing but exaggerated in front of them. I know I'm just a breather in the flames life sets upon humanity. Another monster in human clothing. An insignificant particle of dust that is breathed in, breathed out. That no one will look back at me and say that my life matters. I'm another stranger in the crowd, another faceless shadow. Another nobody.

I don't know what to think right now. If my sister is right, there must be a flaw in my narration. And if there is, then-

I see the house. It's two storied, a hundred meters away from the rest of the buildings. Secluded. I take out my keys and slide them in the brass keyhole and hear the click as the complex mechanism inside unwinds; the creak of the door and the whiff of the stale air inside rush out. I enter and shut the door, trying not to look at the walls or the floors. Trying not to look at anything. And then I can't help it. My eyes take in everything and my pupils dilate. The specks of blood on the walls. She had been shot on the sofa. Some red had flecked off and dried on the wall behind her. The room is in disarray. The furniture is askew- knocked aside when I dragged her body to the backyard. The gun is still lying on the floor, sinister looking. There is a certain smell that hangs in the room- a stale, decaying sort of smell. My heart beating savagely, I take some steps into the room. The evening is turning into night and I flick on the fluorescent light to cover the insidious darkness.

The room illuminates and my heart skips a beat. I thought I saw something. It was only my reflection on the window- pale skin, thinly built and weakened by circumstances.

I see forms looming all around me. My heart is crushing my ribs and seems to tune in with the only sound I hear- of the wall clock.

That's what my heart sounds like right now- 'Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock, Tick...' I take enervated steps to the netted door that leads to the backyard. A line of flaking blood leads to it. Sweat builds up on my forehead and I can feel the little beads crawl down my temple. I look through the net- the mound of dirt where my love is sleeping. Beyond that is the bricked fence after which there is silence and unused roads. The stars are faintly visible in the sky now. They seem to mock me- again. I remember how her limp body fell in the soft mud, her blood dissolving in the ground, two gaping holes in her beautifully flawed skin. I break. The shudders give way to tears and I cry on the net through which the night sees me.

I turn away from the metallic smell of the net and make my way to the living room. My head starts to ache. Badly. But I cannot stop the tears. I pick up a photograph of my family from the table- a life which was poisoned and cruelly taken away from me. I find a length of rope and fasten a loop at one end. I feed in the other end through the loop till a loose lasso remains. I climb up the stairs halfway and reaching up to the stairway grills on the upper level, tie the free end of the rope on one of the grills. You can do this in a two-storied house. You can hang yourself by jumping from the upper stairs to the lower ones. You can make your soul a part of the elements. You can make your body a fragment in time.

There's a soft knock on the door. It's him. I wipe my eyes and climb down the stairs and open the door to see my son. He smiles at me and says "Hello Papa." Then, he collects his hand into a fist and hits me on my jaw.

I fall to the ground. From shock, rather than injury. He bends down, takes my head and smashes it to the ground. Twice. I hear my son speak to himself in a sing song voice- "Mama watch me hurt a man" and then he starts laughing. Manically, uncontrollably. At a joke I can't see.

I get up. I don't see my son but the darkness that has consumed his brain and I can't feel my body anymore. I can't think rationally. I can't think as a father, or a human, or anything. I feel rage course through my veins and pity through my heart seeing what he has become. For some reason, I think of my sister and then shrug the thought off. It's too late. The family has been destroyed and its roots have been slashed. I can't think as I reach for his unresisting neck and take it up the stairs. I remember the gun and think I'll use that on myself later. Halfway up, I turn him around and feed his neck through the noose.

I stop dead. I look upon myself in repulsion. And as I look upon his body- shuddering in laughter- I know that it has already ended. At this moment, everything falls into place like a puzzle in the scrambles of my mind. I know it has never been my son but then what am I holding? What am I trying to do?

What am I?

Then it hits me. I look at the body in my hands, laughing uncontrollably, his neck not even resisting the rope. I found the flaw in my narration. My son had run out of the house leaving the door open and I had left the house by unlatching the bolts. Unfortunately, my brain hadn't thought of that.

A few days later, the papers will bear a small column stating the strange case of the suicide of an anonymous man who had had an accident two months and fourteen days back. It would say that this anonymous man's sister was right. That his son had died in the crash and unable to cope up with the grief of brutally losing two children, this man had unknowingly resurrected one of them and covered his guilt of letting the son drive in the first place. To cover his act of killing his wife when he could not stand her grief and hysteria.

My love screamed when I touched her because she had heard me talking to the hallucination of her son. Because she feared me. Because she knew her son was dead. My sweet sister tried to tell me but I didn't listen. She thought this was all a phase and would soon pass. She gave me a chance by waiting and not getting me taken off to an asylum. She trusted me. Even when I killed my wife. I blamed that on a delusion, like I did everything. I made up stories, made up lies and lived in them.

Isn't that what we all do? Escape to the warmth of a more beautiful prevarication to hide from the brutality of a colder truth? Immerse ourselves in things we know are untrue yet appealing? I cannot help but think if that's why people read stories. So that they can live in them.

I have carried it too far and now I cannot stop.

Because I'm just a breather in the flames and all I can do is follow, not resist.

Monsters die this night.

As I push my sweet young son down the stairs, I feel the noose tighten around my throat. I think it would complete me if I laugh at the stars now. As I open my mouth to do that, I feel the constricted, dark, foul, ever tightening bands of-
Silence.