The Subjugation of Will - Patrick Muczczek

Mrs. Borne was sitting on the floor of their apartment waiting for her husband to return from work. In a burst of anxious contemplation, a nervous twitch had caused her arm to break the sole pride of their household; a Ming vase her husband had obtained by unfair means. She had always doubted its authenticity and was, combined with his very self, a thorn in her flesh. One could argue whether her spasm was an act of retaliation or her subconsciousness confronting her with a necessary ultimatum.

She resented the one night she decided to enter the foul concrete of his high-rise apartment which had now granted her, after fourteen years of silent endurance, nightmarish nervous ticks. Her former occupation had steeled her will somewhat against uneasy imagery but never prepared her for the emotional torture her husband would bring upon her. Her life simply was too bad to be true, she imagined, one morning she would wake up, with a terrible headache and the sweet amnesia dreams inherently brought to relieve her of the burden of her puny reality. As her son was not around anymore, the brutality of her husband increased daily until the point of frequent visits to the doctor and further torture by needle and thread. Officials had wrested the boy from her grasp with thorough violence when her husband questioned her sanity and, in time, would themselves produce a twitch in his fortune. The unbearable threat of her passing down a trauma or worse, her guilty conscience, was eliminated by their taking and hence allowed all restraint to leave her. The muscles in her arms convulsed evermore when she realized his arrival was due and keys grinded the innards of the cylinder lock.

“W-Welcome home, I have a confession to make. A-and an offer”, she said nervously and pointed at a stool in the kitchen; the table was laid perfectly and covered in a variety of seducing meat and deliciously smelling offal.

“Better be good”, he responded angrily and revealed a disgusting vein on the left side of his forehead when he approached the table to begin his feast. She remained on the floor and watched her husband gulp down masses of ground pork and beef, steaks and joints, livers and hearts. His barbaric smacking shared bits and pieces which could evade his teeth with the table producing the picture of an inhuman glutton, almost animalistic in his appearance.

“Good boy,” she said when her husband’s head was slowly drawn to the table as if they were magnetic counterparts, “Sleep tight.”

When he woke up from his slumber, his eyes opened sluggishly as his head tried to order his thoughts, trying to command his tongue and lungs to produce a sound. He was gagged and stark naked, his head still sticking to the same table he lost consciousness on.

“This time,” Mrs. Borne said carrying the cleaver she had once laid down for him, “It’s my turn, William.”

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Patrick Muczczek is a Germany based writer and student who engages with fiction and poetry daily. He is 22 years old and currently studies English literature, linguistics and culture in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen. His works have recently been published in the literary journals, “Harbinger Asylum” and “Wingless Dreamer” .