by Julie Frayn
“Free?” she shook her head. “I’m the one who’s free. By the time you get out of this, we’ll be long gone. You’ll never hurt me or Ariel again, you hear me? Ever. Again.” She filled her mouth with saliva and sent a ball of spit into the air. It landed on his neck, a few drops of spittle dotting his cheek and chin.
He closed his eyes and pressed his lips closed, turned and glared at her. “You can’t even spit right.” His voice had lost its edge. “You’re pitiful.” The malice waned, replaced by a false bravado. He’d lost his grip on her and he knew it.
A dark spot grew on the sheet. She raised one eyebrow, threw her head back and laughed. “What are you, three years old? Poor Cullen. Pissed his bed like a widdle baby.”
“Fuck you.”
Mazie yanked on the scarf. He resisted, but the damage to his shoulder had weakened him. She used a better knot and tied it tight to the slat.
She stood back and surveyed the room. The bed sheets were ripped, the cream canvas splattered with crimson blood, soaked with yellow urine, and punctuated by black mascara smudges from her attempts to secure his free arm. It was almost beautiful. Like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Mazie jerked the scissors free from his shoulder and tossed them on the dresser. She grabbed the bourbon and put the bottle to her lips, her eyes on his. She grinned at him and tipped her head and the bottle back. The booze heated her throat and her belly. She shook her head and marvelled at the cold shiver that trailed from the base of her neck to her tail bone. She ripped the sheet off of him and poured the alcohol into the open wound on his left thigh.
He pressed his head back into the pillow and screamed.
“You like that?” She set the bottle on the dresser and peeled her T-shirt off revealing her black bra with the touch of lace where her breasts met to create the ample cleavage he so loved. “How about this? This good for you?”
His breath was laboured, his face twisted, but he stared at her chest.
She mounted him, straddled his hips and rocked against them. She dry-humped him and ran one finger over her breasts. Despite his wounds, the pain, the blood, despite pissing himself just a moment before, his erection soon pressed against the crotch of her jeans. A crooked smile crossed her face. “Yeah, that’s it. Come on, baby. You wanna fuck me?”
He didn’t speak, but his lips parted and he stared into her eyes.
She put one hand to his throat and pressed.
His eyes flew open and began to water. He thrashed beneath her and gasped. “Mazie,” his voice creaked through his constricted windpipe. “Can’t. Breathe.”
“Shut up!” She leaned forward, her face just a few inches from his, and smiled. “I’m not done fucking you yet.”
She stopped humping and stared at his face, at the colour in his cheeks and the fear of pending death. His eyes rolled back and his mouth slackened. His body stiffened beneath her.
She released her hold on his throat and cocked her head.
An experiment the first time, he’d told her. Erotic asphyxiation. Was supposed to heighten orgasm. She’d fought it, said no, pushed him away. It heightened his orgasm all right. But as he climaxed, she had passed out cold. She awoke to him snoring beside her, physically spent and emotionally absent. She got online the next day and looked it up. The person being asphyxiated was supposed to get off. It was normally a lonely activity, one using a belt or a tie. Or a scarf.
His cherry cheeks began to pale, his mouth opened wide and he gasped for air, coughed, and swallowed. His eyes darted back and forth, coming to rest on her face, his eyes wide. The throbbing of his heart shook his body, bouncing her on top of him with each pounding beat.
So that’s what she looked like every time he’d done that to her. Red-faced. Wild-eyed. Scared to death. Relieved to be alive. Now he really understood her.
He couldn’t hold her gaze and turned his head to the side. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, before moving his focus to the other side of the room. “Mazie, why are you doing this to me?”
She crawled off the bed, turned her back to him and pulled her shirt back over her head. Blood smears stained the inner thighs of her jeans, soaked through the fabric at her right knee and into her skin. Damn, why hadn’t she thought to change first? Her favourite Levi’s, ruined. She spun around.
“Look what you did! You wrecked my jeans. You can’t even bleed right. Maybe you ought to scrub the stains out, huh? Think you could handle that, you simple bastard?”
He smirked at her and huffed air out his nostrils. “I get it.” His voice was hoarse. Probably damage to his windpipe. She could sympathize. But she wouldn’t.
“Yeah? And just exactly what do you get?” She stared at the bright red handprint on his neck. At the gaping wounds in his thighs and arm. His flaccid manhood dangling between his legs.
He swallowed and coughed. “You think you’re showing me what it feels like.” Tears dripped from his eyes onto the pillow case.
Another damn stain.
“A little payback, maybe.” He was barely whispering now.
She crossed her arms. “There is no amount of shit I could do to you in one night that will ever make you ‘get it.’ Do you understand?” She paced the carpet beside the bed, shook her head, and grumbled unintelligible words. Her head was woozy from sucking on brandy and bourbon — more booze than she’d had to drink in years. More than she’d meant to have that night.
She stopped short and stared at the floor, at the stains of drying blood on her feet. She spun around, her eyes darting across the carpet around her. Her bare footprints stared back at her, the bloody toe marks diminishing as she’d wiped his blood from her feet with each step. Her heart raced and she took three steps toward the hall.
She had to get it cleaned up before Cullen got home.
When she got to the threshold of their bedroom door, awareness struck her like a fist to the side of the head. She turned back and found him still lying on the bed. Still tied up, one limb to each corner. Drawn and quartered.
How many times had she cleaned up his filth? Piss on the toilet seat, on the floor, on the side of the bathroom cabinet where he splashed because he couldn’t bother to sit or wipe up after himself. No, that was her job. And his vomit all those times he got drunk and missed the bowl. That was her job too. What used to be just normal smells of human life had become the stench of him, a vile, inescapable odour that followed her every move. His sweaty armpits when he fucked her without showering, his stinky feet when he walked across the spotless linoleum and ground his smell into the carpet, coffee and cigarettes and bourbon and beer that he breathed, hot and moist, onto her neck when he held her hair, pulled back her head, and growled obscenities into her ear.
He was covered in blood, soiled with his own urine, stinking of the booze he’d drunk and of the bourbon she’d poured into his wounds. She cocked her head and smiled.
There would be no cleaning up. Not for him. Not ever again.
She paced at the foot of the bed, her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on his eyes.
He turned his head. “Stop staring at me.”
He looked deflated. Like a balloon with a tiny hole that had lost a lot of hot air. She’d broken him, made him cry, hurt him and demeaned him. She should be elated. Satisfied. A tiny bit happy.
But she was none of those things. There was no joy in seeing him this way. No excitement, no release in causing him harm. There was only emptiness. The relief of that fact was overwhelming. She was not a monster. She’d never be what he had become. She took no pleasure in his pain, despite every hateful blow he’d heaped upon her, despite her own hatred for him. The stream of tears it brought to her eyes was unrestrained.
“Damn it, you’ve made your point!” His breathing became laboured, his chest heaved. His eyes lost their resignation and regained a familiar glint. He was angry.
Nothing had changed. If she let him loose she would suffer at his hands. He would overpower her, attack her. Break her. Kill her. That was th
e inevitable end to life with Cullen.
Death.
He pulled on the restraints and kicked his feet, his face contorted in pain. The bed creaked and the headboard hit the wall.
Thud, thud, thud, thud.
Her body rocked with the sound of their sex.
Creak, thud, gasp, thud, gasp, creak, thud.
She wiped one palm across her forehead, then covered her ears with both hands and closed her eyes. “Stop it!” She barely heard her own voice screaming over the incessant banging of wood against drywall. The room began to spin. Her eyes shot open.
The whole bed rocked with his attempts to rip himself free. “Let me loose. Now, so I can fucking kill you! I hate you, you fucking bitch. You hear me? I hate you!”
Mazie raced down the stairs to the kitchen. The thudding and creaking followed her with each step. Her eyes scanned every inch of counter space. She yanked open the knife drawer, touched the handle of each blade. Her fingers tingled when they made contact with the smooth surface of the black pakkawood handle of her favourite chef’s knife. She raised it from the drawer and slid it from its sheath. Moonlight streamed in the front window and glinted off the sharpened edge. Her reflection in the steel was warped and twisted, like a funhouse mirror. She focused on the purple bruise around her eye and scabbed wound on her cheek. On the smear of his blood across her forehead.
She held the knife at her side, blade pointed toward the floor. Every footstep up the stairs, across the hall and into the bedroom calmed her. Her mind was lucid. Her intention clear. Her patience with him spent. She stood beside the bed and stared at him as he thrashed.
His efforts had opened his wounds. Fresh blood, bright and scarlet, dripped onto the bed sheet.
His gaze froze on the knife. His eyes darted from the blade to her eyes and back again. He shook his head. “Don’t do it.”
“Do what?”
His eyes narrowed and he smirked. “You can’t do it, can you?”
“Do what?”
“You fucking nut job. You haven’t got the stones for it.”
She raised the knife.
He pressed his head back into the pillow, his eyes frozen open, tracking the arc of the blade.
She brought the knife down in one swift movement. It sliced though his abdomen, as easy as hacking up a summer watermelon. When the knife came up, a trail of blood flew from the tip, leaving an arc of red spatter across the bed and his chest. The second time the blade pierced his flesh, his screams disappeared amid the thrumming of her heartbeat in her ears. She brought her arm up three times, four, five. She stabbed and sliced, the room silent despite Cullen’s open, screaming, bourbon-reeking mouth. There was only her heartbeat, the swish of metal through the air, and the spray of his blood.
Her arm wearied. She ceased the onslaught, her arm above her head. Drops of his metallic, stinking blood, like a rusted scouring pad left under the sink too long, landed softly in her hair and on her shirt. She dropped her arm to her side and poked his face with her other hand. His head lolled to the side, his eyes open, mouth agape. He’d stopped screaming. Stopped yelling at her. Stopped demeaning her.
He’d just stopped.
The time glowed on the clock-radio. Five forty-seven. Mazie wandered to the window and brushed the drape aside with the knife blade. The horizon was awash in red and purple streaks. The air was still, the cul-de-sac silent.
It was going to be a beautiful day.
~~~~~~~~
Mazie sat in the chair at the foot of the bed and watched the clock radio mark the passing of each interminable minute. Leaden arms and legs pinned her to the seat, her mind a blank canvas, empty of thought and emotion.
A hollow thud shook her from her daze. She crossed the room and peered out through a crack in the blood-stained drape.
The paper boy rode his bicycle away from the house and stopped in front of Rachel’s. He grabbed a newspaper from the wagon behind his bike, bound it with an elastic band, and tossed it toward the Simpson’s porch.
Awareness seeped in. Her skin was sticky and crusty with Cullen’s blood. She held out her hands. In the right was the knife. Her favourite one, so sharp and perfect for cutting through carrots and potatoes at a professional pace, for severing sinew from bone when she butchered a rack of lamb down to chops. In her left was her husband’s flaccid penis. She recoiled and dropped it on the carpet. She spun around. His body was still. His angry mouth silent. He was covered in blood, sliced and diced. His crotch and torso were ground beef.
She looked at his penis on the floor. So small. So insignificant. A grin crossed her lips and soon she was laughing hysterically. How had this insignificant thing been the cause of so much pain and anguish? What power did it hold over him that satisfying it was more important than keeping his wife, the woman he used to love, safe and free from harm? She shook her head and stepped over it.
God, she needed a cup of coffee.
The screech of the six o’clock alarm clock made her jump. She raced to the other side of the bed and slapped the snooze button, turned and surveyed the room. Her arms and legs went cold, her mind numb.
Blood trails splattered the walls and the carpet. The bourbon bottle lay on its side on the dresser, its contents pooled on the pine. She raised her eyes and followed a roadmap of his death. Red sprays stained the ceiling and scarlet drops plopped onto the pools of blood on his body. She tossed the knife and held out her arms. They were soaked with him. Crimson taunted her from under her nails, from the grooves of her fingerprints where his blood had ground into her skin. She wiped her palms against her T-shirt to find it sticky as well, like a murderous tie-dye experiment gone horribly wrong.
She sank to the floor, and curled up on the carpet. Her entire body convulsed with shivers and tremors and dry sobs. What had she done? She’d only intended to hurt him and leave.
The snooze alarm sounded and her body jerked at the intrusion. Her gaze darted around the room. Six oh-nine.
She had to get ready. She had to go.
She reached up to the night stand, clicked the alarm off, stood and rubbed her hands down the front of her pants, her gaze fixed on the bloody sheets.
Cullen’s cell phone vibrated against the wood of the night stand. With each shimmying alert, it hopped and bounced, nearer and nearer to the edge.
Mazie held her breath and cut her eyes to his face. She expected his arm to reach out and grab the damn thing. He just lay there, his eyes open and staring straight at her. She exhaled, leaned one knee on the bed and forced his eyelids closed with two fingers. She walked around the bed, her gaze never leaving his face, not fully believing that he was gone. Her nerves were on high alert, ready to cut and run if he sat up and tried to come after her.
She picked up the phone. A text. Her heart fluttered. She wasn’t allowed to see his phone, to intrude on his life. But like hell would she not intrude on his death. She pressed the centre button and the screen lit up.
Hey man, what time are we heading to the cabin?
Damn. He’d made actual plans. Someone expected him. Her breathing came in short bursts and her arms went cold. Who the hell was J-Dawg? The phone vibrated in her hand and another message popped up.
Dude. Come on. If we’re going today I need to get my shit together and call the girls.
Her eyes narrowed. The girls. She looked at Cullen. Needed some time alone. Away from everything. Right.
She put her thumbs to the keyboard and took a breath. Sorry man. Not yet. How about next Friday?
That would give her a week to get some distance. See her mother before she died. Then find a new life.
The phone buzzed. Seriously? We’d only have the weekend then. Man, these chicks are good to go! You’re gonna spend a week at home with that bitch instead?
Her eyes were slits. He didn’t just call her a bitch at home. He let his friends do it too. And just how many trips alone to the cabin involved chicks that were good to go? She glanced at his flaccid manhood lying on the floor, curled h
er nose at the smell of excrement that was seeping from his anus.
Want to spend time with my little girl. There will always be more chicks. She grinned and pressed send. I’ll let you know. Send. She turned the phone off.
“Yup, those chicks would love you now, you sorry bastard.” She swatted his foot.
Mazie stripped, gathered her soiled clothes and ran them down to the washer. She righted the brandy bottle and wiped up the spilled alcohol, but it had already started to take the finish off the dresser. She scanned the room. There was no way she’d be able to clean it up. What was the point? She couldn’t move his body anyway. He was too heavy even when he wasn’t dead weight.
She gathered the pictures, wiped drops of drying blood from them onto the sheets, and arranged one set of them on the bed in order of the beatings, from the first black eye to the last. She opened one copy of the notebook filled with proof — dates and damage done, lies and guilt. She added a final entry.
I, Mazie Louise Reynolds, have murdered my bastard husband, Cullen Reginald Reynolds. I didn’t set out to kill him. I just wanted him to have a taste of his own medicine before I took our daughter away. To protect her from him, from being physically and sexually abused by her own father. He’d hit her. And he planned on raping her. I know because he told me so.
This notebook and the pictures document the terror he’s inflicted on me for the past four years. It does not include anything he did in the seven years prior to that. I didn’t think to document it. I thought he had a good heart. I thought we could make our marriage work. I thought he loved me.
If I hadn’t killed him, it would be my body lying here. And Ariel would be irreparably damaged.
I do not regret my actions. But I do apologize for slicing off his penis. That was overkill.
She signed her name, dated the entry, and laid the book on his mangled torso.
She ran the shower until it was hot, climbed into the tub and scrubbed her skin and her hair. After two shampoos it was still caked with blood. She washed it three more times and left conditioner in while she took a nail brush to her fingers and feet. When she was finished, no trace of his blood remained on her body, but her skin was nearly raw. Pink drops of bloody water dotted the floor and stained the nylon shower curtain. She dried her hair and doused her skin with the same body lotion she’d used every day for years. A life lived on autopilot.