Rain began falling down like a sheet of water. Her living room looked dark and gloomy like her heart. She sat on a chair by the dinning table without putting the lights on. There was a bucket of ice cream on the table from many hours before. the ice cream was all melted and had leaked on the table. After her mother's phone call, she vomited everything she had eaten that day. She did not know how to go one, how to carry this baby for another four months, how to endure this life, how to study, how to write poems! She did not know where her dreams had gone, disappeared.
Her body was changing slowly. Although she had lost weight instead of gaining, she felt that her clothes at the stomach part were getting tight on her. This morning she had looked at her naked body in the bathroom mirror. Her arms, legs, and face were thin and skinny. She had blue marks and rings under her eyes. She contributed those to her extensive crying, to vomiting everything she ate, and to not sleeping. She was all skin and bones. She looked old for a sixteen years old, looked out of shape, and ugly. Right there, in the middle of her body, it was her stomach which was rising like a fire ant mount. How did she fall into this trap? Why didn't her mother tell her anything about how to prevent pregnancy! Was her mother's unhappiness so grand that she had forgotten to give some advice to her daughter? Couldn't she tell her about birth control pills? Couldn't her aunt Zari advise her before she went as a girl to her new house and now was a pregnant woman and all alone? She did not know! She had no knowledge of married life and the intimate relation between a man and woman before the very first night when Mansour took her. She had not known what the life of a man and woman together before the very first night; and no one had told her a thing.
As she was dozing in the dark with her head on the table, and listening to the pouring rain outside, she heard a knock on the door. Startled, she got up and went to the door and opened it. It was Mansour at last. So he had decided to come.
"You have key, don't you?" That was the first thing came to her mouth.
"I don't live here anymore. I threw out my key. You come to school today. What do you want?"
So he had come to have his last fight; but that was not the way she wanted to end.
"I don't want to fight. I want to talk."
"You had nothing to tell me before!" He said that without any obvious feeling. "I was planning to call your father tomorrow."
She went to the window, pulled the drapes back and looked at the gloomy sky. Rain had stopped; but the melancholy had stayed.
"Why are you sitting in the dark? let me put the light on."
"No, no..." She almost became frantic.
As she said no, no, a vigorous lightening brightened the room. She suddenly saw him standing next to her. That sudden illumination seemed to be the horror both felt; the hopeless love that they both had thought they could find in each other. Neda walked away from window automatically. It was dark again; but she knew that he followed her. Right before she would sit so she would not fall for her extreme trembling and weakness, he seized her. His hands, she felt, had involuntary muscular contraction. She stood, he supporting her, also stood. He kept holding her hand. They both looked outside into the storm of the nature so they would avoid the storm within themselves. A thunder shook the room. Rain started again. It kept pounding the roof and windows with its fearful sound. He turned his face towards her and finally said:
"I guess this is it!"
To Be continued
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