Her Secret Power

I submitted a version of this short story for a book week writing competition in 2019 and won 1st place. I hope you enjoy :).

She jumped as the door banged open, and He came in. She heard His heavy footsteps on the stairs and her breath quickened as they came closer. The doorknob rattled as his hand wrestled with it, his intoxication hindering his attempts at turning it.

It creaked open and the smell of alcohol wafted in making her choke “Not again," she thought "please not tonight.”

She saw Him standing there in the doorway, the light from the hallway casting a deep shadow on the ground before her. In that shadow she saw all her fear. Her pain. Her loneliness.

But she did not cry. She would not.

The bruises on her arms and face were still raw and painful from the last time He had come home like this. She didn't know if she could survive another spell, but she knew she couldn't leave.

“Why?” her mother had asked, “Why do you stay? You know you can always come home.”

But she couldn't. It was her fault that he was this way. She had betrayed him, and she knew she didn't deserve anything more than what she got.

It hadn’t always been like this. They had been young and in love and He had been kind and sweet and romantic.

But then it happened. The terrible, awful thing that changed her life forever. Now He came home like this most nights, and she cowered on the floor in her corner hoping he would forget she was even there. Forget what she had done.

Some nights he did, and she would curl up on the floor and listen to him moaning in his sleep, raging against unseen monsters. Those nights she would ache with the pain of guilt. She had broken the man she loved most and now he was slowly breaking her.

Other nights when the pain was too much to bear, she would be the one he raged against. Her fault. Always her fault. Those nights she got what she deserved.

The bruises never fully healed and her worst scars went far deeper than the ones that decorated her skin.

And still no tears. Not yet. She didn't deserve to cry for this. She had made this her reality. She had no one to blame but herself.

She never slept anymore. She barely did anything. She stayed in her corner, and when He was asleep, when He was finished breaking her, she read. She let herself get lost in a different world, a world less painful than hers. A world with hope, and joy, and love. She let the words on the page wash over her and take her suffering away.

This was when she lived.

Stories where her escape. Books, her liberator. Reading, her secret power.

Her fear, her pain, her loneliness couldn’t reach her here. He couldn’t reach her here. She was safe.

Every word, every character, every bit of magic, she savoured, and at the end, when the prince got the princess, when the lost was found, when the fight was won, she would return to her story. Her life.

The memories would come flooding back bringing all the pain and sorrow with them worse than before. And she would know that no story could ever change the one she had written for herself.

And that’s when the tears came.

Edited to meet word count requirements.