Salome watched her friends leave her home. Era the baker took care of closing the gate after them, and Omi was kind enough to wait for her and to wave goodbye to Salome; she waved back and finally looked on after them, seeing them walk down the street, returning to their homes in order to attend to their families. It was going to be cold tonight, especially with the changing climate. Salome didn’t want them to go, especially as she was going to be alone in the house. She didn’t want to be alone, to feel lonely, not after experiencing the most dreadful pain in her life as a quiet housewife, not after losing almost everything in the South, all thanks to that stupid string of gas attacks by the more radical socialist factions —— especially the one she fought for before as a young woman studying in an university.
She stepped away from the window, back turned to it as she felt her hands shiver, but she forced them to her breast, turning them into gentle fists, shielding her spirit as the warm light of the sun became distant, the brother of the moon finally coming down from his place upon the sky, much to the hated irony surrounding her; it was so humiliating to feel miserable on such a good day as the sun set.
She made her way up the stairs, eyes searching, not in a focused manner, but in a manner lost to space and time, as if she was following after a ghost. And she hoped to find either a ghost or a living person, at least one, another human being to be with her, here, in this empty house.
Her feet brought her to the front of a door; the door was not for her room, it was for her son.
But was her son there? Waiting for her? Salome knew the truth, but the truth was too painful to think about, even for a moment, but she could feel it anyway. And she stood there, before the wooden barrier, the very door that her husband, now behind bars for life, once crafted for her son when they moved here. While she did, Salome tried to hope that he was still alive, that he was just in his room, that he wasn’t one of those killed in the demonstration which the government crushed.
The government —— Salome blamed them; she blamed their masters, the ones who ordered those Azen dogs, those bastardos negros from Azenia. They were the enemy, the ones she fought as a creyente, a revolucionario! ¡Los monarquistas!
She almost never felt the rising of the rate of her heartbeat; the drumming of her pulse; the gradual drifting of her breath towards a series of heavier, deeper ones. She leaned against the door, one arm on the wooden barrier, the obstacle that stopped her from coming into his room —— no longer, he was dead —— dead at the hands of black pagans! Of the negros paganos! And worst of all, the monarquistas! The damned Roblistas!
And thus, Salome slammed her free hand, a fist now, against the barrier, a mighty thud flowing throughout the air within the empty house.
He was only seventeen —— seventeen! —— and they did not even return his body —— not yet! They were probably desecrating him! Treating him like the perro rojo they thought he was.
While she personally disliked the desviados —— the homosexuals and the rest of their twisted sexual community —— she set that aside because her son —— her only son, the only offspring she gave to the world and to her husband, whom she loved so much, despite her own unwillingness to forgive him —— wanted to help his friends —— comrades! Just as she would have done for her friends, especially the now-extinct Ohi peoples…
And he was dead. They had shot him —— a dirty Azen Legionnaire, a soldier from an army of whores and barbarians. And they would pay.
Yes.
They would all pay.
