This is based on true events that happened to a very close friend. Comments, as always appreciated.

“Hey Sara, come over here, look at this. It’s gorgeous. Look great for Saturday. What you think!”

I turned at the sound of my friend voice, expecting to see a cool new diffusion line straight from the catwalk, and saw him.

His eyes echoed in shop front glass, and a gate opened, his eyes transporting me back to a time I had tried so ferociously to forget. A place I strived to bury with the hurt, pain and humiliation that threatened to smash my very existence to dust.

But his dead black eyes had created the conduit.

The pavement buckled beneath the load of past emotions, and I tumbled through the gap made by the warped space-time. Whipped up, tossed, turned, this way and that, dizzy and disturbed. In my head, a maelstrom of malignant memories.

His eyes fixed on me. My friend was no longer there. Neither was the street.
Cold grey steel walls encased my being. Everything I had been, everything I was and everything I was yet to be was held in that room.

Muffled sounds of inhumanity rang out between the walls. I knew my turn was coming.

All the cliches: 'fear knotted in the pit of my stomach', 'my heart thudded from my chest', can never describe the feeling, the knowing, the thought that you are waiting...waiting to be tortured.

You loose all sense of reality. Your body breaks down. Everything goes, first your bladder, then your bowels. Your mind explodes when the thought hits you, as if the thought were a mallet and your mind but a walnut. You literally shatter.

At first you close your eyes. You try to imagine it's all a nightmare. You'll wake soon. Then you try to take yourself off to somewhere else. Anywhere else. But the smell seeps in. Inveigling into your psyche. You try to ignore it, but you can't, for it's the smell generated by utter, naked fear. And it only proves to underline how fragile and human you are.

How easily you can break...

A creak from a rusty hinge borne in hell signals their return. Three of them, their uniforms hanging tight around them; a second skin, so that everything they do, can easily be washed away. Nothing sticks.

I try to remember why?

Slowly they slither towards me.

Why? Months later I hear something about a girl in College who wanted me out the way. She was envious of my popularity and success. She reported me as a subversive. The play had barely ended and they'd been waiting. Throwing me in the back of their smelly van, they beat me to blackness.

In the College car park my parents waited. 40 days they would wait before they saw my face again.

The man in the centre pulled away from his colleagues and moved forward to face me. Overcome with terror, I squeezed my eyes tight. Blindness would have been a blessing.

"Look at me!"

He didn't shout, didn't scream. Didn't try to make his voice sound menacing. But the coldness in his tone; the fact his words were a precursor to the pain, made my heart ram hard in my throat, threatening to choke me from inside; it's beat overwhelming my body, shaking me viciously like a dirty, flimsy dish cloth, penetrating my soul in powerful surges.

On his command, I looked.

His eyes, I shall never forget his eyes. Freezing my mind in just one stare. Reflecting the truth: he intended for my life to end.

"Do you know why you're here?"

I shook my head. My voice had deserted me. Terror takes you that way. You can't control anything. You go into a waking coma; a half-life held together by the hell you're expecting to endure.

"You have been seen engaging in the dissemination of subversive materials. These materials portray our President in a derogatory manner. Do you agree?"

I said nothing. My lips couldn't open, like someone had used invisible staples to fasten them shut. I tried to swallow and tasted hot, foul bile. Gagging with nausea, I pushed down the vile liquid, and suddenly my mouth dried quicker than snowflakes on a BBQ.

"Your silence incriminates you."

Those were his last words, before they started.

Time slowed, as if caught in a bubble, somehow displaced and floating. They advanced, one of them pulled my arm forward, while he brandished the hammer.

On the first blow, I thought I would die. The searing, white hot pain transmitted to my cerebral cortex only underpinned the shocking visual trauma my eyes lived through, on witnessing one human wilfully and intentionally abuse another.

On the third strike, I passed out.

My last vision, those eyes that now stared back at me through the shop window. I turned. Ten years had not aged him. Indeed, he looked remarkably young.

He stared, racking his mind to remember. Who was I? A casual acquaintance? A work colleague? A past lover? Who was I?

I knew they'd been so many like me. His mind had erased their faces, as his hands had erased their lives.

Unable to recall, he shrugged and walked away. I just stared. No talk. No action. Despite all the things he'd done to me. I could say nothing. I was numb. A swift micro-second of catatonic silence took me.

I watched him cross the road. He strode out purposefully, his mind firmly fixed on his destination.

I revolved back to face the shop window, preferring to view him through a medium other than air. For then he was just a reflection. He didn't infect my space. He wasn't real.

Then it happened. Some say if you think about something with expectancy, conviction and truth, it will come to pass. God knows I've wanted justice for what he did.

A million times have I visualised cornering him, acting out my revenge; satisfying my blood lust in the most horrific ways conceivable. But after all the years of therapy and counselling, of recriminations and talk of retribution, when I finally faced him, I could do nothing.

Only think. Maybe, that's all I needed to do.

He stopped suddenly in mid-stride, right in the centre of the road, turned and looked back. His cold eyes burned into me. Recognition flashed full on his face.

I don't know whether he saw the bus. Part of me hoped he did. Saw death facing him. As he'd shown me it's pain-filled promise.

I stared transfixed, like a petrified tree, in to the scene reflected in the window. The impact hurled his body, a piece of discarded rubbish, on to the pavement behind me. The heavy thud and simultaneous crack; a sound of excruciating resonance.

My friend screamed, as did other shoppers around me.

Air lingered heavy, like oxygen entwined with treacle. Slowly, oh so very slowly, I turned.

I looked down. Those eyes that had seen, had instructed, had delivered, now saw no more.

I know not how, but my wrath of tens years was played out. And justice, my justice was finally served.