Shots Fired in the Melting Pot

by T. C. Clover

filled with desire for survival, and she forced herself to open her eyes. There was a long, sharp piece of the mirror at her feet and she retrieved it from the floor without another thought. Although she was handling the mirror by the larger end, it still cut the skin between her right thumb and index finger. Litz ignored the pain and turned to see that her kidnapper was inspecting his bloodied right hand.

  She took the opportunity to assert herself and jabbed him three times in the back of the head. The man wailed in pain as the plumber tossed the improvised glass knife aside and bolted toward the bedroom door. Litz scrambled across the room in a panic, feeling her breasts bounce under the tight bra. Her face screwed up somewhat as a few pieces of glass found their way into her bare feet. She grabbed the door handle as if in slow motion and felt relief when it twisted open.

  The television star burst through the door with all her strength, doing damage to the drywall in the hallway. She saw a staircase leading down to the main floor and found herself rocketing through the house to the front door. Her body slammed against the entryway wall, and she saw streaks of blood from her feet on the tiles. Litz began to unbolt the locks with impatience. She thought of bulky Kevin and William in the basement but heard Aron stumbling through the hallway upstairs.

  “I’ll send the police to get you; I promise!” Litz shouted toward the basement as she opened the front door in a daze and saw the blinding light of day.

  The liberated woman ran down the cement slabs as if in a dream. There was an older woman with thick eyeglasses standing on the opposite side of the street. She had on a green and white flower print dress that covered her bulky body.

  Litz ran across the street despite the cars that were coming from the east. Pieces of asphalt tore at her bare feet and found their way into the fresh cuts therewith. The elderly pedestrian stared at her with an open mouth as Litz began to scream for the police. But the woman didn’t respond because she wasn’t real.

  The perplexed blonde felt herself sink out of her fantasy of escape and back into bed with the abusive stranger. She closed her eyes and held her breath as the punches kept coming in odd patterns. Litz knew better than to fantasize about characters that couldn’t exist in this world and regretted the end of an exhilarating escape.

  She began to focus on what was real in the room and what had taken place. Aron hadn’t been saying punchy, punchy or one punch. In fact, he had been silent during the entire assault. Litz didn’t understand his need to hurt and dominate her, but the smile on his face indicated unnatural gratification.

  The young woman had felt a spike of hope when Kevin and William fired their pistols from somewhere in the house, but then everything went silent. It had been over five minutes, or three hundred seconds by her count since the last shot went off. Litz was hopeful that the police would soon arrive, but her captor wasn’t concerned with the gunfire.

  She looked over at a tall, dark cedar dresser on the right side of the room. There was a framed photo of a redheaded woman with a beautiful smile atop the dresser. The photo frame was gold and its glass free of dust like the rest of the house. She tried getting a glimpse at the matching chest of drawers to her left, but Aron thumped her in the right eye with his fist again. The television star winced for a few seconds and then gazed at the chest of drawers, which had a large mirror mounted above its surface. There was a brand new brown sweater on top of the unit, in front of the mirror.

  Litz saw her half-naked body covered in bungee cords that were tight to the point of slowing the circulation in her extremities. She detected folds of her skin bunched up under the cords and a pitiful redness at each binding. The forlorn woman noticed that her attacker would stop his assault long enough to admire her red bra and panty set, and she feared that something worse was coming. There had never been a moment in recent memory when she wanted her mother so much. Life had devolved to one sprawling nightmare after another since that hellish roller coaster ride. Litz never knew that a person could become ill from a tragedy until her stomach emptied over and over during that awful day. It occurred to the glum woman that her escape fantasy wasn’t plausible, and this situation would require a sacrifice.

  “You hit like a pansy!” Litz taunted her assailant with a firm jaw and even stare.

  Aron reacted to this comment by exhibiting pain in his face and delivered a massive uppercut to the woman that left her ears ringing. She clenched her teeth and took the blow as though it were something normal – a new form of beauty treatment.

  “You punch the way a fat guy makes love,” her rant continued, and Aron rewarded the plumber with a second uppercut of greater force. “I bet I could hit harder than you, fat boy,” she managed to say through a daze.

  Litz could feel the teeth in her upper left jaw coming loose, and she knew that her consciousness was fading. There was a stream of dried blood that had run down her face when the assault began, and a layer of clear gunk from her nose topped it off. The cunning woman braced herself for more strikes from Aron, but he was distracted.

  She drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few minutes. For a moment there appeared to be a staircase with familiar gray shag carpeting. The dazed woman found herself being carried by someone and hoped that her bodyguards had come to the rescue. This trip downstairs reminded her of that awful roller coaster – a ride she never escaped. There were several flashes of light and darkness, until she felt cold water get splashed all over her face.

  Litz became conscious from the immediate shock of the chilled water. She felt violated and tormented in the same instant. When the water cleared from her eyes, she saw the muscular man standing across from her in the kitchen. There was an empty gray mop bucket in his hands, which he had used to douse her in water. Litz leaned back in her seat and noticed that the water had also soaked a section of the cherry wood table.

  “So you think you can hit harder than me, b****?” Aron swore as he set the mop bucket on the floor and stared at his captive. “Don’t worry about your bodyguards, there’s a half-inch steel plate inside that door. They can shoot at it or through the walls; it doesn’t matter. So what do you have to say now? Acting like a tough girl isn’t going to stop any of this.”

  “I can hit harder than you, pansy,” Litz replied through a fog of pain that was engulfing her face. “Let’s do this,” she muttered in an awkward fashion and tilted her head to the right.

  Aron exploded with his strength across the surface of the table, knocking over two chairs on the long side of the serving area at his left.

  “You’re a liar!” He said, pointing his right index finger at her chest. “You can barely sit up in that chair. But I’ll humor you for a minute. I’ll humiliate you, and then we’ll go back to bed for more playtime,” the man threatened with a wicked grin that made her shiver.

  Litz looked down at her body and noticed that she was free of her bonds. The optimistic woman tried to move her jaw from left to right, but felt something pop and chose to be cautious.

  “I’ll bet you can’t break a dinner plate,” she challenged her captor, raising her swollen eyelids.

  The powerful man pursed his lips together and blew air into the spacious kitchen, mocking her with dominant authority. He shuffled over to the kitchen cupboards and retrieved two white plates. His face was flushed and red when he returned to the kitchen table and slid a plate across the surface. It flew with unexpected force and slammed into her right breast. Litz grimaced and reached out to take the plate in her hands.

  “Go ahead and break it,” Aron ordered as he stood at the other end of the table with another plate in his right hand. “By the way, if you try to hit me with that, I’ll just make it so you can’t walk or stand up.”

  The plumber looked down at the glossy, white plate and was disheartened to read the words ‘microwave safe’ on its reverse side. She flicked the center of the object a few times with her right hand and then held it agai
nst the edge of the table at a forty-five-degree angle. Litz then took the meaty part of her right hand and smacked it against the portion of the plate that was hanging off the table. The leverage of this maneuver snapped the plate in half, and she set the jagged pieces on the table in front of her captor.

  Aron waived his right hand at her in disapproval and slid the jagged pieces of the plate out of her reach. He then balanced his plate against the top of the table at a forty-five-degree angle and hit it in the center, which broke the object at an odd angle.

  “See, that’s how a man breaks something,” he boasted with his chest puffed out. “We don’t rely on the edge of the table to do the work for us.”

  “I’ll bet you can’t break a bowl,” Litz contested with a bit more pride.

  The man shook his head and took a moment to put all four pieces of the broken plates into the mop bucket. He then moved the bucket over to the kitchen counter and fished in the cupboard for two white soup bowls.

  “You first, tough guy,” he mocked with a smirk of superiority and slid a bowl hard across the surface of the table.

  Litz was ready for his cruelty the second time and caught the bowl before it could wound her chest. She turned the object over in her hands