Deal with Him | Lee Heeseung

6-She who sins

Three hours is not enough.

No nook, path, avenue, house, city, country, state or continent is enough. Oneonta maintains the three-hour time distance from the famous New York City. Three hours from the narrow-windowed house. Three hours separate her from cruel recollections and crueler people.
Three hours is not enough.

The black-haired woman stands with her flowery apron wrapped around and tied safely around her waist. In her lap the bible. Her aged fingers, yet still resembling her youth’s beauty through the healthy nails, flip through the pages, as she reads sternly in her mind.

“He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning,” her rough voice echoes through her head as the lips mimic the words quietly.

She tastes the passage on her tongue again but her lecture is interrupted. The stove is fuming. She gets up and calms the near-forming smoke. It’s all good now. Her glasses are lifted slowly and she wipes her tired, willow-leaf eyes.

From the narrow windows of the house, you see the icons of saints, the icon of praying Jesus and lovely Mary the Virgin. And then your eyes shift and you catch the woman standing at her dinner table, waiting for the vegetables to boil and reading again and again. “He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning,” she repeats like a mantra.

                                   ...

The last-night tiresome memories never left her. They converted in nightmares but they never went away.

Ugly poltergeists in masks of people. Scissors and thunderous clicking of snickers on wood. "Stop," she prayed but God didn't listen.

Her forehead is coated in sweat, her clothes almost dripping and her eyes more red and drained than ever. She feels the shake in her bones, circling through her arteries. It’s like the exhaustion passes from her heart to every cell on her body, galloping with no mercy.

Surprisingly, the only part that’s not soaked is her eyes. Although they feel like they’re sewed with spider webs, she’s not crying. How is she not crying?

Evelyn is panting and fumbling with her hands aggressively quick. They are scooting over her body, her pajamas then her hair. It’s long and soft. And she’s alright. She’s not there. She is hurt and exhausted and feeling like she’s going to pop a vein, but she’s not there.

A hushing voice sooths her, slipping like honey in her ears. So soft and comforting and enough to ignore her own convulsing. Her head leans further in the warmth she is nestled in. It feels healing and she wants to feel warm forever.

Her features are severe, as always. Her knuckles white for how stern her hold of the pajama shirt, near her heart is. Her breath is starting to calm, to take an easy pace, to allow her to function again.
Bad dreams or nightmares or the things you want to burn but cannot—they haven’t kept her up for a while now. The ringing of the church bell hasn’t made her ears bleed for some time. But it was back.

What an irony. She prays to not hear prayers anymore. Who do I pray to?

Her eyes do not unlatch, but she can feel it. Her body makes no movement yet she knows. She is where she ‘shouldn’t be’ or should not even know for certain of existing.

She draws in her lungs a deep breath and scrunches her already-scrunched eyes even further. It calms the stinging momentarily—momentarily is enough to feel some comfort. They must be so very red and look so very tired. She knows they do.