An ordinary life

The heat was unbearable. The flame licked around and the blow was hard. And all their attempts to strengthen me by tempering and annealing only added to the agony. If my birth was such an ordeal, I wondered how difficult my life would be.

I’ve been here for some years now. Being the centre of attention for thirteen seconds in someone’s life isn’t that big an achievement, but I get by. There are times when some would be generous enough to spare me an entire minute from their life. Those come by, and come by few.

Today seems to be an inauspicious day. I can feel it within. There are too many people around, too many casual glances thrown at me. I never fancy such attention, callous and capricious. You know they don’t really want to be looking at you. You just happen to be in their line of vision.

One of them seemed to be different. He spoke to the mistress, said he found something intriguing about me. My mistress easily let him take me away. I didn’t feel particularly hurt, but a hint of sadness inevitably marked me. I had after all spent some years under her watchful eyes.

Once he got me, he didn’t seem to care much. He’d leave me in a corner, where no one came, no one in whose line of vision you could fall for mere acknowledgment of your existence. Dust had begun to settle on me like a shroud. The darkness was blinding.

Then one day he came back in drunken rage and fought with the wife. He picked me up with vehement force and threw me down. And that was my sudden, forgettable and absurd demise. The wife stepped on broken pieces of me and let out a scream. I’d made her bleed.

He forgot all about his rage. He rushed to her and went about tending to her. No one cared for the intriguing beauty that was now on the floor, broken. Most of me ground to dust. The maid was asked to sweep away the broken shards, the remains of my featureless form.

They thought about putting me together, but gave up on second thoughts. I was anyways in no shape for attention and effort. No point crying over shattered glass. The baby in the other room had started crying by then, too late for any repair now.