Mystery
826 Words
Advik Dey:
Imagine waiting for your long awaited vacation but instead getting the sound of crickets haunting you in the background.
When I went to work at 8 AM today, I thought that I would finally crash on my comfortable bed at 8 PM.
Fair call, right?
But guess what?
God never wanted to see me... resting.
Tell me one thing. Does reset buttons exist?
Because if I had a reset button, I would like to reset the unwanted smells from that shitty hospital.
Oh, how wonderful would it be!
And then, I would have to reset the pathetic clocks.
Maybe there would have been 20 minutes in an hour.
But reset buttons don't exist (why would it?).
Today I got an emergency call and had to drag my ass towards another of the useless meetings with my Department for 4 hours straight.
They were really important (truly).
Doctors, especially seen youngsters like us by the senior ones, were accustomed to the consequences of what a single mistake could mean.
You mess up a single dose.
Emergency.
You mess up the timing.
Dying tissues. Pathetic cries from the corridors.
And then,
DEATH.
If I had chosen something else. Something that didn't have to do with this word.
I badly wished to take a different occupation and pay (at least) less heed to my demanding mother.
But I end up listening to Her anyway.
And look who was crawling home at 11 PM?
Me.
But my dear mother even snatched the feeling of home away from me.
You must know why.
I had a b***h, signed to be my wife, pacing the shiny floors of my dear home.
I had nothing to do anyway.
Sweaty and f*****g exhausted, ready to punch every single person who would restrain me from crashing on my bed, I knocked on the door.
I simply didn't have the energy to even twist the knob.
Thank God for not having to lock The door and open it with some f*****g keys.
"The Door is open."
I groaned as I twisted the handle and stumbled into the living room.
I could hear a crime podcast running in The background.
And then, I saw Her.
Her long hair spread messily on the floor as she hung her head upside down from The sofa.
'Her body was found near the Mississippi. Bruised by several mysterious marks'
I noticed darts flying in the air.
"What the f**k, Hridhi?" I shouted out.
She continued shooting darts, hanging upside down from the sofa, and perfectly hitting the center titled DEATH.
I knew she was good with guns.
But definitely not like that.
I walked towards her, suddenly forgetting about my f****d up exhausted mind, and took the bucket of drags away from her.
"You hang like that for one more second and give the board of orthopedics a heart attack," I said.
She didn't move. Not even an inch.
Her hands just crawled towards the TV remote and turned it off.
"Food is in the oven."
She brought another dart from the pockets of her pajamas and began to shoot.
One shot.
The word death withered.
Another shot.
The word almost vanished.
For a moment, I just watched. There was a strange melancholy between her and the word DEATH.
"What?" asked Hridhi, finally settling back to a medically less freakish position. "Won't you have dinner?"
I sighed.
"No, I had a take-out."
I turned towards my room, my shirt begging to be in the washer.
Just then,I heard her voice.
"Now who's gonna give the nutritionists a heart attack?"
I didn't turn around.
"Doctors are the worst patients," I said, shutting the door of my room behind me.
I couldn't figure out whether she was saying anything or not. Because right then, shower was my first priority.
I stepped into my bathroom, the cold water already the most precious artifact I ever possessed. Just as I turned to unbutton my sweaty white shirt, I noticed a piece of paper resting on the small space below the air vent.
Curious.
Why would I keep anything other than toilet papers in my bathroom?
As if pulled by some dangerous electromagnetic waves, I unfolded the piece of paper.
It was typed. With a dangerous front.
And trust me, I would have been 10 times less worried if the font was not that scary.
No more power play, Chatterjee. I'll get you first.
My hands almost lost all connections to the brain. My blood turned frozen.
I got out of the bathroom, the note in my hand.
"Hridhi," I shouted, my voice desperate enough to be mistaken for a delusional husband. "Wh-what is this?"
She took the note from my hand as if it was nothing.
She looked at it for one last time before she said,
"It's nothing. Might have delivered to the wrong vent."
I watched her storm into her own room, leaving me there, pupils dilated and fingers still paralyzed.
- Writer
