The scream pierced through the silence like a rape victim shrieking for dignity. The palpable paucity of stars seemed to illuminate the dull sky with a sudden message: Something’s wrong.

She thought of nothing, she thought of no one, but she awoke with a startle and uttered a single word: “Aized.”

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He screamed and he screamed, until he was certain his lungs were forced empty of fury intermingling with paining love. Love for anger and embarrassment, passionate love for treating himself like a failure.

And still, nobody listened.

The euphoria of lit up windows stared back at him accusingly, but for once it was not because of his existence, it was because he had undermined their dreams, and perturbed their sleep for a selfish cause: being human.

Do you not think that the hearty soul who establishes a charity is selfish, praying for eventual fame and a trophy or two rather than regarding the sentiments of those being helped. What about the man who salvages his mind by paying a rupee to the beggar, is he not wanting to drive the homeless child away, not that it has anywhere to go? Or the human who prays five times a day, because it is the surest plane to heaven. A direct flight, without any tiresome stations. Like a resourceful relative in the flight management.

We are all selfish. We have a right to be, and it’s His fault, because He Created this hell for us.

And when you can’t find a place out of hell, you target every bull’s-eye with utmost accuracy, to help you stay in it. Rather, confine yourself within its global boundaries, and burn in the process. Every selfish deed grabbed, will pay off when time comes.

And so Aized did. Tried to, and when fell, got up with threefold the bruises than last time.

This was what clouded his mind, while his mother shook him. Shook him, with power she seemed to have unearthed overnight, hoping to drive every bit of agony and misery out of him, and replace it with mindlessness so that he may not realize how he was torturing himself. And her.

She shook and she shook, driving the pain to her own bones, until every cell reaped of the guilt she had sown. She could not hurt her handicapped son. Aized. Who had only the slightest realization that the rooftop door had clicked open with a louder, more frantic warning than usual, that his mother had scampered over in her nightclothes to his fallen bundle, a body arched over the floor, caressing the ground with the intensity of a lover who had put everything on the line and yet had nothing to lose, that she had helped – struggled, to get him up, to get him to close his mouth which was echoing neither words nor sounds, but pain so simple and blunt it cut through her so sharply she hunted for bleeding wounds, that after he choked on his own sound she massaged his temple, that she then shook him, hoping that her panic would loosen him up, would heal him.

But he had only the faintest idea of what happened.

Which is why, when she left, wiping her eye with the edge of his shirt, he did not know. The world spun around him, weaving webs of memories, falsely tempting him to crawl on them, knowing there would be nothing to break his fall.

And he would have to get back up with bruises tenfold.

He closed his eyes and prayed for salvation.

When he opened them again, the holes sparkling the sky, his solace on any normal day, looked alien. He blinked, thick air clouding his vision, beyond which he could make out faint traces of foliage and winter bark, the brown and green which under the streetlights shined as the worst example of clashing nature in history. The ground below him was a betrayal of distance, far and unreachable. But now, it seemed it would eat him whole if he took one wrong decision, one strayed idea. He took a step back. The rooftop was spinning again but this time, instead of a tornado of memories, it was a whirlpool of things alien and unknown, swimming in waters he had never even dreamt about, waters so strange they almost appeared beautiful.

He looked longingly at the sky, his last convincing reality, the only entity still stored in his Pandora’s Box, but the holes multiplied with powerful threat and scared the life out of his eyes.

A cascade of bullets shot through holes, landing below the atmosphere, targeting his sanity with every ounce of strength stored in them for the very purpose.

And that is when he gave up.

On you, God.