WIDE ASLEEP

*** She stoped listening to his voice and focused on his mouth instead, imagining how good it would feel to slowly raise her hand and wrap it around his strong, tanned neck; how would it feel to pull herself into his chest inhaling his scent, to taste his lips, his tongue, to feel his perfect white teeth running her tongue along them, tasting him. She could feel herself getting wet and blushed, dropping gaze in embarrassment. It felt like an eternity until he stopped talking, she realised in panic and swallowed hard, whilst not daring to look up and face him. His hot stare was boring a hole though her. She felt as if he read her mind and new exactly were her filthy thoughts were, just moments before. s****l tension was thick in the air. She felt ashamed, fearing that he could somehow smell her excitement. Her treacherous heart pounded hard causing her shortness of breath and in turn making her chest visibly rise and fall, rapidly, in an effort to take short and quick breaths, inhaling erratically and with great effort. Her n*****s got hard and erect pitching up the thin, white cotton fabric of her office shirt… *** MADELEINEEEE!!!! The jarring sound of Madeleine’s alarm, a loud Ed Sheeran track ‘The Shape of You’, coming from her phone was obliterated with annoyed woman’s cry.. “Get up already! You are going to be late for school, again!’ Kassia, Madeleine’s mother, abruptly barged in the girl’s room to open the curtains whilst shouting once more, “Get up!” The young woman slowly rolled out of bed, stretching her limbs in a way that resembled a feline. “University”, Madeleine flatly said. “What?” “University, not school.” “Stop being smart-mouth and get ready. Did you forget that today you need to drop your sister off to school?” Abruptly, Kassia stopped in her tracks to give her daughter more thorough look. She viewed the young woman with suspicion, focusing on her rosy cheeks and tousled hair. Katia’s eyes darted to Madeleine’s bed, inspecting her sheets. “Are you all right Madeleine”, Kassia asked with forced nonchalance. “You look flushed.” The sudden change in her mother‘s tone made the young woman extremely uncomfortable. “Here we go again”, she thought to herself. There was no privacy in this household or even outside of it; nowhere to hide, not even between the walls of her room. It was never considered ’her’ space, she wasn’t allowed to lock the door. There was no confinement where she could feel invisible and relaxed, alone with her private thoughts and emotions not for a second, not ever. Madeleine’s parents, Driza and Kassia, kept their children firmly under their thumb, never ever relaxing the reins. They believed with deep conviction that it was their duty to protect their own daughters from the outside world and influence, shielding them against anything that they deemed potentially compromising to their daughters’ innocence and that was pretty much everything they could think of. In their opinion, all that could potentially lead to their daughter’s independent thinking, including work experience and most of the extracurricular activities, especially non-chaperoned ones was fraught with risk and even danger. Everything that held even the slightest potential of leading the girls towards emotional maturity and social intelligence was weeded out of their lives and that included friendships. Everything was supervised in a controlling manner. It instilled fear in girls and lack of trust towards their parents and relatives. They felt trapped and isolated and even worse, they felt they could confide in no one. Madeline started writing emotional diary when she was twelve. It was the only outlet left out to her. Unfortunately, it was not private either. Kassia found it and then, together with Madeleine’s older sibling, Zania, who was allowed to read her sister’s diary, publicly made fun of Madeleine’s puppy crush on her classmate, Malden. That public ridicule and humiliation was something Madeleine never forgot and found hard to forgive, too. Not only that but, by doing so Kassia shut out an option of a private diary as an emotional outlet to Madeleine; she also thought her eldest daughter not to support her sisters. It wasn’t a completely innocent mistake. Kassia was consciously creating mistrust between her daughters in order for them to spy on one another. Kassia was the master manipulator and the Queen of the household and Driza was the King and her puppet - their daughters nothing but loyal subjects and mindless drone tools of their parents’ ambition. Kassia and Driza had a cut out clear vision in which girls had to become respectively: a Lawyer, a Doctor and a Pharmacist in order to continue working in their father’s clinic, under his thumb, so that even after he retires, he would continue to run it thus controlling their lives and, Kassia would be all too happy to pull the strings through him, until the very end of their days. She was the ultimate manipulator. The thought of their daughters’ personal happiness never entered their minds: who would they marry, how would their own families’ quality time and subsequently happiness suffer - none of that was taken into the equation or even considered. To Driza and therefore Kassia, the daughters were mere tools, not a source of parental joy and pride, unlike a son would have been, had they ever had one, they firmly believed and were not shy to express their disappointment in not having a son to carry on the family name and legacy. It took years for Madeline to realise how exactly everything in her life was orchestrated: from allowed and vetted friends to allowed and even more stringently vetted boyfriends (platonic relationships only, of course). Not once, Madeleine had found current affairs and culture Magazines with butchered articles - the illustrations cut out of them. Her mother would carefully censor anything that may have had even a hint of nudity whether those were photographs of classical art like masterpieces by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni or simply extracts from Kama Sutra that accompanied otherwise very interesting articles that were bizarrely left behind for reading, just without “pornography”. Truth to be told, Madeleine’s nine years old, younger sister, Tenera, was too young to be ‘in any danger’ of coming across those articles by accident: she read just Mickey Mouse comic books in her free time, watched cartoons and played with her Barbie dolls, still. Madeleine’s 4 years older sister, Zania, had even less interest in anything that could be considered an effort to learn something that could potentially broaden her horizons; if she ever read in her free time, those would be just plain old, simple teenage love stories and an occasional Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins novel to satisfy curiosity of her budding sexuality. Zania was really only interested in investing minimal effort in anything she did and spending their parents’ money on sycophants who pretended to be her friends, falsely ‘worshipping’ her in order to gain access to Zania’s parents’ influence and money which Zania uncontrollably and frivolously spent on her posse of ‘admirers’. In reality, Kassia’s censorship was aimed at Madeleine; Madeleine’s insatiable zeal for reading and learning included any sources of information that she could possibly lay her hands on: The Economist, National Geographic (even tribal photos were cut out), TIME Magazine, The Lancet, … literally anything. In turn, Madeleine found her parents’ apparent prudishness tiring and ridiculous: her father was a Doctor, her mother a Biologist and Madeleine herself studied Medicine. It was their fear of ‘losing their face’ and social standing in the community should their daughters ever happen be caught ‘misbehaving’ or embarrassed by getting their name tarnished by even a hint of a ‘scandal’ that totally misguided her parents in how to treat their daughters. At least, Madeleine strongly felt that way and that ‘the community’ was a gang of Kassia and Driza’s relatives, “friends” and a gossiping, random nucleus of the provincial town they lived in; like the whole wide world with all the wonders and wonderful peoples in it did not exist at all. In reality, Madeleine came to realise with sadness, exactly how narrow minded and insular her family was. They were good people, just did not know any better. What Madeline came to despise is the fact that they did not want to try to be better, to open to change or even consider that there was something else out there and that discarding the shackles of a provincial mindset might be a good thing for them all, not necessarily source of shame and embarrassment. The fear of the latter two was how ‘the community’ kept young minds under control. She started to feel ‘the yoke’ of the restrictions on her personal freedoms more and more difficult to bear, day after day. She felt it stunted her growth as an individual and as an adult, rendering her and her sisters into permanent state of infantile dependency on their parents and all with the ultimate goal of total and complete control of their lives. Inadvertently, their way of ‘carrot and stick’ parenting methods slowly evolved into a mixture of bullying tactics and eventually backfired. One time, when Madeleine’s older sister, Zania, tried to break ‘the chains’ and openly rebelled against the suffocating control she was constantly under, their entire extended family got involved: all of their Aunts and Uncles suddenly felt the urge ‘to help’ openly offering their assistance and endless lectures on how things should be done. They congregated at Madeleine’s parents’ house with sighs and sad faces whilst gleefully, in secret and behind their backs maliciously enjoying Zenia’s parents’ fall from grace’. Madeline came to despise all of them because of their hypocrisy and badly hidden Schadenfreude. Poor Zania had no one to turn to for support, she was so full of pent up anger that she slapped Madeleine when Madeleine tried to comfort her with hug. Zania reacted with aggression toward the only person that was kind to her. In reality, as much as Madeleine hated Zania’s behaviour and despised Zania’s choices, Madeleine also was the only one who could relate to Zania’s feelings of frustration caused by the oppression they both lived under because Madeleine too felt rudderless and frustrated. *** In fact, Zania has been violent towards Madeleine for as long as Madeleine could remember. Zania’s animosity and jealousy towards both of her younger sisters was never hidden. Their parents’ way of raising their children put Zania in social isolation. Unlike Madeline who was generally thought to be gregarious and well adapted, popular leader amongst her peers at school and outside, Zania have always struggled to be accepted for how she was, constantly hen pecked and corrected by their mother. It created feelings of inadequacy and insecurity deep within Zania’s core and only way to vent out her feelings which she did not understand was to lash out, all of her unexpressed emotions morphed into pure rage and aggression like lava, simmering under pressure and waiting to explode. And, the target of it, most often was Madeleine.