Most nights your sleep is cut short. Cut short by the sounds. Someone always groans, moans, coughs, pants; something always shrieks, creaks, flops, plops. Cut short by the smells, too.

Father smells of saw dust, wood shavings, and native gin whenever he returns from the Timber Market. Mother oozes with cod or mackerel after a long grueling day in the sun.

Night habitually brings the vinegary odour of human sweat and fluids when father's heavily built limbs crush against the willowy waist of Mother.

The nightly bed quaking has been going on close to three months. As you think about it a nameless feeling roils inside you, constricting the lower part of your abdomen. You believe a cruel hand is squeezing your intestines. Sometimes, the feeling foams up your throat. You feel like vomiting. You barely realize that this feeling is akin to disgust….

This nightly bed quaking doesn't last more than an hour or two. Yet, you presume it spans forever. And strangely the sounds of it would linger, never fading, in your head after dawn must have broken forth.

Anyway, night allows you to draw images of Father's broad chest heaving against Mother's breasts while her bony face is pressed hard against his pillar of a neck in your head. The darkness fertilizes your mind with such rich fancies. Sometimes, while the quaking goes on you dip your hands into your pants, and stroke, your mouth stretched to elastic ‘W’, stroke till you feel your penis turn stiff, hot liquid stick to  your fingers, which you then wipe on your sleeping wrapper.

You have watched a couple of films, where white men and women make out. You begin to wonder if Father's face is gelid, or rocky, or wrinkly, or cheery, or stretchy, or just bored and sapped. But you know for sure that an agonized look will create ruts in the brow of Mother as she tries with what little strength left in her body to move in sync with Father's wheeling waist. You wish she was bold enough to defy his nocturnal demands.

"Please, I'm tired…the pain in my waist…" Mother groans.

"I will love you well and you will feel no pain,” Father huffs. ”You will see."

You squeeze your eyes tight, darkness filling your head. You are just 13, and you wish you were old enough to shush them.

Anyway, the sounds cannot be barred. Now someone is oo-ooo-ooh-oo-ing; another sound soon goes ha-ha-um-um-ha-ing, then –

Someone's breaks wind –

Father must have let out that disgusting sound and the room smells like rotting oranges.

You feel like hurling spit towards the bed. Hurling him out of the dingy room.

"Sorry," Mother apologizes. And you know for sure that the fart issued from her anus.

You want to splinter the ceiling with a scream. With a soft hiss you turn on your side, as if embarrassed, defeated, drenched in sweat, hating the deprivation that life has caged you in.

The End