~I'm not afraid~

~Of anything in this world~

~There's nothing you can throw at me~

~That I haven't already heard~

U2-STUCK IN A MOMENT

She sat alone, quietly, on the hard cold chair in their tiny flat. Alicia had felt this way many times before. Tony had beaten her countless times previously, in the past. Her hands trembled slightly, tears streaming down her face. She looked down at her chest and lower torso. Smears of scarlet stained her favourite dress, the fabric was torn in long, thin strips at various points across the pretty frock, and she knew her body would follow this striped pattern.

Alicia Davies was no pushover, make no mistake about it, but since she had met Tony, she had sunk into herself gradually, and in their four years of marriage, she had let him take the lead. Perhaps too much, as she had cruelly discovered about two years ago, when, after a night out with the girls, she had staggered home in a very drunken condition. Her husband was not particularly happy at her state in which she entered the house in, and he punished her in a new method he had learnt from his blokey work chums at the building site.

And so it carried on, at first only very occasionally, but lately it had been over extremely minor things, where the car keys were, why there wasn't any milk in the fridge etc. This incident was over Alicia burning the dinner- that soon ended up over her, she could feel the scald marks on her upper arms.

Alicia stood up carefully, then quickly brushed her auburn hair back in a scruffy pony. She set about tidying the flat, cleaning the walls of spaghetti Bolognese, wiping blood off the lino in the kitchen. Then she had a soak in the bath, this made her feel a bit better. As she came out of the bathroom, a sharp knock came at the front door. She tiptoed up to the eyehole, so she could see who it was. Alicia wasn't particularly in the mood for her mother-in-law's sour jokes about how she wasn't good enough for her "Little Tony."