I Was Proud Of Myself Yesterday, And I Am Proud Of Myself Today
Day 28 of the Flash Fiction Month 2023!
My biggest effort, since I became a free woman, has not been living without my husband, or earning enough to buy boots for my children. The hardest, most tiresome thing I had to do was acknowledging that Mikail was human.
They sent us all here to re-built our lives; victims and perpetrators, prisoners and guards, survivors and torturers, and I saw with my own eyes how quickly revenge can send you back to the camps. This doesn’t mean I forgive them. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to see them walk on the other side of the street, or queue at the till just ahead of me.
For years Mikail has been the embodiment of evil. He’s the one who ripped my children from my hands. He’s the one who grabbed my husband by the collar and shot him in the head, wiping away his blood as if it was mud. He’s the one who strolled through the camp, reading a book or biting on a sandwich, while I was starving, shaking with fever, digging holes in the ground for the frozen corpses of my sisters.
And yet, we all end up together, side by side, equally forgotten by the regime.
I was proud of myself yesterday, when I saw him twisting his ankle on the pavement, and I gave him the heaviest of the sticks I’d gathered for my stove. He thanked me, and I nodded in response.
I could never quite work out if the shame in his eyes was because of his current condition, or connected to what he did to my family.
I am also proud of myself today. I’m proud of my sadness as I watch the paramedics carry his body out of his rundown apartment. Overdose, they say. Too many pills.
Today is a day of celebration. Our tyrant died. The person who got us into the camp, and then out, in this town, alluding to a future none of us would ever enjoy.
But Mikail killed himself today. And I’m sad, because he was human. He made a human mistake. He believed in the orders he was following. He believed he was doing the right thing.