Drip Drip Drip

It’s dark. We hear a drip down the corridor. It hasn’t stopped since they locked us down here, over a week ago—or two—we don’t know. The guy they locked in with us couldn’t stand the sound of the dripping, but it comforts us. It sounds like fat from roasting meat, collecting onto the dripping pan.

The drip centers us. It is a metronome, and we are its measure. We used to be imperfect, defective. A divinity wanting, but not any more. The drip reminds us that we are the rubato, an uneven tempo, the note that steals from other notes.

Father caught us stealing once, when we were little. He walked in on us with our hands in the pocket of his coat, fishing out his wallet. Oh, how he whipped us. We can still hear the beat, the falling of his cracked leather belt across our back. We screamed and we mewled. We didn’t know how we awoke in his room, but father didn’t listen. He never did. Later, he locked us in the cellar, and we remember that the cellar had a drip too.

That was when I first met her.

Under the drip, I heard a buzzing, tinkling noise, like angry flies beating themselves against a windowpane. Then a soft raspy whisper. “Why are you here? This is my time.” she said. “Who are you?” I asked her. She did not reply.

The next time I heard her was six months later. There was an eclipse, and father had us black the windows for fear we attract the attention of the serpent who swallows the sun. I lay there, huddled under my blankets, listening to the water drip from the eaves outside my window. That voice again, like a rosebud being grated. “You should not be here” she rasped, “Yours is the day, and I am at night.” This time I stayed quiet. I wanted her to say more, but she didn’t.

A week later, I was prepared. Father was away, travelling, and I locked myself in our cellar, with a leaky bucket, hung on a hook above the dusty old table in the middle of the room. I placed the dripping tray beneath the bucket, blindfolded myself and sat under the table. At first, I heard nothing, just the drip, drip of the leaky old bucket. Then a giggle in the dark. “Clever, clever boy” she whispered. “You found a way for us to be together.“

The dripping in the room increased in tempo, and we lost track of time. When we awoke, we were standing in the garden, and our house was on fire. I could see father through the window, leaning across our dining table, a scarlet line across his throat, the dripping tray at his feet. We stole his note to sustain our own.

Many we have stolen since, until the day they found us, red up to our elbows, nestled amongst torsos and limbs and pretty heads arrayed in neat rows. Now we wait, in this dark room, alone. Our fellow prisoner has gone silent. We needed him to be, otherwise we could not hear the drip.

Notes

I joined a writing club. The theme for this week was Karmic Connection. After running through a few variations that involved relationships with people, animals and even inanimate objects like my favourite brush pen, I decided on a horror story, because a karmic connection with anything feels horrific to me. Someone or something that follows you across lives? Brrrr.

Write Club Bangalore meets on the terrace of an office building on M.G road. We receive a prompt, write for two hours, and then read our pieces out aloud to the gathering. A little scary, but this may be the support system I need to improve my writing.