Shattered dreams – Chapter 3
A cock crowed loudly next door. Sabrina stirred. She was still tired after last night’s ordeal. She got up and began to shuffle around the room. Bullet Head was still asleep.
She stumbled over his clothes that lay on the floor and picked them up sulkily then glanced to the side of the room at the pile of dirty clothes. It was wash day.
Her body felt strange. An overwhelming sense of tiredness came over her.
The days went by so quickly. Already it was Saturday. She noticed that Bullet Head had a routine. So after the second night of painful sexual encounter, she had braced herself thereafter. Sure enough, every night Bullet Head transformed into an animal. He was nasty and lazy and Sabrina was growing to hate him more every day.
She made breakfast and it may have been this that woke him, because Sabrina was frightened when she turned to see him watching her from the doorway. She exchanged little words with him and only spoke when he questioned her.
Later that day, Sabrina sat under the mango tree in the yard and washed her clothes and his. Sometime during the week, Bullet Head had gone to her house to get the rest of her clothes. Sabrina wondered how her mother was. She had not seen her since he ‘captured’ her at the dance last Saturday and she was worried. Sabrina felt like a prisoner. She had no friends. She had practically become Bullet Head’s slave overnight.
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A year passed and things began to change. Sabrina slowly won Bullet Head’s confidence to go out on her own. She began to go shopping on the weekends to the market. She even got to visit her mother. At these times, Sabrina spoke nothing of her ordeal. People often commented on how thin she was. But she managed to convince them otherwise.
It was never that Bullet Head was not feeding her, but Sabrina had begun to take life pretty hard. She had become friends with the neighbour, but Sasha was never Sabrina’s crowd. She would sit and listen to Sasha all day as she talked about her desperation to get out of the ghetto.
She held firm to the belief that ‘foreign’ was the only place for her, but like Sabrina, Sasha did not have a visa.
She spoke wholeheartedly about becoming a drug mule and how she would be rich in no time. That, she concluded, was her ticket to stardom. Sabrina knew the term but she knew very little about it. She did not care to know either.
Meanwhile, Bullet Head had his gang who robbed and killed on a nightly basis and it was all over the news. He became one of the country’s most wanted felons but the cops could never catch him. He would disappear for weeks on end when the cops came to raid the community, but Bullet Head had his sources who kept him informed.
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Nearly two months after she was forced into solitude, Sabrina realised that she was pregnant. She did not know what to do. She had thought of telling Bullet Head but she was still so timid to confront him. So she kept it a secret. She became weaker and weaker as her body began to respond to demands of the two forces – Bullet Head and the expected baby. And it was never until she passed out one morning that Bullet Head realised she was ill and rushed her to the hospital. She lost the baby.
Sabrina spent two weeks in the hospital. And it was at that point that she realised she had to do something before Bullet Head killed her. It was also then that she rested, truly rested.
