A Madman's Monologue

By Asad Zaidi

Oh, so you want to hear my story, too? I must admit I grow weary of telling and retelling this tale to people like you, you smartly dressed women with your incessant understanding nods and your constant scribbling in your notepads, and the way you send me off once I'm done to the dark room without windows. It amuses me how every time I talk to you people, I am later subjected to a new kind of 'treatment therapy', as you call it.

But since I have nowhere better to be...Very well then.

I haven't truly been alone in a long time. I hear voices, you see. And quite companionable voices they are. They can be a tad unreasonable at times. For instance, right now they insist that I put my hands around your neck and wring the life out of you. Quite unreasonable. I cannot do such a thing in this straight-jacket anyways. 

Forgive me for losing my train of thought...

And so these voices...They have been with me, guiding me, for as long as I can remember. Before I realized that others could not hear them, I made the mistake of telling my family about them. Horrified, my family handed me over to the local Church. The Church, of course, knows none of the love and compassion it preaches. I was beaten. Brutally. Nearly to death on a number of occasions. What unpleasant days they were. 

Soon, however, I learnt to pretend not to hear those voices. By the time I was deemed worthy of being part of society again, I was no longer as boy. I found a job waiting tables at a rather fancy restaurant. It was there that I met... her. What a pretty little thing she was with her vivid green eyes and that jet black hair. She became an obsession. I followed her home once and, after that, spent many nights watching her sleep through her bedroom window. 

Now this young girl, my precious, she lived with her father and what a horrid, nasty man he was, always drunk and mumbling profanities. He would hit her sometimes and she would cry herself to sleep and I would watch. 

But then things got out of hand one day. She was screaming and he was roaring. She cowered on the floor as he stood over her with his leather belt in his hand. In an attempt to save my precious, I smashed though the window, ran inside and killed him with a blow to the head with a vase. I still wonder why that vase didn't break...

Oh, right. I suppose you'd like to know what happened next. I walked over to my precious and held out a hand to help her up. She didn't take it. She just looked at me and then at her dead father and then back at me. Oh and the look she gave me! It was as if I was some demon and not her saviour. I could not take that. Suddenly the voices I had pushed away for so long returned, louder than ever.

"Kill her," they instructed.

And so I did.

And that is my story.