Truth or Dare

CW: suicide, domestic violence.

The room had been fermenting for hours in the smell of vodka, sweat, boiled potatoes and fish left too long beneath plastic wrap. Heat clung to the wallpaper. Even the curtains seemed damp with it.

The children tried enduring the adults for as long as they could. Outside, the sun threatened sunstroke; inside, the mourners played a strange game. A childish ritual forced onto grown people already softened by grief and liquor.

Truth or dare.

Do this because I told you to. Say this because it’s your turn.

The children watched silently at first, disturbed by how quickly sorrow turned into exposure. Words were spoken that no one would dare say even in front of God. Actions followed that no one would do even in solitude. It was as if the usual distance between people and themselves had briefly disappeared.

An old woman told the eldest boy to behave and watch the youngest girl, but the children were already fleeing the apartment, running downstairs in laughter and relief, deciding together that the burning street was kinder than grieving adults.

The adults remained alone.

Near the framed photograph of the deceased sat her husband, a flushed young man with wet eyes and a crooked smile. Beside the photograph stood a shot glass covered by a piece of dark bread.

Only twenty minutes earlier, during the game, he had been told to kiss his wife’s twin sister.

And because it was a wake, because it was her last wish, because everyone was watching and pretending this was normal — he did.

The photograph of his dead wife stood only a few steps away while it happened.

Now nausea rolled inside him with the vodka. He wanted to go home, remove his black shirt, and sleep for twelve hours without dreaming. But first he needed to honor his wife properly. He was a man of his word. That had always mattered more to him than desire.

Across from him sat the dead woman’s twin sister, who looked so much like the photograph that the guests kept glancing between them by mistake.

She cried soundlessly. Her throat was dry while her mouth still carried the faint, unwanted memory of the moment.

There was only one thought inside her:

I never understood you. Not even when we shared everything. Not even our genome could make you transparent to me.

“My turn,” announced the old woman suddenly.

Her lipstick had bled into the wrinkles around her mouth hours ago.

She pointed at her cousin.

“I want you, my beloved cousin, to answer honestly. What was your role inside prison?”

The grandmother’s cousin reached for the bottle almost too quickly, as if the movement itself could replace an answer. His hands were clumsy, his face already red.

“Dear aunt,” he muttered, avoiding her eyes, “let me refill your glass. It shouldn’t stay empty on a day like this.”

He poured without looking properly, then hesitated, and poured again for others at the table, as if distributing vodka could postpone what was being asked of him.

For a moment, the question hung there unanswered.

Then the old man covered in faded prison tattoos leaned forward and cut through it.

“He’s a faggot,” he barked. “Everybody knows that already. It’s no mystery who he was inside.”

The man he pointed at — the grandmother’s cousin — did not answer. Not because he had nothing to say, and not because he agreed or disagreed, but because the structure of the evening made every possible answer feel like part of the same trap.

Nobody corrected the old man. Nobody defended him either.

The old man looked irritated by everything in the room except the alcohol in front of him. He had never liked his granddaughter.

In his eyes, she had always been a woman who never understood her place in the world — as if she was looking permanently past it, somewhere above it, without ever seeing what was in front of her. Even when blood ran down her cheek after his hand, she would still smile faintly, as if none of it quite registered as something that required a reaction.

Still, compared to most women, he had tolerated his wife well enough.

His wife sat beside him now with lowered eyes and trembling hands. Small. Red-faced. Humiliated by his words, though not surprised by them.

She had looked exactly the same the first time he hit her.

Exactly the same when he struck their daughter for returning home with a child and no husband.

Exactly the same when, only a week earlier, he struck the grown-up little girl — not knowing that within a week she would no longer be alive.

Silence expanded through the apartment.

Five minutes passed so slowly they seemed endless.

The grandmother’s cousin could have said something, defended himself, denied it, even raised his voice. But on the day a sweet soul had asked everyone for sincerity, he found himself unable to turn the moment into anything other than what it already was — exposure, misinterpretation, noise layered over a request that had been almost holy in its simplicity.

Worse still, he could not tell the whole truth either. Not while wearing clerical clothes.

“I think we should stop.”

The twin sister finally broke the silence.

She had not simply loved her sister. Their closeness belonged to something uncanny, almost frightening. Two girls raised half as sisters, half as reflections. She thought she knew at least the shape of her sister’s sadness.

Then she found her in a bathtub full of blood and understood she had never once reached the center of her.

The room stirred uneasily.

Everyone expected resistance from the old man. Not from her.

She had spent most of her life protecting her older sister despite being the younger twin herself — babysitting her through panic attacks, lovers, bruises, apologies, disappearances, reconciliations.

Only one face remained almost unchanged: the husband’s.

He looked exhausted more than devastated.

Years ago, when he proposed, regret arrived the exact moment she accepted. But he believed promises were sacred once spoken aloud. More sacred than desire. More sacred than honesty. So he stayed.

The sweet soul never believed life was cruel. To her, it was a gift — almost painfully beautiful.

But she felt like a burden to those around her.

An absent father.

A mother remembered only in the sound of heels disappearing down a corridor.

A grandfather with judging eyes and heavy hands.

A grandmother who lowered her gaze through life, as if her granddaughter were a stranger begging in the street — someone you feel pity for, but look away from.

A sister who tried desperately to save her and eventually grew angry from failing.

A husband who changed jobs, opinions, cities, dreams, and lovers too easily to ever fully belong to one person.

And the grandmother’s cousin — the gentle religious man — who practiced silence so faithfully that he mistook it for virtue.

The game had been her final wish.

Just one hour without the protection of roles.

It did not last long enough to change them. Not long enough to repair anything.

Tomorrow the old man would still wake angry. His wife would still lower her eyes. The husband would continue living against himself. The sister would still carry guilt like a second skeleton beneath her skin. The grandmother’s cousin would return to silence, as if nothing had ever been said.

In half a year perhaps only two people would still visit the grave regularly.

But for one evening, beneath the sour smell of vodka and mourning food, the living looked directly at one another.

And that, perhaps, was the only thing she had ever wanted.