The Accidents

The breeze tickled me lightly, caressing my exposed face. The weather was gloomy, with clouds hiding the sun, and rain threatening the pedestrians. I didn’t mind it. I was lost in my own blank world, walking around aimlessly, unable to think.

The breeze was carrying away the frosty air that had already dampened my clothes, which were all black in color.

The breeze picked up a little speed, waking me up from my unfocused reverie. I shook my head to calibrate myself into where I was and what I was doing. I suddenly shivered. The cold, which I hadn’t felt till then, suddenly bit me like many small animals through my thin clothes.

I felt the numbness of my fingers and my face. Weren’t they always like that? The street was empty except for a homeless person shivering near an alley. He was thin, sickly and was perpetually coughing. I wondered how the people living in those buildings bore all that noise.

I felt the stick in my hand and thought if I should take him. It would be better for him, and all others living there, wouldn’t it?

My clothes stuck against me as the wind suddenly picked up speed. I could feel my thin skin against my bones.

I smiled. Not now. I left him there. Let him cough a little more.

He was an accident.

I walked on more, leaving the noisy coughs behind.

I got into a nearby house.

In the second floor, there was a young woman, about 20 years old, preparing water to bathe her little son of no more than one year of age. She picked her son up and gently rocked him in her arms. The little kid’s eyes were of a bright blue color; curious little eyes trying to learn more about the world around him.

The woman looked happy and content for a while, before again looking haggard and unwell. She was a single mother, with an accidental pregnancy. The kid took away her future, her whole life. Her escapades were finally catching up to her. The society no longer wanted her. She wanted to start life anew in a new place, with no-one there to remind her of her old life.

She wanted a new beginning.

She whispered in her child’s ear, “I’m sorry.”

She then placed the kid into the tub brimming with water and held him under the water. The natural instinct of the baby made him hold his breath for a while. His innocent eyes turned wild for a moment before settling down. The eyes lost their brightness and happiness. The brain stopped functioning shortly afterwards. There was no struggle. He was dead. A bright future suddenly doesn’t exist.

His mother took her hands off her baby. The trembling hands reached towards the table to get her mobile phone. She called the police, and lied in the corner of the room, crying softly yet noisily.

Later, while giving a statement to the police, she said, “It was an accident.”

Two days later, I saw her in the county jail. She had not been convicted yet. She cut her wrists in the evening of that day. I still remember her glassy eyes looking at me as her life ended.

I smiled. It comes to everyone: the over-ambitious, the under-ambitious, and all the collateral damage between them.

A few days later, I met a boy on the streets.

He was raped, brutally so. He was lying in a dark pathway completely naked. Blood poured from all the orifices of his body. His male appendage had been horribly mutilated. His breathing was ragged and uneven. He couldn’t move.

But, he saw me. One of his eyes was covered with dirt and blood. With the other, he looked at me.

“Who are you?” he cried in a feeble and broken voice.

The hope he had on his eyes when he saw the outline of my body suddenly extinguished as I got near him.

Then he died.

“It was an accident. We didn’t mean to kill him.” said the offenders.

It was not an accident.

They didn’t get a significant prison time.

He was called a queer.

They didn’t care for him.

I didn’t smile.

I withdrew myself from the world.

I had been putting up a façade of strength and inhumanity in all my travels.

But, periodically, I look at myself.

I have been scarred by the things I have seen. I have already been reduced to skin and bone, have seen lots of horrifying things.

Still nothing is able to top the absolute horror that humans can create.

I watch over all of the humans.

But, who will watch over me?

Who will think about, and for me?

I am death.

And, I am scarred and petrified by life.