“You’re a good friend.”
Mr. Johnson’s bathrobe got caught on a high weed. He looked at it stuck to the brush with slow and steady befuddlement.
She looked up at the second-floor window with its curtains drawn and its twisting strand of green. “I should let you get on with your day.”
Mr. Johnson grunted twice and closed his hands in the air.
“I know. Todd makes me miserable sometimes.” She smiled. “But there are worse things he could do.” Like never wear pants. “Bye Mr. Johnson. Have a great day.”
She could hear him pounding on the wall as she tucked the ladder away. “Come on, Red.”
He was a good boy, always a good boy, and he followed her into the family room. Emily looked around and frowned. The sky was only mildly overcast, but she still had to turn on a lamp to see, and it seemed like such a shame. There was a window over the kitchen sink, and a trio of windows along one wall, and even though they only looked out on the cinderblock fence, they would still let in some natural light. The house was so gloomy, so claustrophobic some days. That was normal, she told herself. The darkness was normal.
But she abhorred this normal, always being in the dark. Todd had gone out for a run, which she assumed meant a run down to the convenience store for beer more than it meant a run intended to be healthy in any way. Still, she probably had time to surprise him with a little change. Wasn’t change supposed to be normal too? Nothing could stay the same.
She grabbed a crowbar from the garage and approached the painted boards on the windows with determination. She hummed a song; she thought it might have been one the DJ played at her wedding, and she had to be careful not to damage the window frame. Board by board, she let in the light. She’d forgotten how bright, how cheerful it could be, but it seemed like a good morning for remembering.
When the family room was free, she moved on to kitchen, and the formal living room. What was the purpose, she wondered, of cutting off the view of their pretty, perfect street? She stripped off the boards, feeling more weightless with every loose nail. Finally, it seemed like only the stairwell and some little piece of herself was left in darkness.
She stood at the bottom stair, looking up at the door that was always closed, Surely, that window would let in the light, if the door was open, the sun would shine down the stairs and stop the last piece of darkness.
A wave of dizziness. She paused to grip the railing and steady the carpet under her feet. Red followed her, tail whipping, happy to be moving, and she felt better, by small increments. So, she climbed another stair, and another, until she was nearly at the top of the staircase, eyes level with the doorknob she wanted very much to reach and fling open to let in the glorious light.
But the front door slammed open, and she stopped and was forced to turn around on the shadowy stairs. Todd was standing in the open doorway, and he reminded her of a bull stomping the dirt and snorting with flared nostrils and narrow eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”
Her heart sank. She tried so hard to make him happy, but it always turned out this way. She was a child. She sat down on the stairs and wrapped her arms around her knees. “It’s always so dark. I just wanted to let in the sun. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d be happy.”
“Emily, we need these.” He picked up a board and grimaced at the crooked nail she’d pried from the window frame.
He was so angry; she’d never seen him look so mean. “I’m sorry, Todd.” She heard her voice break a little. “I shouldn’t have moved your things.”
Todd’s anger leaked out of him, and in its place a look of perplexity, as if she were some curious thing in a museum of oddities. He leaned a board against the wall and sat down at her feet. “Em, are you okay?”
She nodded and wiped a tear across her face. “Yes. I’m just sad I made you angry. Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be? I just wanted to let the sun in. The house is so dark; I just wanted the light to touch me.”
He sighed, and she thought it looked less like frustration and more like relief. “Don’t cry, Em.” His voice had brightened up, like warm rays piercing a cloud. “No harm done. We can hang them up again. You can hand me nails, and I’ll hammer things back together.”
“I don’t want to go back in the dark.”
He took her hand and wrapped it in two of his so that it disappeared completely, but he peeled back one hand a little, so he could kiss her fingers. “It’s not the low light that makes you unhappy, Em.”
She pulled her hands away from him because he was right. It was the death, the unending dark, that no amount of sun could reach.
“Help me fix this, and then we’ll be okay, like always.”
“Always.” She caught a tear before it completely left her eye. “Always somewhere between awake and a dream.”
‘A nightmare,’ said the voice in her brain.
18
They spent the rest of the afternoon undoing the damage she’d done. Every nail was like a little stake into her heart, but Todd was so strangely happy, it made things seem easier, even if they weren’t. Slowly, they slipped back into the dark, but it was less lonely, less hollow than it had before seemed. They watched movies, she made dinner, vegetarian lasagna with things from her garden, and when they went to bed, he’d convinced her that all she really needed was a little bit of change.
It made perfect sense really. She did the same thing day after day, disgustingly routine. She supposed that was how marriage was meant to be, finding something that kind of worked and keeping at it until they were too old to remember they’d basically spent their entire lives doing the same stupid things. So instead of heading to the garden for a morning with the tomatoes and undoubtedly a discussion with the perpetually naked Johnson, she decided to go out the front door instead. She packed light, only a small hand gun on her hip. Red trotted beside her, as much ready for a run as she had been. She waved to the little boy that lived at last house on the corner. He was always playing in the yard no matter the time of day, and she wondered about his parents, letting him roam around with no supervision all the time. She waved to the white-haired lady that had nothing better to do than sit on the porch and watch the neighbors go by, and she waved to the man in the shirt and tie who sat in his car and occasionally honked the horn while he waited on his wife and family to come out for the day.
Red had endless joy for exercise. When pausing at the intersections to catch their breath, Red’s tongue lolled from his mouth in radiant doggie glee. She started to feel better the harder she breathed, and before too long, she was convinced wholeheartedly that Todd had been right. He was so kind, always looking out for her, so forgiving even when he shouldn’t be.
She’d put in earbuds for the run. It had been a long time since she listened to anything but the emptiness of the house, and all the music was new again as the songs shuffled by on random, sometimes slow ballads completely inappropriate for a run. She didn’t mind. Every song brought with it little memories, most of them happy, a few that made her soul sing.
Except she heard a song sometimes that made her angry, everything was great. She couldn’t remember why some songs made her feel that way, and sometimes she’d see a flash between the pounding of her feet on the sidewalk and the silence between the end of one and the start of another tune.
Sometimes it was fire, tall and wide, smoke filling the sky. She’d blink, and the street was as it had always been. Sometimes it was Danny laughing; she’d shake the sound from her ears and wave to the neighbor shuffling to the mailbox in filthy pajamas.
Sometimes the moments were hot and fast, a scream, a jolt of fear, a farm with fields of wheat that felt like sweet cream and sadness. Sometimes the feeling was vague, a flash of rage, unreasonable emptiness. Sometimes it was specific, the color of a coffee cup, a nose full of mint and rosemary, black veins and eyes painted with red spider webs. Guns firing. That, she heard in every song, every moment, each footstep, and heartbeat.
She felt her fe
et go heavy and her breath ragged. All those thoughts, and she’d forgotten to think about breathing. At the next broken streetlight, she doubled over, wondering why the hell she’d come so far and thinking that she should have stayed home in the garden after all. But that was the point of it. Breathe. To make her want to stay at home. Breathe. To kill the urge, she had to leave home forever. Breathe. She rubbed her side, which did nothing to stop the cramping there, and forced herself to stand up. Breathe.
It was then she realized what Red had long since noticed, judging by the height of his mohawk. There was another jogger on the street. Emily forgot to breathe. That was a thing that didn’t matter. Air was something she didn’t need.
The other woman was wearing a purple sports bra, and her boobs were kind of oozy out the top and woven with thick black veins. She had on black stretch pants and pink running shoes with white laces, ridiculous. She didn’t want to run, she wanted to stop traffic with her bright shoes, oozy boobs, her skintight pants, and her black guts kind of hanging out one side in between.
Every ounce of Emily’s energy returned, as if she hadn’t run for days. Hatred was rocket fuel. She forgot she was tired, and that she already exhausted all the morning’s energy, and she bolted through the intersection and flew at the woman like a jet propelled by unfathomable rage.
They ended up in a heap with Emily straddled across the top of the other woman. The woman tried to reach up and grab hold, her pretty, black-veined face wriggling with surprise and distain, but Emily was too full of monster inside herself to let the woman get away. It was beyond control, beyond reason. Emily pulled back a fist and slammed it into the woman’s grey cheek. Between her fist and the pavement, she felt the bones break, but, she hit her again and again, until all Emily could see was a mass of red and black. No more blood shot green eyes, and the woman’s silky black ponytail was gore glued to the street. Even then, Emily swelled again with anger and found other parts of the woman to destroy that weren’t as gruesome as her obliterated face.
Somewhere it drifted back, between ragged breaths and violence like fire.
Emily had known her.
She’d known her without knowing. She’d only seen her once, but that had been with Todd, wrapped up in his arms with her big, oozy boobs pressed against his chest, lips swallowing his face.
The memory, and she was sure it was a memory, did nothing to lessen her rage. She had limitless energy for annihilation, the excitement of bones breaking, and grey brain squishing and splatting on the sidewalk. It wasn’t until Emily felt her knuckles hit the concrete that she felt the pain. It was inside and out, radiating from her hands to her heart and back again. Breathe.
Red snarled and thundered, and she almost didn’t care. She wanted to keep punching until the pain that had come and flooded every corner of her had also gone away, except Red sounded so violent and afraid that she looked up from her shredded knuckles and the human sidewalk stain.
There were five of them. It was the worst possible time to remember she was exhausted, and her body was shaking with rage still yes, but now pain and fear, and tiredness multiplied exponentially by destruction.
One of them had wandered so close, he was already lunging down, reaching. She heard Red’s bark rip the air as she rolled, only narrowly avoiding black fingers, and a yellow wrecking ball with teeth.
The space she had occupied was filled with snarling dog, and the area around them was shrinking by the second. Even if she could have gotten up fast enough to run, there was no direction where she wouldn’t have to fight. She reached for the gun on her belt and hopped to her feet just as another one of them reached for her. Her fingers were swollen from driving them into bone and pavement. Gripping the gun to aim was difficult. Instead of trying to put some space between, she went straight into the snarling woman’s arms and slammed the butt of the gun into her temple. Emily didn’t have the strength to break through another skull, but still the woman dropped momentarily.
They had an opening but not for long. She grabbed Red by the back of the collar and jerked hard in the direction she wanted him to go. He got the message and detached his teeth from the man’s face, which was mauled beyond looking face-like. Together, She and Red bolted through the overgrown yards, but they hadn’t gone far when she realized that this way was blocked with a line of people, and the second they were seen, a small mob was reaching, yelping, coming too fast.
Her moment of hesitation was a moment too long. Before she could move again she felt a cold grip on her shoulder and nails digging in through her shirt. She felt the forward momentum, and she knew that she would fall, that the thing would be on her back and biting.
She should have been afraid. She should have felt the fear of dying, but all she felt was encroaching cold, filling in the spaces where her anger had been. All she could see was that woman’s face pressed against Todd, and them both, so happy. Maybe it was better not to feel that pain. Maybe if she were like the others, with those empty blood shot eyes, she could live at last, not be alone, and put those memories to rest.
She looked at Red, circling, just waiting for a clean bite that would matter. She didn’t want to leave him. Todd would never keep him, and he’d be alone again. There was no place where the loneliness did not penetrate.
There was a boom. For a second, she thought it had come from inside her. It felt like it had, and she felt the hand on her shoulder go lax and slip away. Just as Emily thought she would fall, as she was sure she would die, she only stumbled forward and found her feet again. Her feet wanted to live. The rest of her followed in waves.
Someone had shot the man who’d had hold of her. There was a hole in the side of his head. He was tall but shriveled on the ground with black and grey leaking from his hair and busted bone. There was no time to seek out her savior. Red had already charged a small woman with brown hair and she saw the streak of them hurtling for the ground.
She forced her swollen fingers into position on the gun and pointed it at their last pursuer who was in the rear because he was round and hobbling. She pulled the trigger, but it didn’t feel right. Nothing happened.
“Son of a bitch.” She flipped the safety. Red for dead, it fucking rhymed! This time the gun fired, and the man rolled backward like a squishy boulder. There was another boom from the rooftops. The line of people blocking the road ahead began to fall one by one. She walked toward the shrinking mob and aimed slow. Red circled her, doggie mohawk between his shoulders at attention and his mouth leaving drops of gore in a halo at her feet.
Her heart began to slow with the realization that she was almost free, and by the time the last one fell, she followed it to the ground. Without fear, she had nothing to keep the exhaustion at bay, and the muscles in her legs quivered against the street. She rolled her head to look at the line of bodies on the ground and then back the other way, to the woman she’d destroyed. But she couldn’t dwell on Todd’s dead girlfriend. She felt a burst of rage again but didn’t have the time or energy to let it burn. A few houses away, a man climbed down from a garage roof with a rifle slung across his back and he walked awkwardly, she guessed from the swollen ankle in an ace bandage hidden by his boots. “Hello, Adam.”
Jessica. It was all still water still leaking through the dam. The girl she’d turned to pavement art, her name was Jessica, and Todd was an asshole.
There was little differentiation between those pieces of information. There was a black hole in her brain, one that sucked away her memories, it was closing in on itself, and soon it would be like she’d never forgotten at all.
Adam scratched Red and looked down at her balancing on his better foot. “Alive?”
“Yeah.” She closed her eyes and opened them again, just in case, but he was still there. “You got a new gun.” She struggled to catch her breath, but she stretched out a hand for him to help her up.
19
Adam took her hand and pulled her to her feet. They couldn’t stay in the road in case there were more of the hungry.
. . she couldn’t bring herself to call them people. They weren’t people anymore.
They climbed up onto a rooftop because it seemed the safest place, but they had trouble getting Red up there. He was heavy and squirmy, and liked heights about as much as could be expected of someone who’d spent life with mostly four feet on the ground. It took a few minutes, but once he’d found his footing on the shallow slope, he was as happy as ever. She was never going to be rid of that stain on his face. It grew a little redder every day.
Adam was more prepared for an outing than she had thought to be, and he had a backpack with water and food enough for the three of them. He seemed hesitant to say anything. She couldn’t blame him. He probably thought she was crazy and may have just seen her crush some woman’s face into the street.
In the quiet, she had time to look at him without distraction for the first time, and she realized that he was probably at least ten years younger than she was because, now that he was alone with her again, he seemed boyish and uncertain. She swallowed a piece of the granola bar he’d given her. “How did you find me?”
He went slightly red in the cheeks. “Not hard to find what you’re following. Don’t be angry. I’ve been keeping an eye out since that day at the plant.”
She frowned. “Seriously?”
“It was Barbara’s idea.” He was quick to look away. “It’s not like I just wanted to stalk you or anything, but Barbara said you might be sick, like head sick, and you might not be able to, you know, think rationally.”
“I see.” She took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “I can’t complain because you both probably just saved my life. There was a second there when I didn’t want to get up again, so thanks.”
“You saved me before. You don’t have to thank me for anything. I was only able to be here today because of you.”
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