Magda against the world

Submitted into Contest #108 in response to: Start or end your story with a house going up in flames.... view prompt

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Drama Crime Fiction

-Everything is blurry and confusing, where am I?

The loud sound of the bedroom door being broken woke Magda up and it felt like a lightning hit her in the head. The air was filled with dark smoke coming from the fire.

The hangover was brutal, and the reality was even worse: she was still alive.

Carried out of her bed without realizing where she was or what day that was, Magda grasped: they have found me!

Today was the day Magda has been waiting all along.

Naked and zipping champagne at 9 am in the morning, feeling the crisp and fresh morning breeze in the face and contemplating the views of the swiss Alps, Leonor feels truly satisfied: “This is just picture-perfect” she thinks, smiling. She hated the fading smell of the cigars though. Why do rich people have to smoke anyways?  He would lit a cigar at any time of day or night. Specially after sex.

The views also include her gorgeous man taking a shower on the open bath with the scenic views, refreshing himself after the absurd morning sex they just had.

David McConnel was the dreamiest man any woman could ever have met: handsome, tall, rich and single.

They met in a hotel bar on a rainy night while having drinks with friends. It was love at first sight.

Not only Connel, as she called him, was the best sex of her life, he was also caring, dedicated and successful.

Eleonor comes back to reality from her daydreaming and sees Connell walking towards her with water dripping from all over his body… the desire she felt towards him was nothing like she could have dreamed of: was pure magic!

They only knew each other for 3 months now, but it felt like a lifetime.

But… what lifetime?

Magda was born in Pakistan and sold as a sex slave in her early years by her father. She ended up in Italy under the guard of a rich twisted old man who adopted her and other girls, only to abuse them.

When she was 12 years old, she started using drugs and met the man who would change her life forever. She felt in love with her Sicilian drug dealer and he helped her to get an English passport so she could escape. But she knew she could not trust any man at this point, despite the warm feeling she had towards him. And before she took that flight and with the money he gave her she arranged for him to be killed in a forged accident. She needed to be free at once.

 There is no such thing as love.

Because of her looks and her history, Magda had an early start as a prostitute in London but soon to realize that this gave her too much visibility, so she joined a cleaning company working as a cleaner of hotel rooms. She had a plan all along.

Most of her early memories seemed to have faded away, but there were two words she never forgot: McConnel and England.

Regarding her parents, she didn’t care at all. They were pieces of shit anyways, sad losers who never did anything for themselves but to procreate and sell children. She made sure both were dead when she had the first opportunity of making money with drugs back in Italy. “International drug dealers are indeed handy”, she thought at the time. She had some shadowy tender memories of her mother sometimes, but she mostly would not allow them to surface and that was over before she ordered them to be killed.

Most young girl’s dreams seemed to be very different from hers, but she truly enjoyed going to bed at night and dreaming about the day she would make people suffer as much as she did. There is nothing more satisfying in life than the image of her parents being slowly killed by the people she hired to do so, or the people who arranged her to be sold perishing. It made her smile every time she thought of it. Each time, the satisfaction felt the same, it was the most intense feeling, much better than sex or any drugs she has ever experienced.

If there is a dream, there is a drive. And the only thing that drove Magda was revenge.

On the last October 2nd of her life, on top of the swiss alps watching down all the beautiful mountains and rivers Leonor took her last zip of the champagne. She enjoyed this moment like a child enjoys going for a piece of cake: the anticipation of the upcoming best moment of one’s life. It felt like such a unique moment, and as she was predicting, it would be her last.

Magda has spent the last 10 years of her life working cleaning hotels and bars, sleeping in a dorm with other foreigners, living in poverty. Every night as she put her head on her pillow, she would recite the same words: “life is nothing but a waste of time”.

Until she met Rosalie.

Rosalie was a Ukrainian co-worker, very attractive and very ambitious. They share the room at the dorm, and at some nights she would disappear only to come back next day. Magda was not intrigued at first, assuming Rosalie was a prostitute at night, but could not get her head around why a prostitute would be cleaning hotels at daytime?

As they got close, Rosalie decided to take Magda out with her one night.

They dressed at their best and Rosalie had reservations at a fancy restaurant bar for drinks. The drill was to pretend to be a businesswoman travelling from abroad looking for fun. They would trick the man into paying for drinks, dinner and maybe a nice weekend away. The target was travelling businessmen, of course.

For the past 10 years Leonor was representing to be a respectable, normal English girl: having a regular job, doing her groceries, buying her bread in the morning and paying her taxes.

She enjoyed playing this character. I fact, she often thought that if she was born in a decent family, she would probably have become an actress. A very famous, well paid actress. In a sense she was fulfilling her life’s purposes, she thought.

On her first night out as Eleonor, Magda met David.

Life is a circus, she once heard. An indeed it is, she thought. When he introduced himself, she froze: his last name is the same of the people who sold her to the English man. How is this even possible? Life is fair, she thought for the first time. Her time for revenge has come!

As she claimed she was a family business owner abroad and heir she did not have to go back. She had saved enough money and managed to rent a room in his hotel building after they met. Mostly her man was treating her to the best life, and she was travelling around with him.

Funny thing is, she never actually got attached to him, emotionally, in any way. She never did, with anyone, ever.

October 2nd, 2019:

Back in her room Magda got ready, look at herself in the mirror for the last time and took a deep breath: this is it. She needed to free herself from the past, and also from the future.

The sensation of relief of not being anymore in disguised, not needing to be Eleonor nor even Magda felt amazing. And after this, no more need to hide or to pretend at all.

Conell is the head of the abductive girl’s organization. He will serve her purpose.

Magda has planned this for so long, in so many ways, and she even thought about being gentle in the way she would take things… but when the time came the real old Magda reappeared.

After he stripped down his clothes for what he thought was going to be a hot love-making session, she took her sharp scissors from her bag and stabbed him in the neck.

Magda of course researched previously on what to do and how to do it, as she would not be able to control a man if he had the chance to take her down. So, the neck was the best to start with. And she learned she had to do it multiple times at once, to make sure he would be down for what she had planned later. He needed to be steady and calm to hear what she had to say before he would die.

The scissors felt very heavy in her hands after a few minutes.

In the beginning he struggled but soon to succumb. To cut into skin was much harder than she thought. She imagined would be softer, easier to cut trough. She has counted 12 times up and down, 12 times that made him more subtle after she was the one with the power of the scissors. Not sure why the couniting, but it felt reassuring.

Magda thought was an amusing thing to feel the warm thick blood touching her skin and the strength of this man fading away: “this is what power feels like”, she thought.

Everything was quickly finished, sooner the she thought. Magda heard and felt his last breath and enjoyed every second of it while her body was shaking from excitement and fear.

She walked around Connel’s dead body for some time still feeling both angry and sad, listening to music and drinking from a bottle of whisky with lit a cigar.

This is what she was made for. To conquer!

Now is time for Magda, Leonor and whoever came in between to just go away as well.

She felt as she possessed the dead man to herself, because she gave him his death.

She felt a very deep connection with him as she has never felt before with anyone else. He was now hers at a deeper level.

After a long bath Magda kept walking around and dancing, spilling whisky on the and on top of the dead lover, while taking sleeping pills. Dancing with bare foot on top of the blood on the carpet floors.

Until she didn’t.

-Everything is blurry and confusing, where am I?

The fire has taken most things and there was nothing left to incriminate Eleonor. Everything and everyone involved went into ashes.

But Magda could no longer live a life, her purpose has been completed.

And as she lays in the hospital bed at dawn she remembers, with tears in her eyes, the warm memories of her mom looking at her in the eye as a kid, before it all went wrong in so many ways, so many years ago.

Magda takes a knife and stabs Eleonor to death in the neck, 12 time. Just as she did with David.

August 27, 2021 22:16

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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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