A Short Horror

by

 etta

Breakfast was dry.  The toast, the eggs.  Even the coffee tasted dry.  No one made coffee like Henry.  Not even me.  I never used the kitchen much myself until he left.  I was the brains, he was the heart.  After moving pieces around with a fork, I wash the tired plate, put it away, and I choked down the mug of mud.

     It has just been over a year.  A slow year with dry nourishment and dry tear glands.  A year of wondering how long it will take to replace the us’s and we’s with I’s and

me’s, the familiarity of companionship with unwanted solitude.  For the first time in my life, I am an individual.  Not so ready to face the world alone.  But I must.  Move forward.  Step one: Learn how to make coffee.  Like Henry.

***

     She said we were very special together.  She said we were too special for the rest of the world.  They would never love us because we did not deserve love.  So that is what we believed.  As if we had a choice to believe anything else.  She is all we knew, and all we learned to accept as children.

     Most of what we learned was contained within our backyard.  Perfectly squared, perfectly guarded.  Guarded by the fence that soared above our heads, and so much more guarded by the forest beyond.  Strange and oblivious, terrified and ignorant, she was our only gate to the fence.  No one else ever came in, and we never went out.

     In our yard, we were left to count dry blades of grass and watch clouds fade into and out of each other.  Aside from the four steps down and the fence around, there was nothing.  Nothing but grass, air, and a useless stump in one corner. Too close to the fence and jagged along the

top, we were unable to hide behind or climb atop it and quickly lost interest.  Instead we used the yard to learn of our life in relation to the world outside. 

     From the kitchen she could watch us, but with nowhere for us to disappear to, she seldom did.  Most of what we saw of her was just a trace of shadow in the window.  To ensure our constant occupancy in our yard, she gave us books.  Books after books after books.  All read aloud by me to Henry.  With such extreme attempts at keeping us hidden from the world, and at a distance from her, she probably never stopped to think we might learn something from the books.

     Well we did.  We learned the difference between blood and water.

     Despite the growing pains of leaving, our yard was just as much an escape from life indoors.  Indoors cleaning.  Cleaning for hours a day.  To earn our keep.   

***

My alarm sounded at four thirty.  Ten minutes after my eyes opened.  It has been a while since I slept well, I am getting used to it.  Last night I would have appreciated at least a full four hours. 

Today it has been five years since Henry left.  Exactly.  All the pains are in the right places.  Migraines ringing off the hook already, which makes stepping out the door to a pitch-black, silent town a bit of a relief.

I have come to enjoy my disoriented walks to work.  Especially when it is raining.  No one in Irwin but us.  Me.  Just me.  A little city to call my own for the next thirty-five minutes as I make it over the bridge and around the manmade lake.

Today the loneliness rages inside.  Halfway there, I stopped at a bench to catch my breath.  I remind myself the buzzing of my headache would shortly be replaced by the buzzing of the early birds needing their first caffeine fix of the day.  Henry would be thrilled.  I am out in the world.  I even got a job.  Making coffee.

***

“Hello boys.  No stay right there!” she would say, rushing past our doorless room.  Every Monday.  First thing.  Were we to think it was a treat?  At first we did. Once a week, a few extra hours, indoors without chores.  Hours that seemed like only moments, cuddled up on our cot, almost feeling a sense of home. Stomachs growling. Sharing with Henry tales of strawberry mountains, avalanched by fresh cream, all tumbling down a hot-cake crust of an earth.  Cozy and warm.  Until we realized it was just another attempt to keep us out of the way.

Aside from multiple footsteps coming from downstairs, at least two hours would pass until another sign of her.  She would pass by our room, alone again, but leisurely this time.  Then spend another good twenty minutes in her room.  Door shut.  When she would open the door, we knew it was time to make her coffee and peanut spread on a slice of toast.  Which Henry actually enjoyed doing.

The first glimpse we received of our life in truth was the first time we saw the Monday Morning Man.  Just his hand.  Shutting the grand entrance door.

“He loves me.  I know it is difficult for you to understand.  You will never be loved.” She would say while rushing us out of bed, down the stairs, and into our awaiting yard after he left.  “He would not visit me if he knew of you.  He couldn’t love me anymore.  Then I would have nothing left to give you.  You would have to leave and face the world I warn you about.”  We knew well of his existence by then.  Even the nickname was given some time back.  But more than anything, we wanted to see him through our own eyes.

Plans of escape did not take long to develop between Henry and me succeeding the discovery of the Monday Morning Man.  There were so many questions to be answered.  Answers she would or could never give us.  Perhaps he could.

One Monday morning, as soon as we heard the front door shut and saw her drift into her quarters, our eyes met for one last available glance, knowing we would get our answers then.  It was not long after her bedroom door shut that our breathing slowed.  To make room for our heartbeat.  By the third heavy beat, we were downstairs looking up at the front door.  The knob soared above us.  That door would have made anyone, anything seem gnome sized.  It was unlocked, but we did not question our good fortune.  Forward momentum.

The first taste of freedom is all we needed to overwhelm and direct our motions.  So intense.  We went through our own front porch, a porch we had never seen, and through some hedges.  The hedges that separated us from the vast forest and world.  We cleared the shrubbery and immediately were on a tiny dirt path.  It seemed like hours on the path before we saw the big house.  And the Monday

Morning Man climbing the last step entering in it.  Just as we went to rush the house, we were snatched by the wrists and pulled back behind the bushes.  She followed us.

***

     It has only been a year.  One slow, dry year.  Someday I will have to leave my new room with grey walls.  Some day will come where I choose to walk outside and talk to someone and make a living for myself.  Maybe even a friend. Before facing the truths that lay beyond these walls, I will have to face myself.  Alone.  I was saved.  Why it was me, will never be understood.  I have been cursed.  Cursed by my memories and by the longing. Cursed by a second chance.  A chance to bring myself upward from the nothing I was under her grasp.  A chance to fill the empty spaces Henry left.

When all the pains are at their most, I sit at the window and watch the rain.  There are trees that seem to precede the clouds.  The rain makes all the trees brighter green and glisten as the leaves shiver with anticipation.  As anticipated as happily engorged little leaves can get.  I watch the rain for days.  Days until I feel I can breath again.  I could use a cup of coffee.

***

The silence was almost deafening.  I heard nothing. Nothing but the screams of her.  The rest of the world, voided.  What she screamed, I do not know.  I do not care.  It brought the Monday Morning Man back into the forest to find us. Well- me.  The others.  The others were reduced to a pile of blood soaked cloth and gleaming red flesh.  One crushing blow to her head with the first rock that found itself bound by my undoubting fingers is all it took.  But for what. Henry, too, was dead.  I could have, should have saved him from her crushing blows.  Had I reached for that rock, or anything sooner.  Regrets became worthless as I found myself also slipping into my own blackness amongst the pulverized heap of non-beings.

     I awoke in a hospital bed in a cold grey hospital room. Two windows, a small side table, and a sink with a hazy mirror.  No people.  No noise.  Numbness.  That’s all I felt.  Henry is gone.  Just gone.  With him, he took my arm, and it felt like half my chest was missing.  The important half.  The healing scar that runs from my neck to almost my knees confirms.  I am one now.  Only me.

***

THE END

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