by J. R. Rain
Anyway, I’m too… exhausted to deal with all of this now. Maybe tonight, when I have more energy. A thought that gives me pause… I’m accepting truth in knowing I’ll have more energy tonight after the sun goes down. Whoa, Sam, dial it back a bit. Reality check.
So, I say, “I think the doctor was a bit overly conservative. I went to change them yesterday and, well… look. There’s not even a mark left. It was a knife, I think, but it must’ve been really sharp. The cut was small. Lot of blood.”
“Sam…” Mary Lou grabs my hand and cradles it in both of hers. “Even a small cut wouldn’t be gone in a week. And the last I saw you―granted you were sleeping at the time―but still, the last I saw you, you had this huge bandage around your neck. Like huge. I remember, because I nearly lost it. They said the injury was bad. Like really bad. But… there’s nothing, Sam. Seriously, what the heck?”
I sigh, knowing there’s no one in this world I trust more than Mary Lou. I guess my late-night confessional was getting moved up, energy or no energy. “I… don’t understand either. Maybe you can help me make sense of it.”
“Sense of what?”
“You’re staring at me the same way you stared at me before I told you what I did at Jensen’s farm.”
She puts her fists on her hips. “Damn right, I am. Sam, what’s going on? You’re freaking me out.”
Jensen’s farm. Right, my hippie family living in the woods needed food and I’d snuck onto his farm at night to steal vegetables. Figured the worst that would happen being ten years old at the time would’ve been an ass whipping. More than likely, Mr. Jensen would’ve felt bad for me, a wild-haired scrawny ragamuffin trying to steal food because her parents failed at life. Luckily, I never got caught that summer, even though I went back there dozens of times. Mary Lou hadn’t told on me… in fact, once or twice she’d helped carry stuff. Not that the Jensens missed it. They had a lot of land and sold most of their produce to some giant company.
Anyway… I have to trust her.
At the realization I haven’t taken a breath in a few minutes, I suck in a deep one and let it out slow. “I’m confused and a little freaked out myself.” I motion for her to follow me. “C’mon.”
My turn to lead her by the hand. The kids and Danny are all still in the living room. We creep down the hall and duck into the bathroom. Mary Lou folds her arms, like she’s expecting me to lift up my nightgown and show some wound, blemish, or other some such body issue.
“Promise me you won’t scream, okay?” I say.
She smiles. “You didn’t sprout a penis, did you?”
I cackle and wind up laughing uncontrollably for a moment. “God, I needed that.”
“So no extra body parts, then?” she asks.
“Nope. I think it’s more like something’s missing.” I wipe the laughter tears, grab her by the shoulders, and try to steady myself. “This is going to be weird. Weirder than anything you’ve ever seen.”
“So you did sprout a―”
“No.” I shake my head. “My plumbing’s just fine.” Head bowed, I close my eyes. “Look in the mirror.”
Mary Lou gasps. “Sam… what?”
Cat’s out of the bag now; no sense hesitating. I open my eyes and lift my head, standing beside my sister with an arm around her. Mary Lou’s in the mirror next to my floating nightgown.
I pull up the front, ‘flashing’ the mirror, but only expose the inside of the garment for a second.
“Oh my God…” She puts a hand over her mouth. “Is this a trick mirror?”
“No. This is really happening.” I pick at her hair, which in the mirror appears to be jumping on its own.
“You mean this joke is happening. Not funny, Sam. In fact, I’m a little pissed off. No, a lot pissed off. Here I am worrying about you, and what, you guys have been busy installing this bullshit mirror―”
“It’s not a joke, Mary Lou.” I rummage through one of the cabinet drawers and find a small handheld mirror. I hold it up, curious myself to see if my refection would be in it… but nope. I angle it so Mary Lou can see, too. In it, I see the tears on her face. In it, I see my sister oh-so-very-close to losing it. That made two of us.
“Sam, where are you?”
“I don’t know. But I’m here. I think.” And despite myself, my voice constricts, and something close to a sob comes out.
Mary Lou, without thinking, pulls me in close. As she does so, I feel her turn her head to the mirror. She says “Jesus” under her breath, and holds me tighter. Soon, we are both sobbing. Mostly―and bless her for this―she lets me know that I am here, that I am alive. And that this is really happening.
***
“So, what do you think?” I ask, when we get a handle on the tears.
“Funky,” mutters Mary Lou, leaning closer to the mirror. “Damn funky. Has Danny seen this?”
“No. I’m a chicken.” I manage a weak smile. “I haven’t told anyone else about my mirror shyness.”
She snickers. “Interesting term for it. Is anything else going on? Do you feel different?”
“A little tired… all day yesterday too. I could so crawl into bed right now and zonk. And… I’m kinda having sunburn issues.”
Mary Lou narrows her eyes, tapping her finger on her chin.
That’s her thinking face… and it usually doesn’t end well.
Chapter Eight
Anger
Mary Lou listened while I talked about most of what had been going through my head since the attack.
As I spoke, my sister didn’t flip out or say much at all, which was a good thing. Because I needed to get it all out in a bad way. When I finished, when I heard how nuts I sounded out loud, my sister gave me a warm, supportive hug… and a look that suggested she’d gone down the rabbit hole and was in crazy land. It was, I thought, a fitting look. We agreed to discuss it later―basically, when I had more information―and, after I got dressed, migrated out to the living room. As if I didn’t already feel like the helpless sick girl, spending two full days in a nightgown only made that worse.
Her husband, Rick, arrived a little after six. My sister and I made dinner. I don’t think she caught me drinking the blood out of the ground beef package, but I’m pretty sure she did catch me faking eating later―not that she said anything.
So, yeah, that was my day.
Now, it’s nearly one in the morning. I’m wide awake again. Danny’s out cold. The kids are safe in their beds. My perfect family sleeps. Only, I feel like I’m not supposed to be here anymore. Everything isn’t as it should be. No, I should be dead. In fact, Danny should be a grieving widower trying to wrangle two kids and a career.
I can’t help but sense that a serious fray has developed in the fabric of my life, and it’s going to unravel in a big way.
To avoid disturbing Danny, I slip gingerly out of bed. We didn’t bother attempting to get intimate tonight, just went to bed like some old couple. And, yes, I know not all old people are so boring. But if I start thinking about oldsters getting frisky, that’ll make me think of my parents and just… no.
Minutes drag into an hour of pacing around the bedroom, watching Danny sleep. Memories of our life together flood my thoughts in a torrent of snapshot smiles. The confused/worried expression he had on when he ran up to me on the beach only weeks ago lingers. He hadn’t noticed I had lost track of Tammy, hadn’t seen what a failure of a parent I’d been. Mere seconds. I’d looked away for mere seconds, transfixed by―something evil.
I’ve read countless crime statistics. I know what can happen in ‘mere seconds,’ and yet, I still fell for the trap. I lost her. By sheer luck, she’d found a kind old man and not a dangerous one.
And I’d failed her again when I decided to go jogging in the middle of the night. Why was I so freakin’ stupid!? Why did I do that to my family? To Danny? What did I do to deserve this? Why me? I get pissed off at the universe all over again.
Rage boils up inside me. My fists clench. I storm out of the b
edroom so my stomping doesn’t wake Danny or the kids. Around and around the sofa I go in the living room, muttering curses. I want to get my hands on the piece of shit who attacked me. I want to bang my head on the wall to punish myself for being so stupid to go out alone. Never mind that I’ve already determined that by going out alone, I had possibly saved my family from an imminent attack. Screw that. It had to have been random. It had to have, dammit. And I put myself in harm’s way, and now my life was… over. I felt it, sensed it, knew it. Everything I had ever wanted or hoped for was being taken from me, one blood-filled package of raw beef at a time.
Shimmering crimson seeps between my fingers. The pain is minute, but it sneaks past my fury.
Eight small red crescents line my palms from where my fingernails bit in. The wounds close before my eyes, even as the sight of blood stirs hunger within my gut. Before I know what I’m doing, I lick my hands clean.
Hungry, and still furious, I stand there in the kitchen feeling like a home-invader.
With each passing minute, anger builds. I have to do something. I have to… kill the monster that did this to me. A part of my brain laughs at the idiocy of the idea, but I’m far too pissed off for rational thought. How dare he do this to me! How dare he ruin my life! Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but it had been mine. Thirty-one years it had taken me to stop feeling like I needed to hang on to someone else for support to get by. I’d finally become a functioning adult.
And this son of a bitch tried to take it away from me.
I swoop down the hall to the bedroom and change into a tank top, sweatpants, socks, and sneakers. Curses stream past my lips in constant whispering. In mere seconds, I’m already jogging, nearly running, away from the house, the same path I took that night. No explanation for what I’m doing comes to me. My body’s just going.
I may have even left my front door open.
Rage drives me. My sneakers pound the pavement. Snarling, I push myself up to a full run, somehow convinced that if I get back to Hillcrest Park fast enough, I’ll get revenge. I swing a right onto Virginia Road and head west for North Lemon Street. Straight ahead of me, a small ramp leads up into Hillcrest Park, and a six-foot concrete retaining wall at the base of the rounded hill I’d tried to run across to escape just a few nights ago.
Not even close to winded, I hurl myself at the wall, scaling it with ease and claw my way up the curved, grassy slope to the top. It takes me only a few seconds to dart across to the west, leaping down the hilly face on the other side dotted with tiny trees. There, I stop on the bend in the road where that thing caught up to me.
I just ran as hard as I could for about a mile and I’m not breathing hard.
Hell, I’m not even breathing.
This little road bends around a bell-shaped curve with an offshoot leading northeast at the top… That creature picked me up and threw me into the woods, straight north. I take a few steps off the road onto the dirt, turning, scanning the area for any sign of motion.
Nothing.
I feel like a lioness. I hold my arms out, fingers curled like claws, my teeth bared. If that man is here, he is going to die. It doesn’t bother me that I ran down here and didn’t get tired. I barely process the notion that I’m unarmed. It doesn’t seem like a problem. I feel utterly invincible.
“Come on, you coward!” I scream into the trees. “What are you hiding from?”
I turn, glaring death at the sad little moonlit excuse for a forest. It’s all so clear to my eyes. There’s nowhere anyone could hide and I wouldn’t see them. Did someone turn the moon’s dimmer switch all the way up?
“Where are you?!” I roar.
After a moment of no answer, I turn my rage up at the heavens, at God. “Is that what happened? Are you real and you’re laughing your ass off at me now for not believing? Come on! If you’re real, show yourself!”
My voice echoes into nothingness.
“Why me?” I shout. “What the hell did I do?”
A strong twinge of hunger gets me even angrier. Since neither my attacker nor God is bothering to show up for me to vent upon, I stomp around the woods until a potato-sized rock catches my eye.
Overcome by mindless rage, I grab it and hurl it off in a random direction with everything I have, stumbling two steps forward after letting go.
Even that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve burned off any of this excess energy.
I point at the trees, thinking of my attacker. “Where are you, coward? Why me? What did I do to you? And you!” My glare turns skyward. “You’re not real. Or if you are, you’re a sadistic bastard! Benevolent, my ass!”
Too angry to think straight, and having no targets to absorb my wrath, I collapse to my knees, seething at the ground. Frustration at not being able to do anything gets me angry-crying. This isn’t fair! This is completely messed up and so unfair.
A growl, inhumanly deep, slips from my throat. I spring to my feet and plow my fist into a nearby tree, cracking the wood and breaking two knuckles. The pain doesn’t bother me.
It just makes me angrier.
Chapter Nine
SPF Nine Million
Danny comes through for me, having caught the hint I dropped.
When I manage to force myself out of bed around noon the next day―I think it’s Thursday―there’s a plastic bag on the bureau with a few bottles of extreme sunscreen.
I’m a little hungrier than I was yesterday, which unnerves me. I haven’t kept food down since the attack. Even that egg burrito Danny got me in the hospital jumped ship in minutes. I shouldn’t be a little hungry; I should be starving.
After trading my nightgown for a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, I snag the sunscreen products and stagger down the hall toward the kitchen. Danny’s at the dining room table working on the laptop. Tammy’s sitting nearby, her attention on a coloring book while Anthony sits on the floor under the table with his toys.
“Morning, hon.” Danny stands into a kiss, smiling. “Are you feeling any better?”
“Same as I have the past few days. I feel fine… just tired.”
He rubs his chin. “Hmm. I’ve never known you to sleep past nine in the morning before. Maybe you’ve got some kind of flu?”
“No congestion or anything… and you didn’t know me during high school. Mary Lou practically had to drag me out of bed in the morning. I wasn’t a happy camper.”
“Huh.” He chuckles. “I always thought you were a morning person.”
“I am, but it took me a while to outgrow the staying-up-too-late thing.” I hold up the bag. “Thanks. Gonna see if this helps.”
“You need me to help with anything?”
“Yeah.” I wrap my arms around him and nuzzle at his neck for a moment before kissing it and whispering in his ear, “Keep an eye on the kids in case this sunscreen idea goes south…”
“Right.”
I spend a few minutes with Tammy and Anthony before slipping away with a, “Be right back.”
Once I’m in the kitchen, I set the bag on the table and pick among the options. Might as well start at the top. I grab the highest-rated one, a Coppertone lotion, and apply a moderate amount to my left hand. Since I’m not looking forward to turning that beach nightmare into reality, I decide to test small first. Using my ‘protected’ hand, I tug the curtains blocking the window over the kitchen sink aside an inch, creating a patch of sunlight in the steel basin.
“Well, here goes nothing,” I mutter.
It takes me a moment of staring at my shaking hand to find the courage necessary to slide it forward into the light. The glare on my overly-white skin is blinding and the heat is intense. Clenching my jaw, I force myself to keep holding my fingers in the light. Miraculously, I don’t break out in red, smoking blisters. Though, I can’t call it pleasant. It’s as if I’ve stuck my hand right at the opening of a toaster oven. Uncomfortable-teetering-on-painful.
Maybe the knuckles on my right hand turn white from clenching the sink’s edge, but I’m so pale I can�
�t tell. At the start of a faint cracking noise from the Formica, I stop squeezing. Oh, hell no. We just redid this whole kitchen. I am not breaking my countertop.
Wait.
Breaking my countertop?
I shouldn’t be strong enough to crack it without a hammer, much less one-handed. Gah! I must be hearing things. Okay. Sunblock SPF maximum might just work. If I can avoid spontaneous combustion, I might be able to cope with this condition.
Finally, some hope.
***
Friday and the weekend pass in a surreal mixture of boredom, unease, and gratitude (for still being with my family). Danny runs to Albertson’s for me again, and I’m the proud new owner of a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and some loose-fitting but long dresses. Pity I can’t wear them at work. Whatever’s happened to me has resulted in my not being too concerned about overheating or being too cold. Mostly, I need to keep the damn sun off my skin.
Experimentation on Saturday revealed that clothing helps but doesn’t outright stop burning in sunlight. Exposed skin covered in the super sunblock hurts less than fabric. A combination is best. I also discover that I can make myself sorta appear in mirrors using a coating of foundation makeup. If I’m going to try and keep my job, that’s going to need to happen. I’m sure the building security people would freak out if they saw empty clothing walking around on the CCTV feeds. Another bonus is the foundation has more skin tone than I’ve been showing lately, so it’ll keep people from asking why I look like a marble lawn statue.
At some point over the weekend, a thought occurs to me: If I’m now some sort of magical creature who doesn’t appear in mirrors, then why don’t I have a strong enough enchantment that it hides whatever I’m wearing too? I mean, shouldn’t such craziness extend to my clothing? Argh! I don’t understand any of this. Did I seriously just think ‘enchantment’ and be serious?