With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  He was running toward her, briskly, muscularly, with grim efficiency. When he crossed the threshold of the kitchen he pounced in what could only be described as a delirious skipping. She evaded and jolted open the refrigerator door on instinct. He ran right into it. He made a noise that she recognized to be artificial, insincere. It was almost a laugh, an exaggerated joke-noise, as if he was just nothing but a lighthearted buffoon. The effect was disorienting, as she was still in shock and some part of her wanted to pretend this was all an act, not real, that there was someone watching this about to yell “Scene” or “Cut” and put an end to this. He overcompensated for the abrupt, painful disturbance in his movement and fell forward, landing partly on the kitchen table. He cursed, sharply, in a way that punctured illusions and fantasies of mercy.

  Karen frantically opened the utensils drawer next to her for a cooking knife. She grabbed her mother’s fancy Wusthof cooking knife and turned toward her attacker in double-time.

  She turned just in time. He was running at her as if he planned on tackling her but stopped just before he did, flexed his knees to mimic a strike, and then swung high. His feint worked; she’d instinctively taken firm root and readied herself to handle the tackle and stick him with the knife, and processed the newfound need to duck too late. Instead, as if a compromise, she dodged her head backward but not far enough, a cruel notch of the serrated blade caught a meaty chunk off her left cheek. It tore effortlessly and the gore flowed down her face like it was actively fleeing from her — in the span of a few seconds the blood was flowing down her face and pooled in the crevice of her clavicle, sticky and hot on her exposed flesh.

  His left palm pawed at her left cheek sharply. His knife careened back toward her face in a backward slash. She ducked and thrusted her hand forward, stabbing with her knife, which, thank God her mother had always kept sharp. Mother mother dead mother don’t let the knife go dull on the pots and pans and he was quick (like a cat quick like a cat). She wasn’t sure how he’d parried the blows, but he had. She slid back to gain some distance from him.

  They stood off from each other, him pivoting and feinting, her eyes locked on his movements, both holding their weapons in their right hands. He held his knife firmly, resolutely; her hand was too choked-up on the handle. Ludicrously, she copied his knife-holding, intuiting he knew more about this than she.

  They were only a few steps apart, or perhaps one hard lunge. Her entire body was an electrified pole of nerves, squaring off; and just before he made a decisive move toward her, she reached her free left hand behind her, felt a pot, and launched it at his head.

  She was a good throw and if he hadn’t ducked, it’d have conked him square in the head.

  As he ducked, she bolted past him. God let Rose be alive and be here to help me kill him, but she knew, just knew, that there no longer was a Rose, just a sticky long lumpen shape on the couch.

  Upstairs to phone lock the door call police run straight out the door run to the neighbors get help rocketed through her brain in the short span of her sprinting. The stairs were closer, just outside the kitchen, so she ran up them in galloping leaps without thinking, on instinct, no time for consideration.

  She was halfway up the stairs until it seemed as if gravity itself upended her. She fell hard on her chin. He’d caught her by the foot and pulled. All she thought as she fell was please don’t let me kill myself with my own knife but she didn’t, it remained under her control in her right hand, which she’d intuitively extended away from her body.

  She turned to kick and the leverage was perfect — she kicked him, crunch, directly on the bridge of the mask’s nose. He was caught off-balance and rocketed through the air down the length of the stairs, landing squarely on his back without hitting a single stair to break his fall. Please god let him land on his own knife and impale himself she thought as she turned and ran up to her room, slammed the door and locked it. It only had one lock, one of those door-knob locks that prevented the knob from turning.

  She pushed her desk, computer and all, to add heft to the locked door. She put her dresser on the pile, too, all her junk. Locked door, desk, dresser, Heap Mountain. He couldn’t possibly hack through all that, force that all out of his way.

  The phone, where was my phone? She felt in a panic for her phone cord in the wall and followed it to its end. No phone. Must have fallen off in the scramble, swallowed by the Great Heap. By some miracle of heaven her lizard brain detected a sharp bluish light under the mass by her locked door, forced her toward the object and yes, it was her phone.

  It was already on. She unlocked it and dialed 911.

  “I am calling the cops you fucking … you fucking maniac!!” she yelled, without thinking.

  Maybe he didn’t know you were in your room and you just gave it away, she thought in a half-second of fear, but his voice from the hallway made it a moot point.

  “You were already in a bra for me, you were ready for me!” His voice was high-pitched and squeaky, a nightmare Mickey Mouse. “Nuts for you! I’m going to go fuck your dead friend and leave. Bye bye don’t write!”

  “Help me, there is a murderer in my house, he has a knife, he killed my friend and my mother and he’s trying to kill me,” she spoke urgently but coherently to the operator on the other end of the line. She gave her address, the most important information she knew to give. Again and again, she gave her address.

  Help was a few minutes away. It was a turning point for her, and she fought the build-up of mucus and tears. Help was on the way. Help was on the way. She put on her purple sweater and the moment it took to do that was agony; she made the dispatcher keep talking, couldn’t pry herself from the sound of salvation for even the moment it took her to put on the sweater. Her sweater being on felt symbolic, relief, comfort.

  “Boyfriend is here!” she heard from the hallway, again in that insane nightmare parody of what a crazed Mickey Mouse might sound like. This time there was a little strain to the impersonation; there was a bit of an underlying baritone, what was probably closer to his regular voice, maybe for effect, maybe for volume. He course-corrected in what he said next: “I can’t wait to meet him,” he said in a yippie-skippie screech that could break glass.

  Still on the phone, she opened her blinds and looked outside. There was a car, headlights on, pulling into her driveway. She now realized the red flashing light of her phone, which signaled she’d received a text message, but she didn’t dare do anything to disconnect herself from 911.

  She opened the window inartfully. Something about the cool night air made her feel sick. She almost threw up, but held her composure.

  It was Justin. He was still in his car; the top floor of her house wasn’t too far off the ground and she could see him perfectly fine. There was Justin waiting in the driver’s seat, maybe tapping the steering wheel impatiently, maybe consternation across his face; no way to tell, intuition filled in the visual lapses. He was definitely reaching for something, probably his cell phone to call her.

  She waved her hands and yelled. “Go, Justin, get out of here, run, get out of here.” She banged loudly on the top interior of her window. At no point did she contemplate leaving the sanctity of her boarded-up bedroom. That would be suicide, tempting fate. Please hear me please hear me.

  She continued banging and yelling. Please hear me please hear me. “Justin, drive, get help! Get out of here!”

  There was pounding, a tilting almost, of noise in the hallway behind her, something or someone running at full speed. No Justin please God don’t come in here but no, it wasn’t him, he was still in the car. She tucked the thought away.

  The window was now raised all the way. She made a funnel with her hands — still holding the knife, which she kept jutted outward away from her body — and yelled with all her might. “Justin!” She felt her phone vibrate again and knew it must be him calling, but she refused to hang up with 911. She was staying on the ph
one until help damn well arrived.

  She felt the sense-impression of kinetic motion and an explosion of panicked, frayed thought. She was barricaded in this room, he couldn’t get in. Think. Stay calm. Let him run around, try and scare her, psych her out. Why didn’t she hear him outside her door? Where was he? She didn’t see him by Justin’s car, didn’t see any shapes running outside.

  She thought to grab something from her desk and throw it at Justin’s car to get his attention. Justin was at least smart enough (or cold enough) to stay in his car.

  Her mind was still racing a mile a minute, and she couldn’t put her mental-finger on it, but there was something she was overlooking.

  I love you Mom, a deep welling sadness opened up within her chest. Rose, I love you too. Please don’t let him be desecrating their bodies. Or my Mother’s room

  Mother’s room, something about Mother’s room. Location. Rooms faced the same side, windows faced the same side.

  She leaned out the window slightly and looked toward her Mother’s window. A faint but conspicuous light was on. A desk lamp, she conjectured. She panicked again, looked down in a panic, what if he’s down below, throws a knife up at me, she escapes only to die carelessly, a knife flung into her throat.

  Out of the corner of her eyes she saw movement and a human-shape, with awkward determination, launch itself toward her.

  He’d been lurking in the windowsill from her mother’s room.

  He wasn’t at an angle to leap directly into her room; he came from the side, but both his hands were flailing, a whirlwind of movement, and his free left hand grabbed wildly at her hair and latched on. Gravity should be pulling him down, taking him away, but between his fistful of her hair and the insane, rabid contortions of his body, he was getting a foothold.

  She pushed his face down, going for the eyes, but his face was wrapped in something like padded paper, almost like a reinforced diaper. She reached to gouge his eyes and hooked with her thumb, but felt only this bizarre material that gave no clues as to what she was touching. He held on and she saw his knife come down and registered she should do something but it was too late, it pierced through her sweater into the blubber of her upper left breast and she screamed. She was going to die, to have her heart ripped from her chest in full view of the street, in full view of Justin, in full view of the police, she had done everything right only to fuck it up when help might be arriving in just a few minutes, pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

  She bled and cried, for her, for Rose, for her mother, for everything that was cruel and evil.

  He pulled back to strike again, but she grabbed his right wrist and pinioned it to her chest. She felt one of his digits invade the cut in her chest, the open, sacred space of her body, one digit, maybe two, like he was doing nothing more than ripping a blockage out of a stubborn drain.

  She propelled herself forward out the window. He intertwined with her and fell too, positioned right below. She pushed his hand out of the way but feared beyond all fear that she would land straight on, be impaled, by his knife. No. In those fleeting moments, thinking nothing of the pain that would greet her upon impact — grass and pine chips will break fall — she thought only of the logistics of bringing her knife down into his head as if she were slicing nothing more than a block of cheese.

  There was the crunch of their bodies and a profound dislocation and disconnection. The relationship between her right leg and the rest of her body had changed; it felt like it crumbled into itself, that she was now somehow no longer bipedal. She couldn’t move it.

  He was still beneath her, groaning and kinetic, alive, but operating slowly. She had largely used his body to cushion her fall.

  She heard sirens in the background and the rumble of approaching vehicles. She heard the click of a car door open and the slam of it closing. Justin’s voice, yelling her name, for several moments, getting closer. She rolled over, blotting out the world, catatonic. Tharn, she thought, a fantasy-word she read in a children’s book, used to describe rabbits that became so paralyzed with fear and anxiety that they’d stop moving, stop functioning. Tharn.

  Justin rushed down toward her, taking a knee. She felt his hands on her shoulder, helping her up. She registered that his knee partially-landed on and pinched her nose, one of those sharp-frustrating pains that might be funny in other circumstances, klutzy uncoordinated Justin.

  Justin lifted her slightly to her side. “Karen are you —” and next thing she knew there was a horrifying squishing noise and an abortive inhalation. Justin, still on his knees, looked up at the sky and landed on his back, a knife lodged securely in his gut, up to the hilt.

  Not my knife. Not my knife. She flexed and pumped her hand, yes, her hand was not broken, she could feel it, yes, she’d locked her fingers tight, yes, she was holding her knife.

  Rose’s murderer had rolled out from under her in her daze and shoved his knife into Justin’s gut. Her mother’s murderer was pushing his knife deeper-and-deeper, putting his whole body into it, as Justin, poor Justin, gasped without sound, the only sound the barely-perceptible wet suction of Justin’s gut wound being torn further open.

  She screamed, lunged, grabbed the psycho’s shoulder and twisted him around, where he sprawled onto the ground before her. Her probing fingers felt a wetness that she knew came from his body, from an injury he must have sustained from the fall. Nothing, that would be nothing, a papercut, nothing compared to what she had planned for him.

  She was screaming.

  She thrust the knife from behind her shoulder, stabbing down, down, down into her tormentor’s face, pushing him down, down, down, down into hell. The blade went straight through the waxy padded-paper covering his face. She stabbed again, and again, and again. The tip of her knife intuited a slit for eyes, and she took the blade by the hilt, steady with both hands, and raised it to the sky — malevolent thoughts of how the Aztecs ripped out human hearts — and brought the sharp blade straight through his eye, straight through his head, into the yielding earth. She stopped only because the knife was stuck, a railroad spike.

  Karen folded upon herself, passing out, worrying crazy things about her vanity, being cold in only a bra, then, before losing consciousness, remembering she was wearing a sweater. She wanted to reach out to Justin, touch him, help him, but she couldn’t. Tharn.

  There was the great rushing of bodies, swarming and sirens, and she didn’t exactly pass out but was somewhere else when she was put onto a stretcher and lifted like soft magic into the back of an ambulance.

  >< >< ><

  The following months were … not a blur, no, that wasn’t right. How to describe it. It’s like she’d been placed on a gentle raft bobbing down a slow-moving but implacable river. Where she’d end up, she didn’t know. How she ended up there, she couldn’t conceive of. Where she had come from, the story of her bygone days, she could still see dimly, but each day the reality of her new situation became less and less deniable. She held onto her memories of her mother, her memories of Rose, and amplified them, magnified them a million times, took intentional chunks of time to do nothing but think of them, as full, important, sacred human beings. Mythic totems, almost.

  Turns out that neither she nor Rose had thought to lock the front door, a fact mentioned ad nauseam by anonymous social media commentators. But why would she, it was a safe neighborhood, people make mistakes, God, she’d imbibed the social media discussion threads so thoroughly that she replayed them in her daydreams.

  Her injuries were relatively minor. She’d fractured her right leg jumping out the window and was left with two deep scars, one on her breast and the other, the more garish scar, on her cheek (“quite the badass,” she imagined Rose would say). She hated the scar because it reminded her of nothing but abject cruelty— the serrated crocodile’s teeth of that knife left her cheek ridged, looking like plowed Earth. It served no purpose other than to disfigure and destro
y.

  Justin recovered relatively well. He too, had a ghastly scar, though it always remained hidden under whatever he wore. He did, however, walk with an almost-truncated gait and had to reconcile himself to a host of abdominal and intestinal problems.

  She and Justin kept in touch but rarely saw each other for reasons they never fully explored, although to Karen the mention of his name was concomitant with flooding waves of shame, guilt, and anguish, and no doubt the sentiment was mutual.

  She also did her best to avoid — as much as she could — the history of Geoffrey Melville, a.k.a the Obviously Pseudonymed KatMandu, or Geoff the Shotgun Shell, or Geoff the Whirlwind, Destroyer of Cities from New York to Berlin: he suffered no scarcity of nom de plumes. He had more nom de plumes and online aliases than publication credits … more than anything else, really.

  She resisted poring over the BREAKING NEWS articles and trashy tabloid spreads that brought news reporters to a frenzy, but one can only resist so much. For there were always dark nights of the soul, where you have too much to drink and you binge and you indulge, for no other reason to quell your curiosity or to smother vexing feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.

  So she read up, bits and bobs, never finishing a full article about him. He was 34. He lived in a small studio in an unappealing part of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He was estranged from his family. He had idolized his older brother, but the affection went unrequited. He worked on-and-off as a custodian and as an air conditioner repairman. Colleagues called him a good worker but erratic, and he’d inevitably get fired for talking back, tardiness or just plain no-showing.