The Suicide of a Single Man
Short story by: Abdel Latif Moubarak
Egyptian writer
Murad firmly believed that stability was a thick wall, built by a man with the sweat of his brow to protect his family from the unpredictable storms of life. A software engineer in his mid-thirties, he had calm features and eyes that were permanently tired from staring at screens and blueprints, yet they always sparked with warmth the moment he returned home. His wife, Nada, and his two children, Adam (6) and Lia (4), were his soft cushion in this harsh world.
On that autumn evening, the rain tapped gently against the windowpane. Murad returned home earlier than usual, carrying a box of the sweets Nada loved. The house was uncharacteristically quiet, the lights were dimmed, and the living room TV murmured in a low whisper. Assuming they were asleep, he took off his shoes slowly so as not to wake anyone and walked on tiptoe toward their shared bedroom.
Before opening the door, his attention was caught by the screen of Nada’s phone, glowing on the hallway table. It was vibrating silently. Murad had never been the spying type; for him, trust was a blind, absolute principle. However, an unfamiliar name kept flashing on the screen: “Tarek.” It wasn’t the name of a female friend, nor a relative.
He picked up the phone out of fleeting curiosity, but the notification bar happened to be open on a WhatsApp conversation. The blood froze in his veins as he read the first few lines. They weren’t ordinary words; they were a flood of flirtation, promises, and talk of an “imminent liberation.” Worse, there were photos and intimate details of their private life, sold out on the pavements of betrayal for absolutely nothing. The box of sweets slipped from his hand, its lid hitting the floor with a sound that echoed like a gunshot in the hollow silence.
Nada stepped out of the room, startled. She saw the phone in his hand and his eyes, which had turned into two burning coals of shock and heartbreak. She didn’t cry, she didn’t deny it, and she didn’t drop to her knees begging for forgiveness as women do in the movies. Instead, she put on a mask of ice-cold indifference.
She said in a dry voice, “I was going to tell you soon anyway. It’s been over between us for a long time. You were never really here; you were always consumed by your blueprints and your work.”
Murad felt as if a blade had been driven into his heart and slowly twisted. “Me? Who was I working for? For you and the children!” he shouted in a choked voice, trying desperately not to wake the little ones. But the confrontation was already lost; when betrayal is uncovered without remorse, it becomes a double-edged sword that slaughters the past and executes the future.
In the days that followed, life transformed into a bureaucratic hell. Nada filed for divorce, and with the help of a lawyer who fed on the carcasses of failed relationships, Murad was systematically dismantled. He went from being a loving husband and ideal father to an “absent, negligent man unfit to raise children.”
In the cold corridors of the courthouse, which smelled of old paper and dry ink, Murad stood numb. The law looked at paperwork, not broken hearts. Marital infidelity often became a secondary detail next to the mother’s automatic right to custody. Murad found himself stripped of everything: his dignity, the house he had paid for with his own blood, and most painfully, his children.
The day the temporary custody order and divorce were executed was a black day in Murad’s memory. Nada arrived accompanied by police officers and her family to take the children and their belongings. Adam was crying, clinging tightly to his father’s trousers, while Lia’s frightened eyes searched for an explanation for what was happening.
”Daddy, are you coming with us?” Lia asked, tugging at his shirt.
Murad knelt, his tears falling onto her small face, and said in a trembling voice, “I will see you soon, my sweetheart… very soon.”
Nada took them and slammed the door behind her. The echo of that door closing sounded like the sealing of a coffin. The large, luxurious apartment suddenly turned into a narrow, dark burrow, haunted by the ghosts of their old laughter.
Murad officially became a “single man.” But he wasn’t single in the youthful, liberating sense of the word; he had no freedom, nor any hope for the future. He was a “forced bachelor,” a man whose family had been amputated from him, leaving him to bleed out continuously.
He moved into a small rented apartment on the outskirts of the city. Its walls were a faded, sterile white, and the furniture consisted of a bed, a table, and a single chair. At work, his colleagues noticed the complete extinguishing of his spark. He would sit for hours staring into the void. Photos of his children reached him through social media; Nada was posting pictures of them with Tarek in parks and restaurants, as if Murad had never existed, as if the years of his life had been wiped away with an eraser.
Six months passed. Seeing the children was now restricted to a few hours on weekends in public clubs, under Nada’s watchful, condescending gaze. Every time, he saw his children drift one step further away. They began to hesitate before running into his arms, and their language with him grew cold, heavily rehearsed with their mother’s prompts.
In his apartment, the night was his greatest enemy. The silence would begin to scream in his ears. He replayed the betrayal over and over: How could a woman who slept on his arm for years destroy everything in the blink of an eye? How could love turn into such calculated cruelty? He looked in the mirror and saw nothing but the wreckage of a man—a stranger whose face had wrinkled long before his time.
On a Friday evening, just when he was supposed to see the children the next morning, he received a brief text message from Nada: “The kids are traveling with me and Tarek for a vacation abroad. You won’t be able to see them this weekend, or for the next few weeks.”
This message was the final straw. Murad suddenly felt a strange numbness spreading through his limbs. His anger and rebellion vanished, replaced by a terrifying, absolute calm. He sat down on his single chair and stared into empty space. He realized that the game was over, and that the laws, life, and the woman he loved had all allied to slowly execute him. He decided to hasten the end, by his own hand.
He brought out a blank sheet of white paper and a ballpoint pen. He didn’t write a single word of blame to Nada; she didn’t even deserve the ink. Instead, he wrote to his children:
”Adam, Lia… pieces of my soul that are leaving me now. I do not leave you by choice, but because the world has narrowed so much that there is no room left for my breath. Always remember that I loved you until my very last breath, and that I was not a bad man. I was a faithful man in an era that does not respect loyalty. Look for the truth when you grow up.”
He placed the letter on the table next to their old family photo—the only item he had taken from his former home.
Murad climbed to the roof of the apartment building. The air was freezing cold, and the distant city lights flickered like stars that had fallen to the earth. From up high, the streets and cars looked like tiny toys in an illusionary world.
He took off his wristwatch and placed it on the short ledge. He looked up at the sky and did not pray, for he felt that his soul had already died on the night he read those messages; his body was now merely performing its final movement. He took one step further toward the edge, closed his eyes, and conjured the laughter of Adam and Lia to be the last image he would ever see. Then, he stepped into the void.
In the morning, a crowd gathered around his lifeless body on the pavement. The police arrived to log the case in the official records under a dry, emotionless headline: “Suicide of a single man, due to a psychological crisis.” Everyone went their separate ways, and the truth remained buried in a blank piece of paper on a pale wooden table.
