A Glass Winter 10

Mr Winter, work with us. You need to be honest if you ever want to walk out of here.

Can I call someone, please?

We just want to know what happened last night, why did you kill your wife? You were accomplices in the murder of Arnold Chambers were you not?

No, I didn’t know about Arnold. Please can I have a phone call.

So your wife acted alone?

Yes. I don’t know. Please-

We’re talking about two counts of pre-meditated murder Mr Winter; one phone call isn’t going to save you.

Eddies of breathy air waved around the room, busting in through the singular postage stamp window high on the left wall. The whole space was unbearable, not least because he might never leave it. One of his captors, a blonde heavy-set brute, kept brushing his moustache like a gruff father with a short temper. Those sickening strings of breeze twisted around Theo’s head, encasing it in a terror, feeding the river of fear that coursed through his trembling form. The brute’s companion was no less disheartening, his tight grey shirt was clouded with ever growing spots of sweat, his shiny slicked back hair threatening to lose its perfected form in the pestilent heat. Wherever he looked, whatever thoughts he fought to conjure, nothing seemed to shake the image on his mind, was it imprinted on the inside of his eyelids? Clear as his two steaming jailers, he saw her twisted form, moving ever so slightly in the moment before absolute death. A second playing on an endless loop, his wife shifting into silence, a shiver almost too small to see, and now he was condemned to see it always.

The enormity of the world ahead of him was inconceivable, as one looking at a mountain before beginning the climb, wholly in disbelief that he could ever count himself among those clouded deities. Another furious pang, as he knew that forever behind him was the life he had suffered for, its purity and safety cracked open: Mathew and Amma waiting in their carpeted home for a man who could never return or explain.

They could run rings around him, catch him in damning lies, he didn’t care. Nothing could ever be repaired, he was defeated and they knew it. The brute lit a cigarette. Now his eyelid mural included Mathew staring in revelatory horror at the man he was. The man he must always have been.

Time leaked slowly on, she was his new mistress and was utterly void of empathy. The men across from him shifted lazily, dragons breathing deeply upon their hoard, knowing that they face no real danger. How could the world keep existing from one second to the next, how could the minutes and hours ahead be suffered by anyone. Disenfranchised from his body, Theo felt for a moment he was only his soul. Just a soul in the darkness, reaching for forgiveness.