Introduction
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The shudder crawling through my body wasn't because of the room's cold, but from Ryan's gaze that pierced my back while I was preparing a cheese sandwich for him.
Have you ever felt that the little ones to whom you gave your name and blood carry in their pupils something... ancient?
Something that predates humanity by thousands of years?
Motherhood was supposed to be a sanctuary, but today I stand alone, counting their heavy breaths at night, wondering: when does love stop and horror begin?
Behind those angelic faces dwell "demons" that do not belong to our world.
And now, escape is no longer an option; for the door that has opened between us and their world cannot be closed except with blood, and a war that has never occurred to the heart of any human.
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Chapter One
My name is "Sila." Ten years of marriage have passed like a continuous hum in a deaf ear.
Eight years of chasing "Noor's" laughter around the house, and four years of pampering "Ryan."
But in the midst of all this, I am merely a ghost moving mechanically.
No university degree adorns my wall, no profession grants me a voice; I am just a "name" dropped accidentally from the records of the living.
The first spark of the nightmare...****
It all started there, in that black spot of my memory when I was eight.
I still remember the smell of sterile medicine and my mother's pale face that was wasting away without a single medical reason.
The machines were beeping regularly, and the tests spoke of "safety," while she was leaving us toward nothingness.
I remember sixteen-year-old "Mina" squeezing my mother's cold hand, and "Alex," who was nineteen, standing like a shattered statue before the doctors' helplessness.
My mother departed, and with her, logic departed from our lives.
But the real shock wasn't death; it was the sound of another woman's footsteps entering our house only three months later.
Three months were enough for my father to wipe the dust of loss off his shoes and open the door for a new wife, as if my mother's heart had never beaten here one day.
There, between the walls of that house, I learned for the first time that behind familiar faces... lie monsters we do not know.
The years passed faded, as if they were an old film without color or sound.
And when the clock struck announcing my sister "Mina" reaching eighteen, I didn't see her white wedding dress; rather, I saw a shroud wrapping what remained of my safety.
With her departure behind her husband, I felt the coldness of orphancy gnawing at my bones for the second time, as if the only wall protecting me from the house's fierce wind had completely collapsed.
Hardly five years had passed until "Alex" stood before me, not as a brother, but as a judge weighing my future with coldness.
"No more studying,"
was his final sentence that silenced my dreams while they were still a fetus.
I turned toward my father, searching in his eyes for a revolution, an objection, or even a look of sympathy, but I found nothing but treacherous stillness.
He wasn't just silent; he was the hammer falling with Alex's words to crush what remained of my soul.
The curse that dwells in the age of eighteen...
It is as if this number is the edge from which we all fall in our family.
On my eighteenth birthday, there were no candles;
instead, there was a "deal."
A man who preceded me by eleven autumns, a stranger with rigid features, who possessed nothing of his own affairs except a room in his parents' house, and a voice that would soon rise above mine.
I tried to open my mouth, to say "no," to scream that I am not a commodity to be sold to lighten the burden of the house.
But the words froze in my throat before they were born.
I knew the price well; for in our house, objection is not discussed with logic, but is drawn with blue marks on my body.
I learned that silence was my only way to survive, while the lashes of their gazes followed me as I was led to a life I did not choose, like a sacrifice offered to a new house no less desolate than the old one.
The night of falling into the white
That day came, which is metaphorically called "the wedding day," but inside me, it was the day of the "final rites" of my life.
I was walking in my heavy white dress, not as a bride stepping toward her dreams,
but as a soldier marching toward her death. In my hand, there were not just flowers, but that "damned paper";
a stamped deed proving my virginity, as if my entire being had been summarized in a few drops of blood,
while the man I would share my life with had spent his teenage years loitering in the alleys of brothels,
fortified by a society that grants him the right to everything and deprives me even of the right to own my body.
The stranger in my room...
The noise ended, and the well-wishers left with their fake smiles, to close the door on us.
I found myself alone with a man whose knowledge of me did not exceed a few lines on an ID card.
He didn't smile, he didn't say a word to soothe the desolation of the place, and he didn't even try to break the ice of fear in my eyes.
The silence was heavy, interrupted only by the sound of his approaching breath.
Without introductions, and without a dialogue linking two souls cast into one bed, his hand extended roughly toward the fabric of my white dress.
It was not the hand of a husband seeking a dwelling, but the hand of an invader seizing booty.
At that moment, I realized that I am no more than a body, a mere signature on official papers that gave him the right to snatch everything from me without even looking at my face.
His kisses were digging into my flesh like thorns, and his touches passed over my skin like sharp blades tearing me with coldness.
In those moments, my mind was screaming at me to run, to escape that room, but my body was a lifeless corpse, without movement or the ability to rise.
I felt an unbearable pain gnawing at my entrails, while he was over me like a predatory beast; my pain did not give him any hesitation, and it meant nothing to him that I was experiencing this horror for the first time.
After an eternity of torment, he finally stood up. Instead of a word to reassure me, he pushed me roughly away from the white sheet, casting a sharp look that froze the blood in my veins.
He spat his words which were more bitter than colocynth:
"There isn't even a drop of blood!"
At that moment, the absence of that red drop was no longer just a medical detail, but a death sentence.
Its absence meant in his dictionary and the dictionary of our society that I am "fallen," "vile," and a "whore" who sold her body before her foot stepped into this house.
I froze in my place like a marble idol, my tongue tied and my voice lost, contenting myself with watching him as he averted his gaze from me to grab his phone.
He pressed the buttons nervously, and within seconds his voice pierced the silence, saying:
"I have had intercourse with my wife now... but there is no trace of blood."
I was listening to him in shock, and the surprise had completely stifled my senses until I imagined that I had lost the ability to speak forever.
He pressed the speakerphone button, and his friend's voice slipped into the room, cold and investigative:
"Did she undergo a virginity proof exam before the wedding?"
My husband replied in a congested tone:
"Yes, she did."
The next question came as a slap to my face:
"And who is the doctor who examined her?"
His friend's tone suggested everything; it suggested that I had bought the doctor's conscience with a handful of money to forge a white paper to cover my "shame."
Despite the horror of the accusation, I remained still.
I didn't scream in his face, I didn't defend my honor which was being slaughtered before me, and I didn't tell him that no human had touched my body before him.
At that moment, I felt a thread snapping, and that my soul had detached from this humiliated body, departing far away to another world that had no connection to this bitter reality.
The return from the nightmare****
Ryan's loud gasp pulled me from the well of my dark memories.
The sound of the old speakerphone and my accusing husband's voice vanished, replaced by the current silence of the room, but it was a more terrifying silence.
I looked at my two children; "Noor," who was sitting in the corner of the room combing her doll's hair with unjustified violence,
and "Ryan," who was staring into space with wide eyes, shining with a glow that did not resemble the innocence of children at the age of four.
I remembered night, and that accusation, and how I endured the hell of my husband and his family for years just because I was "broken-winged."
But the bitter irony is that I thought the absence of blood on my first night was my greatest calamity, and I did not know that the blood running in my children's veins now is the greatest mystery.
I looked at "Noor"; I saw her whispering to the doll in words of a language I had never heard, a language resembling the hissing of snakes.
I approached her in fear, placed my hand on her shoulder, and she turned to me.
It wasn't the look of a child to her mother; it was the look of a being that knows more about me than I know about myself.
At that moment, I realized that the war I fought to prove my "honor" before humans was but a stroll compared to the war I will fight now to protect my soul from the "demons" I gave birth to.