by Steve Bailey
"What's wrong… What's wrong! You fucking cunt! You always have to have everything don't you? Little Miss Fucking Perfect, has to have everything to make Daddy proud while I shit myself in the corner like the fucking retard in the family. 'Don't worry, things will get better honey, you just have to try harder.' All you fucking condescending assholes. The whole lot of you can go to fucking hell!"
Cassandra took a plate from the table and threw it against the wall, shattering it into little shards on the floor around them.
Abigail's face went pale with horror and disbelief. "I thought you'd be happy for me."
"Happy? I'm tired of being happy for you. I was happy for you when you graduated with honors in high school while I only managed to get by. I was happy for you when you went to an Ivy League school while I decided to move to the city and try to make something with my talent. I was happy for you when you became the youngest VP at that fucking soulless bank you work for. And yes, fucking happiness all around when you finally got the dream man to propose to you, making yourself a perfect little life while your sister stood off in the wings, providing the tragic contrast to your predictably happy existence."
"I don't understand where this is coming from…"
"You shut up! Tom was mine. He was always mine. You don't understand that, but maybe now you will."
Cassandra snatched her phone from the countertop and tried to dial Tom's number, but her fingers shook too badly to enter the number correctly.
"I'll get him on the phone and then you'll see. He'll tell you how much he loves me and that you mean nothing to him anymore. He'll tell you how we've been seeing each other lately and that's where he's been spending his time. With me."
"What?"
"Oh yeah, that little affair you suspected him of having, that was with me. How do you feel now, Little Miss Sunshine? Is today the first rainy day in your endless stream of parades?"
"You're crazy. I don't believe you…"
"I really don't give a fuck what you believe." After her fourth attempt, Cassandra slammed the phone onto the table, the case cracking under the force. "Call the motherfucker! Put it on speaker. I fucking dare you."
Abigail took out her own phone and dialed Tom's number. After three rings, he picked up the other end. "Hi honey, I'm in the car, just left the restaurant. I should be home soon. You feeling any better?"
"Tom, I'm at Cassandra's. She says the two of you have been seeing each other behind my back. Is that true?"
Silence.
"Is it?"
"It's not what you think… Yes, we've been spending some time together, but nothing has been happening. She just wanted some company and—"
"How could you?" She dropped the phone and then approached Cassandra. "How could both of you do this to me?"
"We didn't do it to you, it just happened," Cassandra said. "We're in love." Cassandra's cell rang—it was Tom. Bet you want to talk to me now, you prick, she thought as her thumb pressed 'accept call.'
"What the fuck did you tell her?"
"I told her the truth honey, that we belong together."
Cassandra placed the phone on the kitchen table. "It's on speaker. Why don't we all discuss this as one happy family?"
"Abby, honey," Tom pleaded. "You have to believe me. Nothing happened between us. She's twisted."
"I don't know what to believe," Abigail said. "I have to get out of here."
"Wait." Cassandra grabbed her sister's arm and pulled her closer. "We're not done yet. Tom tell her that you love me and that you're leaving her…tell her damn it."
"You psychotic bitch, I don't love you. I love my wife."
Cassandra slammed her hands on the table and brushed the phone off so that it went flying across the room and landed on the kitchen floor. She grabbed her sister by the throat and threw her face down on the table. Abigail's flailing hands knocked Cassandra's mail and magazines onto the floor. She leaned in and whispered in her ear, "Isn't that nice, he loves you. He loves you so much that he has to fuck me all the time."
Abigail couldn't breathe, Cassandra's hands clenching tighter and tighter as the rage consumed her. After a few minutes she let go and Abigail instinctively backhanded her with enough force to send Cassandra sprawling.
Blood streamed from Cassandra's nose and down her chin. She leaned over and picked up a piece of the plate that littered the kitchen floor, rushing over to her sister, Cassandra plunged the shard into her sister's stomach.
"Here's what I think of your fucking baby, you little shit!"
Cassandra stabbed the broken sliver of porcelain over and over into Abigail's abdomen until her hand was soaked in blood. She could feel Abigail's insides brushing up against her closed fist as it drove deeper with every thrust.
Moments later her sister's body went completely lifeless, lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of her blood.
Cassandra looked over to her side and noticed the phone in the corner. Tom's voice screamed from the speaker. "Abby! Abby! Stay away from my wife, you bitch."
Cassandra stood up, adjusted her skirt, and wiped the blood from her face with a towel from the counter. She picked up the phone, turned off the speaker, and slowly placed it by her ear.
"Are you still there honey? I took care of our little problem…both of them."
"What the fuck is going on, where's Abby?" Tom's voice cracked in frightened disbelief at what he'd just heard.
She hung up the phone and placed it on the kitchen counter. With barely a tremble in her fingers, Cassandra poured herself a large glass of Bordeaux—the same vintage she had shared with Tom the night they'd fallen in love.
Her phone rang again. She looked at the screen— DADDY.
Cassandra blew a lock of blood-streaked hair away from her face before she took a deep breath and answered the call.
"Hey, Daddy."
"Is your sister there yet? Did she tell you?"
"Abby's gone now."
"Where'd she go?"
"I don't know Daddy. I'm not my sister's keeper."
Cassandra started laughing hysterically before her body began convulsing, throwing up whatever remained in her stomach. She stared at the copy of the Watchtower pamphlet she had received earlier that day, lying on the floor alongside a pair of theatre tickets, an old issue of the New Yorker, and Abigail's lifeless body.
All of it meaning nothing to her any more.
Nothing at all.
Big Hard Squall
by Lane Kareska
Abby has tasted her own blood before, sure—the playground, a single fistfight in high school, junior college basketball…but never this much of it. It's got a hot, sweaty quality to it. And it's not the taste, but the temperature, that makes her gag. She doesn't want to throw up. Not while she's locked in the back of her own brand new 1991 Mercedes Benz S-Class. The darkness, the heat, the insufferable conditions, they don't add up to fear exactly, like she would have thought. Instead, what she feels is a deep, rotten, insulted kind of anger. These two punks show up at her door. Do this to her. Bodily arrest her. It's unthinkable.
Her wrist bones feel crushed beneath the binding of duct tape. Her throat is full of blood and bile, but she can't do much about it but swallow and try to work her jaw enough to rip open the strip of gummy tape slapped across her mouth. One punch—that's all it was—and her nose simply burst. The blood hasn't stopped flowing since. The heat in the trunk of this car—for fuck's sake—this is bad. She keeps waiting for the fear—fear of sexual assault, fear of murder, fear of all manner of harm—to overtake her, but it's not happening. Instead, she just lies there, folded and bound, in the trunk, like a gift for someone.
She's probably only been in her trunk for a few minutes, though it already feels much longer. She was too disoriented to keep track of the initial turns, brakes and accelerations, but now they're on a long straightaway and the punk behind the wheel is putting it to at least forty. She guesses that they're leaving the long driveway out of the subdivision, which is really the on
ly place for him to go. There's only one road in and out of Dune Acres, Indiana, and she is very confident that they're on it right now.
The driver slows, the car bumps gently over the railroad tracks. Yes, she thinks. I know where we are. Now it gets a little bit trickier. If the car turns right, they're heading into Chicago…probably. If they turn left, they're going for the highway that could take them to Chicago, or anywhere else. Indianapolis, Detroit, Tallahassee, who knows?
Her head is swimming. She's going to lose consciousness. These idiots didn't seem too concerned that Abby, a 65-year-old woman with two bad knees, might not be the type of person that would do well being attacked, bound, gagged, and shoved into a car trunk.
The driver turns left. The interstate.
It would be real nice to breathe a normal breath right now. It would be real bad to continue being unable to do so. She strains her neck muscles and tries to lower her jaw. The glue on the back of the tape rips at the skin of her lips. She grunts, cracks her lips, then tries to drive her tongue through the strip of tape. Her own husky, insane breathing and the rough noise of her struggling amplifies and fills the awful compartment. The tape tastes terrible, like the rubber of a gym shoe. She works it, and though the tape doesn't fall away, she does chew it away from her lips. The tape hangs from her face, swaying and brushing her chin with the motion of the car.
Finally able to breathe a little better, she spits, coughs, retches. Don't throw up. Don't throw up. If she throws up, she's the one who has to deal with it. The driver pushes the speed up higher. The vibrant, bodied odor of car exhaust begins to seep into the air of the trunk. What does that mean? Carbon monoxide? Will that kill her? She tries to kick at the trunk, but moving her legs can be hard work on a normal day when she isn't contained like this. The pain in her right knee is absurd; she unfolds her leg from behind her and tries to kick at the trunk door. She achieves three short kicks and there is no result but some jammed toes and pain in the ball of her foot. Muffled sounds from inside the car. The punk is listening to the radio. Commercials.
She got perfect looks at both of their faces. Not that it may end up doing her much good. She had known at the sound of the doorbell—in a vague, unformed kind of way—that something bad had arrived for her. There was no reason for anyone to be ringing her doorbell at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning, on top of a hill that no one ever goes to, in a private subdivision that actively tries to keep people out. Especially not these two: a white guy with longish, tired-colored hair and sunglasses, and a somewhat younger black kid with a boxy haircut and black t-shirt. They looked not unlike carnies, or movers who expected to be put to work. The two actually smiled at her when she came to the door. Behind their shoulders, their red Jeep sat parked in her driveway.
The punk is changing the radio channels. The car slows down to take the on-ramp, then speeds up again. Keeping track of the directions is hopeless. She resolves to not make the effort, but instead to find a way out of this mess and now. She pulls at her wrists. Breaking the tape seems impossible; there's no strength in her triceps. And she's on her side, pinning her right arm with her own weight. She curls her hands, trying to bring her fingernails to the edge of the tape. Maybe she can cut her way out.
Her kidnapper is laughing about something. There had been recognition in the black one's eyes when she came to the door. It wasn't a both-ways recognition. She felt herself identified as though from a photograph. That was the moment when she said, "Hi," flat and suspicious. The white one reached for the door and opened it, while she tried to hold it shut. They knew her. They were at the house for her. They knew she lived alone, widowed, retired, in her off-the-beaten-path, surrounded-by-full-bloom-pine-trees house. After they'd dropped her with the punch, they'd scooped her up. They did not—so far as she knows—go back into the house to steal anything. They had been there for her. And they had taken her car keys off the hook on the wall.
The car bangs over a pothole or something and she is thrown up against the surface of the hood and back down. She hacks a cough and something twists, spasms in her gut. She suddenly has to pee. How long are they going to drive? She is being taken somewhere. There is a destination. She knows that. She doesn't know why she's being taken there or how long it will take, but there is a destination, there is a reason for all of this. She has only to consult a very short list of enemies to try and figure out who she has wronged or what she has done that would call for kidnapping. Before she's even finished sorting through the brief list of former business partners and a useless old brother-in-law that may wish her ill, she knows there is nothing in her own history to demand this. It's either a mistake or has to do with someone else's trouble.
She knows that she, like anyone, has lived a bad life full of mistakes, missteps, failures, hesitations, retreats, and both small and large disasters. But now, at the dusk of her professional life, none of her crimes stand out as any more egregious than what one should expect from a life that started where hers did. None of her connections or associations have so tested the borders of criminality as to place her here, in the back of her own trunk, because of anything she herself has done. In the back of her head, in the back of her life, she knows with thrumming finality that she is not here because of herself—Abby Klutter, semi-retired business person, receiver of three DUIs, "recovered" alcoholic—but because of Margaret.
The car swiftly changes lanes, jostling her. She tries to listen to the radio through the body of the car. She tries to listen to the punk chuckling behind the wheel. A single punk. Both are not in the car because, of course, one has to be driving their red Jeep. They wouldn't have left it in her driveway—the crime scene. Apparently it takes two cars to kidnap one woman. So where is the red Jeep? Driving along behind them? Leading them? Somewhere else entirely?
Margaret is the key to this. Abby is being punished because of her. Or she is the tool, the executing implement, of Margaret's punishment. Margaret, what is this about?
A volcanic rise of nausea. She is going to throw up.
The deceleration of the car wakes her. It's a firm braking and a long, slow circular turn that signals the use of an off-ramp. Her heart rate speeds; they're reaching their destination. What does that mean? Is that good news or bad? What happens when they get there? What is the destination? Some shitty urban garage where Abby will be shackled and tortured with mechanics' tools? Some shitty abandoned motel bathroom where she will be handcuffed to a tub and gang-raped? Some shitty, shaded riverbank where she will be made to kneel before the dark water and shot in the back of the head? These punks are assholes and this situation is bullshit, Margaret.
Another series of nauseating brake pumps and a few seconds of forward idling. She has no idea what's going on. She strains to listen to the outside world. For the first time in what feels like hours, the radio volume is dialed down. A different voice—foreign and electronic—sounds from outside the car. The kidnapper responds, answers casually and slowly, but at an elevated volume. He's projecting his voice but not shouting at whoever, or whatever, he's talking to. The car idles forward again, then brakes. A long pause.
I know exactly where the fuck I am! She screams, "Help!" She kicks out at the trunk with both feet, over and over again, stomping, booming, breaking her feet but who cares? This might be her only opportunity to alert the world. While throwing her tantrum in the trunk, she has a false kind of out-of-body vision. She sees her Mercedes being slowly rolled through a McDonald's drive-thru lane. She sees the faceless employee in the window accepting money—a crumpled and sweat-damp five-dollar bill—and suddenly the bizarre, discordant, and totally unmistakable sound of herself screaming in a high and optimistic panic in the trunk of her own car. She wants to laugh she's so excited by this. She kicks and screams over and over again. "I'm in here! I'm being fucking kidnapped!" Kick. Kick. Kick. Boom. Boom. Boom. "I'm an old woman!"
The car does nothing for a moment—rolls forward, brakes again, then drives away at a higher speed. The car accelerates, the eng
ine growling loudly within the cage of the trunk. Blind as a worm in this darkness, Abby begins to feel a dead ache take hold of her feet, calves and knees. "You motherfucker!" she screams. "You fucking punk!"
Soon the car is flying down the highway again.
Abby believes she understands three facts about her situation:
1. This is a kidnapping.
2. She is the victim.
3. This is a reprisal against her daughter.
She realizes now that during the entire ten years she has spent as the mother of one of Illinois' state prosecuting attorneys, it has never occurred to her that Margaret's career and position would place her or any others of their family in any kind of danger. Why hadn't she thought of that? Margaret's entire day job is all about putting away criminals and wrongdoers. Abby had never thought about how inherently dangerous the nature of that work must be. The thought never entered her mind. And she had certainly never thought that danger could bleed from her daughter's life into her own.
Who are these punks? She can't even begin to place them. Has Margaret recently completed any high-profile prosecutions? There's nothing relevant in her memory. This could be anything.
Margaret…
She realizes now, strangely, that she's been hearing the siren but she hadn't registered it. It's been, for a few moments, nested there beneath the layers of distortion, compressed air and anger in the car. But now, she identifies the sound not only as a siren, but as a police siren, coiling and uncoiling directly behind her Mercedes.
Her mind returns to the entirely theoretical McDonald's. She assembles a sequence of events that stretches from the drive-thru employee identifying Abby's kicks and screams, to the quick exit of the Mercedes, to the employee (now a teen girl in braces) running to her manager and reporting the strangest thing she's ever heard in the drive-thru—which leads to a phone call to the police, a description of the vehicle, maybe even a license plate number read from paused security camera footage. She's done it, Abby thinks. She has saved herself. This is it, Margaret. I finally did something right!