Heatwave shadows

Every summer, the city roared in colors that never changed. Perpetual sun filtering through yellowing plastic blinds. I heard sirens skipping over the cracked pavement. I felt my own musty scent of sweat. The spoiled fruit from the market two blocks down curled into oblivion, softening inside, rotting.

Inside our apartment, heat pressed against the walls. It felt somehow like something wanted to break those walls them apart. The paint was so dry it had started to come off. I peeled at it occasionally, imagining burnt skin peeling off after long days on the beach. Peeling was too soft of an action, I was secretly hoping for the walls to shatter us. Him and me, and all the years we’d simmered together. No chance for that, the heat was stronger on the inside. That old building always held, every summer, no matter the heat, no matter the rats, just like the last.

He called them rough patches. Hubby H, Hector the Humble, Hector the Hammer. He said my moods were like storms that would “blow over if you’d stop making them worse.” So I moved quietly around him. I tried to make my own shadow into a thin ribbon trailing from room to room. I never dared to stretch too far.

When I tried to remember what my voice sounded like before, it came only in echoes, hummed, squished, flattened syllables. Low self-esteem would have still held my head high. But my apologies were pressed into breakfast plates, mildly nonexistent. My apologies were tucked tight into the washed laundry, hiding my voice because almost forgotten was better than existing.

Maybe there were others in the building who heard how he spoke to me. If they did, their eyes always slid away in the hallway, embarrassed, unsure, unconcerned, or just bored.

Each summer blurred into the next, softly, shimmering bruises on my battered soul. July’s heat made everything heavier: his footsteps, my guilt, the air itself choking me into shards.

I started marking the days with small, invisible rebellions. I covered a bruise badly. I washed a cup too loud. Every sound was heightened in my ears. The silence was even screaming into my lungs. I drafted one single message but never sent it on my phone.

He would pace, accusing the neighbors of staring. It was not their business. We were fine, he said. We were just a normal couple, he kept saying. Love keeps score because I am accountable to him, the body knows how to heal, no worries, my whore. The soul forgets and forgives. What would I do alone anyway? I had no income, no friends, nobody, no dignity, no hope.

I became convinced the neighbors left notes on the noticeboard about women who couldn’t keep their men happy. Sometimes, when he was out getting drunk at the kocsma, I kept looking out the peephole. In the flickering hallway light I invented entire conversations in which neighbors whispered my name and wondered if I was alive or just another summer ghost. Ghost, prisoner of another lifetime, a shamble of unsorted and ungrateful expectations. God made me for him and I was what I was.

He believed he had taught me silence. I almost believed it too... but the stories in my head multiplied, I was losing control at times. Sometimes, as I scrubbed at a stain that would refuse to lift, I’d imagine adorning his coffee with shards of glass, like a mandala trap.

Other nights, as I pressed myself into a bundle into the corner of the bed, I’d imagne my escape. How the lock would click at my touch, how the stairs would creak. The cold air on my bare arms as I stepped out of that damned apartment, finally free, uncaught. I almost felt it was real, so much so that my heartbeat would stutter. I’d jerk awake from my own mind’s illusions and press my nails into my skin to succumb back into my manmade hell.

He always noticed. “You look distracted lately, whore” he’d say, voice curling around a threat. “Are you thinking of something you shouldn’t?” I didn’t answer, my eyes would try to find a small dot into which I could disappear. How could I confess that even my revenge was a story I told myself? Every act of quiet rebellion never made it past the front door...

Once, as dusk turned the kitchen orange, I stood by the window. My phone was tight in my hand. I was ready to call a neighbor or just anyone. Though I had no numbers saved, he had deleted my entire contacts list, my history and my apps. I had the phone, but for what?

In the window glass, I caught my own reflection and gasped. I was hollow-eyed, thin-mouthed, hair listless with the heat, the shadow of my former self. Who was I? The window wouldn’t open when I tried. It was warped in the frame, glued, stuck... or I was simply too weak to manage anything. The roads below glimmered with car exhaust. I imagine it would have been divine to inhale if I could have jumped off. I dialed three numbers, that I could do. My thumb hovered over “send.” Behind me I heard his footsteps. I hung up.

Neighbors came and went, I could hear their footsteps. Once, I imagined or maybe believed that I heard them fighting about me downstairs. Was I someone anyone would fight for? Doubt sprouted, but there was one voice sharp, and then a warning from another one: “Don’t get involved.”

Somehow I thought I saw a woman watching our door from the stairwell, but when I looked again, only shadows remained. Imagined.

This summer, I tried to keep a list of what was real and what I’d invented. It became a personal project in the heatwave that blurred the senses and my thoughts. A bruise, a cup, a note on the fridge in my own handwriting (“No more waiting”). All summer, the heat grew until late August. With the heat, so did my conviction that I would break free, just this once.

August came and went. I was still here. So was he. The window still wouldn’t open. The small gray suitcase remained empty, collapsed into itself as I once tried to pack myself into it and disappear into a self made void of sorts.

Just before dawn, when the air thickened and I could barely breathe, I slipped into dreams where I had already escaped feverishly. I ran barefoot, bruised, skin prickling with rain, a necessary reprieve. Those mornings, in the mirror, my face looked different. Older, bandaged with dirty rags, or just more awake from the pain.

I tell myself, I am so close. Maybe next summer I’ll finish what I’ve started in the shadows. Maybe the lock will turn, the door will open into another reality and silence will finally belong to me. For now, I hold on. Hope and fear burn beneath my skin, but my stories are silent, stubborn, and mine alone. And they keep me alive.

When he asks, “Are you thinking of something you shouldn’t, whore?” I just smile, barely, my mouth still a line, and look away.

I don’t tell him. Not yet.