Aberration (standard:Psychological fiction, 1289 words)
Author: Ashok Gurumurthy	Added: Mar 19 2005	Views/Reads: 3937/2288	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A young boy exhumes the past and tries to make sense of it.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

mentioned the inspection that took place yesterday. I am not aware of 
any inspection having taken place of my old room, but this new 
building, the “prison” building, I gather, does have to be inspected; 
she made it out to be routine business. 

The room in which I am confined is near one end of a corridor. At the
end are six bathrooms and six toilets for common use. The warden, whom 
I see occasionally, the attendant (perhaps I ought to call her a 
nurse), a certain “chief” doctor, whom I have seen only twice (the 
first time was my coming here with Father, and the second, when I was 
given this room), were with a stranger in my room when I was taking a 
bath yesterday. The warden's and the attendant's voices I can identify, 
and the chief doctor identified himself in what he said. The stranger, 
I gathered, was the one doing the inspection. They did not seem 
concerned about anybody listening to their conversation, and I too did 
not object to my attention focusing on it. 

They talked about me till I entered my room. They explained that I was
given to wanton violence and had a warped sense of reality; that I had 
cut a classmate's throat at school besides being involved in numerous 
incidents of violence of abnormal intensity; that I had driven, at age 
four, a knife through Mother's heart, possibly deliberately, though 
Father believed it to be an accident, killing her; and that my case was 
beyond all reasonable hope. 

I killed Mother? Irrespective of the answer, she must be dead. And if
that strike with the knife did kill her, then it was no accident; I 
must have killed her. But the night before the incident, I had sneaked 
into their room and seen her: her bare body was enjoined with Father's 
and he was steadily wriggling in and out of the tangle their bodies had 
become; he had his face buried in her bosom and she held him in a loose 
unholy embrace. Mother had betrayed me and coupled with that scoundrel. 
Having slept a tempestuously gloomy sleep, I was bidden by my fury to 
do as I did. For the dogs too, my reason was a good one, and it was 
only benevolence that led me to slay them at night, when they were 
asleep. 

The chief doctor also eloquently described the “extraordinary pains”
taken by him at the behest of Father—an outrageous claim for a man I 
have seen only twice in my life. They also said there was nothing they 
could do about me except see me grow up, grow old, and die, in total 
isolation, unless the isolation took me to my end faster.


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