Chapter 180
Her voice was flat, as still as the surface of a well too deep to reveal its bottom, as calm as a decision that had already been made before it was ever contemplated. At the corner of her lips, dried by black seasoning and hot oil, something slowly began to take shape.
Not a smile, but the shadow of one, a smile that never reached her eyes because those eyes were now fixed on something Absyumura could not see. Perhaps they were looking inward, into the darkest chamber of her heart, where anger was being forged into a fuel that would never run out.
"I know what you're about to say," Miara continued, and then she laughed.
It was not laughter born of happiness, nor laughter born of joy, but laughter that came from something already dead that had never learned how to bury itself. It sounded like bones grinding against one another inside a coffin too narrow to hold them, laughter that made Absyumura, who had been married to this woman for twenty years, twenty years sleeping beside her, twenty years hearing her laugh while she cooked, twenty years watching her smile whenever her closest family called, realize that he had never truly known Miara. Behind the skin, the flesh, and the gentle smile he had seen every morning, there had always been something else, something she had hidden because there had never been a reason for it to emerge. Now, with the news of Shaqar's death still echoing from the television that no one bothered to turn off, that hidden thing had finally come out.
"He deserved it, Absyumura. That bastard..."
She stopped there, drawing a breath that felt as though she were inhaling countless tiny thorns piercing her from within.
"... Or rather, the man known as Shaqar deserved exactly this punishment."
The words spilled from her mouth like vomit, like something she had buried for years in the deepest pit of her stomach, hidden beneath spices, chopped vegetables, and the daily routine of cooking that she had always carried out with love.
Now she spewed it all before her husband, who sat frozen on the muddy floor with eyes wide in disbelief, before the television that still displayed her father's smiling portrait, before a world that had never known that behind the door of this tiny house on the outskirts of an unnamed town, a daughter was burying her father not with tears, but with an anger she had carried ever since she had been too young to understand why her father left home far more often than he returned.
Her cynical laughter rang out again, clearer this time, more tangible, like a cracked bell that continued to be struck because there was no other bell left.
In the kitchen, where the oil had begun producing thick smoke that stained the ceiling black, Miara leaned against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest. The wooden spoon she still held dripped black seasoning onto the floor, a floor that no longer cared about fresh stains because it had already absorbed too many marks from tears, blood, and filth that had never been cleaned away.
"Do you see, Absyumura," Miara said, and now her voice was no longer angry. The anger had already departed, leaving behind only bitterness, bitterness that had fermented for years inside the sealed chamber of her heart, a chamber she had never opened to anyone.
"A man who has no sense of family in his heart, a man who loves his mission more than his wife, who loves his team more than his daughter, who loves dying more than living beside his family, a man like that deserves to die alone. He deserves to die somewhere even his daughter's prayers cannot reach. He deserves to die with his daughter's name on his lips without ever hearing her tell him that she hated being abandoned."
She let out a long breath, and within that exhale, for the first time since she had begun speaking in that emotionless voice, there was a tremor.
A tiny tremor, one she could not hide despite trying with all her strength, a tremor that revealed that beneath the anger, the cynical laughter, and the cutting words, something else still remained. Something older than anger, something deeper than bitterness, something called grief, though she had never dared to give it that name. To name grief would mean acknowledging it, acknowledging it would mean feeling it, and feeling it would mean falling apart.
"And look," she continued, her eyes shifting from Absyumura to the television that still displayed the portraits of fallen heroes.
"He died in the way that suited him best. He died at the center of the ritual. He died by blowing himself up. He died taking every exorcism tool he could gather along with him..."
Then she laughed again, louder than before, laughing until her shoulders trembled and the wooden spoon slipped from her hand, striking the floor with the very same sound her heart had made when she first realized that her father would never come home again.
"Isn't it beautiful, Absyumura? Isn't that the perfect death for a man who could never sit peacefully at the dinner table with his family without checking his phone every five minutes? Isn't that an epic death? A heroic one? A death that the Satanist nation will remember forever?"
Absyumura slowly lifted his head from the soaked muddy floor.
His forehead was still bleeding, his cheeks were still wet with tears he had never wanted yet could not stop, and for the first time since hearing Zhulumat Katamtum's name spoken on television, something other than grief appeared in his swollen eyes. It was something closer to courage, a courage he had never known he possessed, courage born not from a desire to save the world, but from the need to protect his wife from herself.
"Miara," he said, and his voice sounded unlike it ever had before. It was not hoarse from crying, nor weak from despair, but firm, firm enough to make the air inside the room seem heavier for a brief moment.
"Watch your mouth. He's your father. No matter what happened, no matter what he did or failed to do, he is still your father. And he has just fallen, leaving all of us behind."
The words left his dry, cracked lips like small stones dropped into a well so deep that no echo ever returned. He looked at Miara, his wife standing at the entrance of the kitchen with her arms folded across her chest and that cynical smile still lingering at the corner of her lips like a scar that refused to heal, with a gaze so heavy that he himself did not realize its weight. It was filled with something he could not name, perhaps despair, perhaps anger, perhaps love desperately trying to save someone who no longer knew how to save herself.
Miara did not answer with words, not immediately, not after one second, nor two, nor three following the disappearance of her husband's voice into the air still heated by the smoke of burnt oil.
Instead, she answered with movement, movements that were slow yet unwavering, the movements of someone who had already made her decision and would allow no one, not even her husband kneeling on the muddy floor with hope still lingering in his eyes, to change it.
She turned her back on Absyumura in a way that cut more deeply than a thousand insults, and the hand that had only moments earlier been folded across her chest now reached toward the corner of the kitchen, toward a large earthenware container covered with a black cloth, a container that had never once been opened before guests, a container holding something no ordinary person would ever dare touch, because its stench alone was enough to make the stomach heave and the eyes water.
To be continued…