Friday Nights

Anna flipped a coin in the air, awaiting its verdict. Heads or tails, life or death. She gently pulled back the trigger guard, pressed the fully loaded Glock 19 pistol firmly on her right temple, her fingers caressing the trigger. One of the bullets in the magazine might fulfill its destiny of destruction that day. As the coin continued to rise up, gaining momentum and seemingly defying the laws of gravity, Anna trembled with anticipation, and yet there was an air of tranquility about her. She was determined to peacefully savour what could be her final moments...

She woke up with a start, in a cold sweat, her heart pounding hard as if threatening to rip out of her chest. It was a recurring nightmare that always left Anna feeling absolutely terrified - quite the opposite of her emotions in the dream. She sat upright on the bed and took a moment to compose herself. She looked around the dark, empty room as if to convince herself that what she experienced, yet again, was not real. She poured herself a glass of water. It was 2am, late on a Friday night. A solitary beam of light pierced into the room through a crack in the blinds, illuminating the thousands of floating dust particles. She made a mental note to get those damned blinds fixed that very weekend.

Anna's humble two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of London used to have a warm and homely essence to it - the wooden furniture, pristine white and beige walls, a small kitchen with white marble counters, white tiled floors, off white curtains on all windows, the soft, downy sofa set and yellow ambience lighting in the living room, all contributed to making it a cosy place she used to love coming back to. However, now it was nothing more than a cold, bland and empty box to her, even though it had the same features. It was as if Peter robbed her home of its liveliness, along with both of her children after the divorce. It most certainly was just the children who made that house a home - Peter and Anna could never have done that on their own.

She sometimes liked to believe that there was love between them, at least in the first few months of dating. Peter was the kind of man who one could imagine being married to and living a simple life with. He was never the romantic and charming young man to have women swooning over him. He was the kind of person to keep his head down and mind his own business, always meticulous and kept to himself. He lived what one could call a monotonous life, devoid of any excitement or adventure. Anna couldn't remember what made her fall in love with him, or if she ever fell at all. A sense of safety and stability might have been the only feeling after all, which she could have mistaken for love, followed by a hasty marriage; she couldn't remember who proposed that idea. She did, however, remember getting pregnant when they hadn't planned for it to happen. She remembered being terrified of the idea of raising a child and being a mother, even more so when they discovered that they were about to have twins. She remembered not being ready for such a huge responsibility and telling Peter about it. She remembered Peter assuring her that they make a good team, and would make good parents. She remembered looking at the sheer joy in his eyes. She remembered doing it for him.

Her reverie was rudely interrupted by a loud, urgent knock on the front door. She glanced at the clock beside her bed - 2.07 am. She kept still and held her breath, waiting for another knock. It never came. Convinced that she had imagined the sound, she chuckled at the thought of going completely insane. Nobody would come visiting her that late on a Friday night. Nobody would come visiting her at any time on a weekend. All of her friends were just her colleagues from the office. They saw each other Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm, with lively conversations flowing across their small cubicles and whilst having lunch and tea in the small office cafeteria. Anything other than that seemed unnatural and awkward. All of them reserved their two days off for quality time with their family and partners. Anna spent her two days off cleaning the house and waiting for Monday with a bottle of Merlot and several cans of beer. She got up from bed and walked towards the kitchen to get her third can of beer that night, hoping that would help her fall asleep again. She didn't bother to turn on any lights as the harsh bright street lamps outside illuminated the house just enough for her to see where she was going. The darkness of the night that gave everything in the house a bluish tint was strangely comforting to Anna.

That particular night though, the silence was deafening, almost eerie. Anna couldn't hear the usual chirping of crickets or the occasional whines of the neighbours' sick dog or the odd car rolling down the streets. In the back of her head, she was aware that something was not right, there was something unusual happening. As crazy as it seemed to her, she found herself walking towards the front door, just in case the knock she heard was real. She opened the door to the empty and dimly lit corridor, one of the bulbs at the end of it flickering. Her apartment was at one end of the corridor and she could see all five other apartments' doors as well as the main door that opened up to the street tightly shut. As she turned around to go back inside, she noticed something on the floor and bent forward to have a closer look. It was a pair of frocks, one baby blue and the other white with colourful polka dots. They were both heavily stained with what could only have been blood. Anna stood there in horror, all the life and colour drained from her face. Those were the frocks she had bought for the twins on their first birthday. Why were they thrown at her doorstep, why was there blood on them? More importantly, whose blood was it?

Anna felt dizzy and nauseous from horror. Her brain stopped functioning rationally - all she knew was that her children were in danger and she had to reach them as fast as she could. Without bothering to even lock her door or get her phone, she dashed through the corridor and main door onto the street. She didn't have a car, and no taxis or buses ran that late at night. All she could do was keep running. She knew where Peter and the kids lived, just a few blocks to the west, but a good two miles away. She knew why Peter decided to buy an apartment that close to Anna's - just to torment her, as a constant reminder that she was so close to her kids and yet so far.

Anna ran. She ran as fast as her legs could propel her. Her rubber slippers couldn't protect her feet from the small, jagged rocks that littered the streets, but she felt no pain. The dust beneath her feet crunched and gravel ricocheted as she made her way through the deserted, desolate twists and turns of the roads, never to stop or slow down until she reached her children. Her mind meanwhile raced on a different path altogether. She couldn't help but wonder why she was running at all. What was this feeling of attachment to two little kids who had existed in her life for merely a year and a half? What was this overwhelming love for two individuals who she hadn't even seen in almost a year? Why did she have this desperate need to protect and keep two kids safe from all the evil of the world, two kids who she didn't even want to bring into existence? What was this unshakeable bond that she had formed with two little kids just by giving birth to them?

Anna ran and ran until she finally reached Peter's house. Her heart raced and she was completely out of breath. She pounded as hard as she could on his front door, and would've broken it had Peter been a few seconds late. He opened the door looking confused at first, and then disgusted to see Anna at the door. 

"What on earth are you doing here, at such an ungodly hour?", he asked.
"I need to see the girls! Where are my children?", Anna screamed.
"What are you talking about? You need to leave this very second or else I will call the police!", Peter exclaimed. 

Anna had completely forgotten about the restraining order
against her. "I just need to make sure they're okay, they might be in horrific danger and I have to save them Peter!" she said.

"You killed them Anna, the only danger to them was from you! I couldn't protect them from their own mother." 

Peter slammed the door shut on her face and threatened to call the police if Anna wasn't gone in two minutes. The neighbours peeked out of their windows to see what the commotion was about, and immediately drew their curtains back as soon as they saw Anna. It was as if everyone except Anna knew of the horrors she had apparently committed. Anna stood there stunned. She was in utter disbelief. Did Peter just say she murdered her own children? How could she? When did she?

Anna walked back into her house, through her wide open front door and didn't shut it behind her. She was fazed and bewildered from what she had just been told. She was in great anguish as everything she seemed to know about her own life and events fell apart right before her eyes. She couldn't trust herself in that moment, she didn't know if she actually was guilty of everything Peter just accused her of, and that was the worst part of it all. Then she saw a gun kept on her dining table. A gun that wasn't hers. At least she didn't think it was hers, but she wouldn't know for sure. It was the very same gun she had held in her dream earlier that night - the loaded Glock 19 pistol. She stared at it for a good minute, her mind devoid of any thoughts. She decided to simply put an end to everything, an end to the horrible woman she quite possibly was, an end to people suffering because of her and an end to her own misery and untrustworthy brain. She gently pulled back the trigger guard, pressed the fully loaded Glock 19 pistol firmly on her right temple, her fingers caressing the trigger. The cold steel of the gun pressed against her head was strangely comforting to Anna. She didn't wait to savour her final moments this time. This time, she pulled the trigger.

She woke up with a start, in a cold sweat, her heart pounding hard. Again. She had no idea what was real anymore. She glanced at the clock beside her bed - 2 am on a Friday night. She knew she had a long night before her.

As always, Anna's weekends alone at home were particularly tough.