Anoushka Poudel
I was standing inside a rock. Well, you could call it a cave without an entrance. I could not quite understand how I had ended up here. I felt like it was up there, because the last thing I remembered was that I had been climbing a hill. It had been cold and it was still cold. I mean, how in the Devil’s name was someone supposed to be expecting to be locked up in a stone? I was very terrified and angry as I looked around with my mobile phone.
‘Mark,’ Dona said. I remember that I was confused between marking the lines that we were counting on the dress or if she was talking about her husband, Mark. So I waited until she said further.
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ she said, pushing her hair back, conscious of herself. ‘Mark the lines!’
I, half-smiling, nodded and started marking the lines and began thinking on how seldom she talked about Mark nowadays. I, Howard, was … well, I was … an assistant of Dona in her boutique and I found myself very lucky to be. I was broke, it was not like I wasn’t before but she got me a job with fair salary and she was a very beautiful lady, though married she might be.
As soon as our job was done, she asked me if I had had lunch.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t even had breakfast.’
‘What!’ she said astounded. ‘You should have told me!’
In a nearby pizzeria, we had conversations. I always had a lot to say, and to my relief, she always had something to reply. I found her, with my size, tiny. And as tiny she was, she was as pretty. Her hands were always full of jewelry that I felt, personally, too big for her small hands, but nonetheless, with her magnificent sense of dressing, she was very pretty and I feared that she knew but tried to ignore the fact that I fancied her.
It was getting stuffy in that stupid cave. I was almost halfway there to be hyperventilating.
Yesterday though, it was late in the boutique. Costumers, about a dozen squealing girls of the same group, were stepping on every ground inside the tiny boutique hall. But I had eyes only for my Dona. She only came up to the ears of the other girls but so pretty was she that only she was visible to my eyes.
Suddenly, probably tired of running here and there, she retreated to the backroom. I waited for her to come out but she didn’t. After trying every peace, each girl would squeal with excitement. Exasperated, I followed her. She was looking intently at the paper, where the prices of the clothes were written.
I couldn’t stop myself. I held her tiny face in my hands and ignored her question, ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’
‘I know that you know that I like you,’ I said, ‘and I also know that you feel the same way about me –’
‘Be assured, I had no idea and I really don’t feel the –,’ she tried to say but I cut her off.
‘I want us to be secretly together –’
‘I am married, Howard,’ she said.
‘Secretly,’ I repeated, ‘and anyways, what is a marriage where you don’t even love each other?’
Suddenly, she looked angry. ‘I love my husband,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘I do not care what you think –’
‘But you barely talk about him, nowadays,’ I said.
‘That has a reason –’ she said again but again I cut her off.
‘Such a marriage, not even old enough to be worth it, can be easily broken,’ I suggested.
‘Oh, please, no one wants to break off this marriage,’ she protested, but silly me, I wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Howard, I really think that this conversation is unnecessary. Before I can save you, you should leave and –’
This time it wasn’t me who interrupted her. Terrifyingly magically a hand appeared on her mouth, stopping her from talking anymore. I was so shocked that I retreated and fell; my foot was caught on the leg of a table.
‘If you think you are worthy of her,’ said someone behind her, in the raspiest of voice that I had ever heard. ‘Come to the hill.’
And they vanished. You must think that I have gone crazy but I have not. They really did vanish.
Well, now you know why I was climbing the hills. But how did I end up in a –
‘Mark, this is really unnecessary,’ I heard someone say. I couldn’t recognize the voice as it was unclear from inside the cave wall, but I knew it was Dona’s. ‘He is just a boy.’
I knew that I was younger than her, perhaps five years, but really, I was not just a boy.
‘You’re my wife, Dona,’ I heard a male’s voice and I immediately knew that it was Mark. ‘I need to do something to show that I get angry when someone tells you to get a divorce from me and have a secret relationship with him.’
‘But he will not be able to breathe,’ she protested, but her voice was light, she was not that much in worry. Perhaps because she knew that nothing would happen, or to my fear, because she didn’t much care about me.
And why was she protesting anyway? It was not humanly possible for Mark to be responsible for me being inside the rock – or was it?
‘Ah, well, if you say so,’ he replied to her.
The walls of the rock cracked. I grew nervous and turned here and there.
‘Now, you, stupidity,’ said Mark, to which Dona laughed, ‘quickly jump out of the mess before you get hit on the head.’
The walls of the cave crashed and fell. It was apparently a small cave that I was stuffed into. As soon as a tiny entrance was opened for me, I jumped and charged at Mark. I landed on top of him and for a few seconds we wrestled there on the floor while I screamed at the top of my voice.
‘You scoundrel, what did you do?’ I cried. ‘You, you foolish old –’
‘Howard!’ cried Dona, clearly shocked at what she just saw.
‘Dona!’ I cried again and hurried towards her. ‘Dona!’ I said again, shaking her by the shoulders. ‘Are you alright? What did he do –?’
‘He’s my husband, what do you think he would do?’ she said, pushing my hand away. ‘He got angry at how my co-worker proposed the idea of kind-of elopement and made hasty actions. I must say, I am very sorry that I have to do this but I must fire you.’
‘You must fire me?’ I asked, aghast.
‘Yes,’ she said, pretending to look sorry.
‘How did I,’ I asked, ‘though end up inside that rock?’
‘Why do you think I didn’t talk about Mark these days?’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to keep him a secret,’ she said. ‘He is a wizard and that is not a thing to be sharing around everyone.’
‘Oh!’ I said and I must have looked funny because Dona laughed again and suddenly I felt that I no longer liked that laugh. And then I realized what I had just heard and started laughing at the ridicule of her answer.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she asked.
‘I don’t,’ I replied to her. ‘Of course, I don’t! I would be stupid if I did –’
‘No, no,’ said Mark. I had forgotten that he was there. He looked funny; he had a cloak on, with a hat and a stick. ‘You would be stupid not to believe. Because if you think that I am not a wizard then how would you be wearing a pink blouse all of a sudden, when you had none?’
‘I am not –’ then I looked down. I was so horrified and shocked that I stumbled a few steps.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I want it to be a secret. So, you will get a horrible cough where you try to say that I am wizard.’
‘No, I will not!’ I said, arrogantly. ‘Mark is a –.’ What he said became true, and suddenly I started shaking hard with massive coughs, without being able to complete my sentence. I tried again and was tormented by the same coughs.
It has been a year since, and I wrote this story down. He said that I could not say it, but I certainly can write it down.
***
[Anouska is a student of MA (English) at University of Delhi, and a published novelist. Her debut novel, Beyond Her Eyes, has been published by JustFiction, Germany. She writes poems too.]