Chapter X

Samina awoke with the taste of a silent scream burning more than her throat. She tried to piece together the gory images that ravaged her subconscious, even as she scrambled in the darkness toward the bathroom. The handful of water from the tap did little to douse her nocturnal drama. Theatres of events plague the mind long after their traumatic occurences, but in her case, the anxiety was of things to come. A flash of memory startled her as she made the connection between the nightmare that had just awoken her, and the words that had stung over the phone earlier that evening. 'You have overstayed your welcome; the establishment will find a timely retirement for you'. In her dream, she had been sitting at her office chair, when a force lifted her in chair and hurled her in that state, through the window into nothingness. She could not make sense of it, accept to be embraced by an overwhelming sense of dread. And the scream from within that had broken her nightmare. She knew, as she had always known, that the time to terminate would come. And it was here. It had arrived without applomb, just a tinge of arrogance in its power to upturn everything that life had come to mean to her. And there was nothing that she could do about it.