IT WAS TWO A.M. — and the torment had not ended.

The woman was seated on a stool outside of the locked coal cellar door — she was reading passages of the Bible continuously for the past fourteen hours, to her seven-year-old prisoner behind the locked door. She only stopped once to refuel the oil in the lamp that aided her reading in the dark basement — she could not afford the cost of electricity ever since her pastor husband died.

The mother and son did not have a bite to eat of anything since breakfast; as they were fasting for the spiritual Lent period. Sometimes, she would starve her son for the whole of Friday — as penitence for being born as a freak.

The boy rapped the door once, it startled her reading...

"Enough Mother! Give me something to eat. I am hungry..."

The little voice pleaded, behind the door.

"The Word of God is the nourishment to your soul, you greedy boy," she snapped back at him — and was about to go on reading from her holy book — but the child's whiny voice persisted...

"No Mother, give me some bread — I am really hungry."

"You starve now!

"You can indulge in gluttony when you are in hell — when you will dine in the banquet with your fellow diabolic demons — but, if you want to meet Jesus in Heaven — you must fast like the Lord when He was out in the wilderness...

"Now, tell me, you freak, whose words will you obey — is it God's Words or of the Devil's?"

The weeping hungry boy answered from behind the door...

"I always obey God's Words — but why do you keep me locked in the dark, Mother?"

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"It is because you refused to accept Jesus as your saviour — and you also, refuse to speak in tongues. Why is that!!?

"Why don't you speak the language of God's angel, you abomination!!?"

The boy peeked into the crack on the door. He saw the silhouette figure of a woman in her mid-twenties — wearing her besplashed nightgown and with long unkempt hair.

"I can't Mother, I can't speak in tongues — I tried, but I can't?" he answered.

His words stung and furrowed her brow — she had failed her God to instil the sublime heavenly gifts to her prisoner since its birth — it made her even mad...

"Then, you are a spawn of the Devil — because only a child of God will speak in tongues — now speak after me, you beast!"

The woman started to speak in the state of glossolalia...

Her nightgown then burst into combustion, and the flames were spreading upwards towards her face — melting the flesh to the skull — but she continued to utter the divine ancient lyrics in full ecstasy.

The terrified boy's voice cried out aloud, pounding the door from inside...

"Don't die, Mother — no, please don't die!"

*

The shirtless twelve-years-old, bald-shaven boy was rudely awakened by his nightmare. His fingertips touched his own jagged facial cheek — and felt the numerous other scars — that he had received from the past abuses, for failing to speak in tongues...

He also carried more scar-tissues all over on his back from the whipping he received then as a child from his mother — the lesions were the lessons taught to her freak-child — on the sufferings of Christ on Good Friday.

He sat forward, trying hard to erase the thoughts of the night when it all happened...

Those memories of the fiery tragedy which happened five years ago...

He slipped into his monk-robe before leaving the bed.

Clutching his foot wares in his hands, the monk-boy walked light-footed in the dark dormitory, passing rows of beds of other sleeping Intersexual boys.

He was hoping not to arouse Michael up from his sleep; he always sensed that the fellow-monk, who seldom spoke to him — but, he was secretly observing his every move in the monastery.

The monk-boy now treaded stealthy into the dark top floor corridor of the abbey building, which was beside the convent. He took the stairs down. His sandals plodded on the gravel path, in the misty night — he walked pass the rusted signboard — 'St. Mary's Orphanage.'

The abstruse scar-faced boy was drawn to the old cathedral in the vicinity ahead — it was where the ghost of his mother always awaited him.