THESE ARE DAVID'S MOST RECENTLY PUBLISHED STORIES. ELECTROCUTING THE CLOWNS WAS RECOMMENDED FOR A BRAM STOKER AWARD IN 2008.
Electrocuting the Clowns
“I don’t like clown dolls,” Melly said. “When I was a kid I thought at night they could come alive and eat you.”
“You’re psycho,” I said.
“Hey, I’m over it.” she said.
“Then what’s with all this?” I asked, waving my arm in front of the wall opposite the headboard where four full-length rows of clown dolls were staring at us. A strip of black tape was fixed across their eyes as though they were actors in a clown doll porn movie, and each clown was stuck to the wall by a nail through its chest.
Melly leaned back on the bed, brushed her hair away from her face, and grinned.
“This is Death Row, clown style,” she said, “and I’m the sixteen year old warden.”
She was wearing jeans and silver chains, a ragged open shirt held together with safety pins, and a tight color-blurred t-shirt that was more red than anything else. I followed the line of her legs to where they ended in black ankle-high boots with rolled-down tops. She looked good in boots.
“Where’d you get them all?” I asked.
I wanted to sit down on the edge of the bed, but I wasn’t sure how she’d take it.
“Him,” she said.
I knew who that was. Nobody that went to our school had to ask who “Him” was.
I didn’t like the green highlights in her hair, I decided. I liked it better pink.
Melly and I had met outside the psychiatrist’s office. I had seen her around school a few times, hanging with Him─ the clown giver.
He was tall and wore a black trench coat, dark glasses, and he looked pretty scary for being in the tenth grade. He called Melly his “familiar”, like she was one of those cats that hung around witches. Once she wore a dog collar to school for him. It had silver spikes sticking out from it, and her teacher hauled into the school office and got her booted out. His name, before he had a brain aneurysm and blew a head gasket, had been Collin.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why’d he give you all these clowns? I mean there must be like a million of them.”
They watched me. All in a row. All nailed to the wall.
Never piss off a girl with a hammer.
Even in broad daylight, I didn’t like them. I had taken my medicine in the morning, and I felt calm except for being alone in her house with Melly, so I shouldn’t have felt paranoid. When my dosage is off, I can usually tell. I feel hot and I start to sweat. I hear a repeat or an echo in my head sometimes. When my dosage is off, I can hear voices, but not too often. I could go to school, though, because I was on a treatment program. Not a lot of kids hung with me. Girls usually kept their distance.
That’s why I was couldn’t believe it when Melly called. I thought it was a joke at first. We began to talk a lot. I kept waiting for her to hang up. She could have dialed the wrong number and got me by mistake and decided to just keep talking. I asked a lot of flipped questions, but I tried not to ask the same ones twice. I worried now that none of my business about why he gave her all the clowns.
She squinted her eyes at her bedroom window.
“Kind of bright in here, isn’t it?” she said.
I checked my watch.
“It’s two o’clock,” I said back at her.
“My mom won’t be back until eight,” she said.
She twisted a bit of her hair and looked at the ceiling. The air conditioning was on, but my forehead was oily, and started feeling wet. It was the way she moved or lay there or breathed or just the way she looked at me that did it. Melly Brooks wasn’t the best looking girl in school, but she definitely had the best body. I was the same age as she was, and I’d never seen a naked girl yet except on videos.
“She’s working, right?” I asked.
“Posing it,” she said. “You know- anything to keep from being a housewife. At least when my jerkwad stepdad was here she hung around a little more.”
“Why did he leave?”
“Why don’t you sit on the edge of the bed? Don’t get any ideas or anything, though. Not yet. ”
“I can drag that chair over from the computer desk,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and pulled her shirt out from her pants and began to rub her stomach. “Fat,” she said, patting it.
“No way,” I said.
When I’d moved the red metal chair over from the computer desk to a spot next to her bed and was about to sit down, she asked, “So, are you going to close the curtains, or what?”
“What about the neighbors?”
“You care about the neighbors?”
“No, I just meant that I didn’t want you to get in trouble. You know what I mean. People look up and see the curtains closed and say something to your mom and all. Maybe she won’t let me come back over.”
Melly started to laugh at that.
“I can close them if you want,” I said.
She kept laughing. Her fingers dug into the comforter like she was afraid of laughing so hard that she would fall off of the floor and hurt herself.
“I’m closing them right now,” I said.
“Do you like me?” she asked, and stopped me before I could move by grabbing my wrist.
I looked straight down into her dark eyes, and felt a warm buzz humming through my system.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like you a lot.”
“I’ll do something for you if you do something for me.”
I sat down as slowly as I could, and at least I didn’t knock the chair over doing it.
“I have a hard time thinking when I’m around you,” I told her.
“You like that?” she asked, and propped herself up on both elbows again.
“I don’t know,” I said, leaning back in the chair.
“You think I’m bizarre, don’t you?” asked Melly.
“I think you’re different,” I said.
“Yeah, well you’d be different if you had to sleep with them every night,” she said, jerking her thumb at the small stadium of clowns lining the wall.
“So what’s the story with the circus?” I asked.
“I told you, they’re from Him.”
Collin again.
It was creepy.
White make-up and Mardi Gras outfits. Big floppy shoes and orange hair. Most of them happy, some of them sad. All of them with round red noses and painted mouths, and each of them with a nail hammered through their little clown hearts.
“That why you hammered them into place?”
She sat up and patted the edge of the bed, inviting me to leave the safety of my chair. Her black fingernail polish made it okay even though it was afternoon.
I was too nervous to move.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” she asked.
“It’s hard to think around you,” I told her again.
“And?” she prompted.
“And it gets harder when you’re closer.”
“What gets harder?” she grinned.
“Thinking. Thinking gets harder. Oh, I got it. I didn’t mean that. I meant─.”
“You can quit talking now, Orin,” she said.
I shut up.
She moved a little closer to me and touched my hand.
“Orin, a lot of people think we’re crazy, you and me,” she said.
“I’m not crazy,” I told her. “Not when I take my medicine.”
I looked away and over at the clowns. I could hear them whispering to each other, but I couldn’t see them move. They were playing it cool. There was one I saw, a little bigger than the rest, and it was the only one that had its hands in front of it and its wrist wired together. Its head seemed to move a little to one side, as though it were angling for a better look at me.
“Do you like my clowns?” she asked.
“Are you afraid of them?”
“They scare the shit out of me,” she said as she brought her face within a few inches of mine.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
She leaned forward and kissed me on the tip of the nose.
I leaned back in the chair, pulling away from her, my stomach tightening and my groin muscles locking up.
“Why, Melly?”
“Because I like you. I like you a lot.”
“Why really?”
“You don’t think I like you?”
“I’m skinny, I’ve got big ears, and I’ve got too many pimples. Why am I here?”
She sat up straight and swung her legs over the edge of the bed so that our knees were touching, even though I was leaning back. Her hands moved forward and she placed them on my knees.
“I need some help, Orin, and I think you’re the only one crazy enough to help me.”
“You like me, though, right? Maybe just a little bit?”
I felt safer with my chair leaning back and away from her. With her hands on my knees, though, it was a lot hard for me to breathe. The heat from her palms went right through my jeans. It was like my thighs were being microwaved.
“Sure I like you. I figured you liked me too. That’s why I thought you would help me do it.”
“Do what? What do you want me to do?”
“I want you,” she leaned forward and whispered, “to help me electrocute some clowns.”
“That’s murder,” I said.
“Those clowns,” she said, pointing at the wall.
The chair fell backwards as I stood up and backed away a few steps. Maybe she was making fun of me. Maybe we weren’t alone in the house. From the corner of my eye I saw one of the clowns, a little one in a green polka-dotted jump suit with a circle of red around his mouth, lean his head forward like he was agreeing with me.
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Why are you doing this to me? Inviting me over here with your mom gone. But we’re not alone, are we? I bet you’ve got lots of your friends in here somewhere, waiting to come in and laugh at me. I didn’t do anything to you. You think just because I take pills I must be crazy. It’s just some kind of a chemical imbalance. That’s all. I’m normal, I am. I’m right in the head.”
“Hey, you’re fine. I take pills too. And what’s wrong with being a little crazy?”
She was off the bed and walking toward me. I wanted to push her back onto to the blanket and hold her down. She was trying to use me.
“What’re you thinking about, Orin?” she asked. “We are all alone, you know.”
Melly was so close, so close, and she put her arms behind my neck and started to stroke the back of my hair.
“I was…I was…I was thinking that I…. I was thinking that I wanted to push you back down on the bed and hold you down.”
“You can do that, you know. Is that what you want to do, to push me back on the bed and hold me down?”
“I can’t think,” I said.
“All you have to do is help me fry some little clowns. I’m so afraid, Orin. They’ve been tormenting me ever since Collin died. I don’t know how he does it. You knew what he was, didn’t you? You knew that he messed around with some nasty black witchcraft, didn’t you?”
“I was afraid of him. He could be very bad.”
She was pulling my head forward, and I put my hand between us to keep her back, but I could feel that I was pushing against her breast.
“Do you want to push me there?” she asked.
“I was just-.”
“Then you’ve got to help me get rid of Collin.”
“Collin’s dead, Melly.”
She pulled my head closer, and I had my hand still on her breast when she kissed me.
“He’s not dead,” she said, pulling me down lower and whispering in my ear. “Collin is in one of those little clowns.”
Before the doctors found meds that worked for me, I used to have nightmares while I was awake. Some of the psychiatrists said that my waking nightmares were primal terrors and aggressions that broke past my inhibitions. Others said other things. All of them thought that I was crazy. None of them said quite that. What I was doing with Melly was real, and as I strapped the first clown into the wires and straps and metal that she called “her little electric chair” after we pulled the drapes, I knew that what I was doing would classify as nuts. But Melly felt good.
She had put her electric chair on a rubber mouse pad, and wires ran from the device to a switchbox that was plugged into the wall.
“You take them off the wall one at a time,” she said, “and put them in the chair and strap them in. I don’t want to touch them. But I’ll throw the switch.”
“Why don’t you want to touch them?” I had asked.
“I just don’t,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because they’ll try to hurt me.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“They’ll hate you,” she said back, “but they can’t do anything to you. Most of them are just… half alive. One of them is him. I just don’t know which one.”
“It wouldn’t be the one with the little handcuffs, would it?” I asked.
“I think that’s a devil. It might be Collin, though. I’m not sure. But I’m not taking any chances.”
“Why did you put the black tape over their eyes?”
“I got tired of them watching me,” she said. “And when we do it, you can’t take the tape off their eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because their eyes can make you do things.”
“This is crazy, Melly.”
“So?”
“Maybe I should leave.”
“You chicken?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Go get me a prisoner.”
I removed the nail from the first victim with the claw end of a hammer, and it must have been nailed into a stud, because either the wood or the clown doll shrieked as the nail came out.
There were tears painted onto the doll’s ceramic face. They were red and made me think of blood. I saw one drop of red at the corner of its lips that I wasn’t sure was there before I had pulled out the nail. I tried not to look at it while I did the reverse-stake thing.
“Hurry,” she said. “Put it in the chair before it wakes up. It takes them a while to start moving because they’re still in shock.”
When I had wired the first one in, I stepped back, took one of a few amber bottles from my pocket, and shook out a med. I wasn’t sure if I was following the schedule, but I was feeling stressed. As Melly squeezed a little water onto the clown from a washcloth, I swallowed the pill dry. I thought that it was the one to keep me calm, but the label had fallen off the plastic bottles and I wasn’t sure which one was which. With what was going on, I wasn’t sure that it made a difference what type of drug that I took.
Melly said something in Latin or some other language with her eyes closed and then threw the switch. The sparks must have bounced the clown up in the chair before it started to smoke, because it jumped enough that if it wasn’t the sparks, it was the clown arching its back.
“It’s going to burn,” I said.
“In Hell,” she replied.
“This is crazy, Melly,” I said.
“Next clown,” she said back at me.
By Clown number five, we had to put a fan in front of her bedroom window and blow the smoke out. Each clown that she juiced puffed a gray-purple cloud. It wasn’t that there was so much of the smoke; it was just that when she threw the switch, there was an awful smell that came from them; the puff clouds had the kind of nasty odor that you’d expect if you lit a skunk on fire. But the fan cleared the smoke out enough to breathe without gagging.
Outside, it was a day as bright and clear as freshly cleaned glass, but inside we were killing inanimate objects.
The lights would dim for a sec when she threw the switch, like they do in the Death Row movies; there would be the snap, crackle, and pop when the electricity fried their fifty percent cotton, fifty percent rayon hearts, and always the fan sucked the air from the room and blew it outside. We were running a clown death camp on the second floor of a suburban bi-level.
People have asked me if they were alive, and whether or not I thought that what Melly and I did was killing living things. I have always answered that I was just following orders. I learned that from the history channel. Whenever that doesn’t work, though, I remind them that I’m not right in the head, and tell them that I can’t imagine why they would be looking for a straight answer from me anyway.
But when I pried the nails from their chest with the claw hammer, as I held them against the wall and yanked on the hammer’s handle, I know that I felt them squirm. I mean it.
And I could not take my eyes away from the black tape that blindfolded them. I wondered about their eyes.
Little clowns with little clown hats and two teenagers who were electrocuting them one at a time.
I hoped that Melly was right.
I hoped that they couldn’t hurt me.
Melly had brought a black garbage bag into the room, and when they had been executed with her saying her enchantment as each clown in succession met Mr. Electron, the bag was filling up with their rag doll bodies.
By the third clown execution, I had begun to shake and sweat. Half way through the lot my T-shirt was soaked. Two thirds of the way through I had taken three more pills, and the room glowed with bright, oscillating colors. I heard whisperings in my head. One part of my mind argued with the other. The rational with the part that was possessed by fear and lust.
“Take that you little bastard,” she told a fat little clown that I had barely been able to squeeze into her homemade electric chair.
“There’s nobody here but us,” I reminded her.
I had never been alone with a girl in her bedroom, but somehow I had imagined it differently.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Melly said.
“Now?” I asked.
“Now.”
“But we’ve only got that one left,” I told her, and pointed to the last clown on the shelf, the one with its hands wired together.
Things weren’t going exactly the way that I had planned. Somewhere during the execution of the clowns, I had asked myself why forty or fifty normal clown dolls would be pissed at a teenage girl. Maybe her ex-boyfriend Collin really had given her clown dolls that came to life after he died. I’m sure it happened a lot in the Twilight Zone.
So what had Melly done to Collin?
I didn’t like the idea of her leaving me in the room with the last clown doll. The big clown. The mother of all clown dolls.
And Melly wanted to go to the bathroom and leave me by myself.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can’t hold it?”
“I can’t be here when you do that one.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I just can’t. You’ve got to do it by yourself.”
“You’re coming back right?”
“You’re horny, is that it?”
“No, it’s-.”
“Hey, you’re a boy. What else is new? But we might have to wait until tomorrow. I think I’m getting kind of sick.”
“But you said-.”
“I said what? I mean what am I supposed to think when you don’t even like me enough to get rid of the last clown? You saved the worst one for last. God, you’re an asshole. You would have used me and left me with that last one there, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I wouldn’t do that, Melly. I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, you’d say anything you had to to get my pants off, wouldn’t you, Orin?”
I would have, actually, but firgured I knew that what she was saying had nothing to do with what she said. She was lying. I knew a lot about lying. Lying is what people did to get you to do what you didn’t want to do by promising you something that you were never going to get. Some things were clearer to me when I was on medication, but maybe if I hadn’t have been on the meds, I wouldn’t have bought her bullshit either.
It was sometime late in the afternoon. The fan was either doing a good job of blowing out the smoke and the smell, or I was getting used to it.
I looked past Melly, trying not to think of the fact that she was trying to scoot out of the room and leave me with a clown doll that she was so afraid of that not only had she nailed it to the wall and covered its eyes with black electrician’s tape, but she had also wired its puffy white cotton wrists together. The wall behind each of the shelves was lined with the nail holes that I had left while taking the condemned off of the wall so that Melly could fry them. Plaster-dandruff flakes lay scattered on the floor.
“She won’t do it for you,” I heard a tiny voice say, and I didn’t want to look over at the wall to see who had said it. She should have taped their mouths.
“She’s running her game on you. She’s using you, man.”
Shut up, Collin, I thought, but I was glad that he was nailed to the wall.
“You shining me?” I asked her. So much of my medication had kicked in that listening to the blood flowing along through my veins made it tough to concentrate.
“Are you okay?” she asked. I thought that she was concerned, but it was hard to tell.
“I’m okay,” I told her.
I was worried about her, I thought, because she was rocking back and forth, back and forth without seeming to be aware of it.
“Orin,” she said, “you’ve got to stop moving back and forth. You’re making my stomach more upset.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
She was weaving or I was weaving, or both. If she was weaving, that was bad. If I was weaving, that was worse.
“Are you tough enough for this?” she asked.
My parents usually didn’t care where I went or how long that I was gone, but at that moment I wished that they would start looking for me.
“Melly, we’re going to… I mean maybe tomorrow…”
“Is that all you think about, Orin? I thought you liked me.”
She pressed her lips together as though she was thinking bad things about me, but I was used to that. Lots of people thought bad things about me.
“I do.”
And I truly did. I liked her so much that I wanted to put my hands on her hips and squeeze just a little. I liked her so much that I wanted to run my fingers over the front of her shirt and feel the mystery through the fabric. Little studs ran along the outside edge of her jeans and I wanted rub my face against them and smell her legs through the material.
Psst. Check her out, man. Ask her to take off her top. Eyeball the eye candy. She won’t show you anything. She’s using you like you were a loser.
Melly kept staring at me, as though there wasn’t a voice, as though she didn’t hear it.
I heard it. I knew it was real. And I knew that if I told her about the voice, she would really think that I was crazy. There are lots of ways to be crazy, but one of the worst is when you hear voices. I could hear my shrink now if I told him a stuffed clown doll was talking to me, especially if I told her that the clown-doll was nailed to a bedroom wall with its eyes taped shut and its white cotton little hands were wired together. It wasn’t what she would say, because all that shrinks ever really say are things like “sure” or “how does that make you feel?”
“Then give me space” she said. “I have to go. I can’t be in the room when you take the nail out of him,” and here she pointed at the last clown, “or he’ll hurt me.”
“What about me, Melly? Will he hurt me? And if he’s so dangerous, how did you get him nailed to the wall? Huh? How’d you do that without getting hurt?”
“Quit pressuring me,” she said.
She’s stalling, man. When the nail comes out of me I’m going to kill her, and if you don’t hurry up and do it, I’m going to pull it out myself and kill both of you.
“Shut up,” I told the clown.
“What did you say?”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said before she could go off on me.
“Orin, we’re the only ones here.”
“I-.”
Before I could complete the sentence, she turned and looked at the last clown. What she saw was a frilly wide round white collar, a red polka dotted hat ringed by tufts of Halloween orange hair, a white face highlighted by eye tracings and clown make-up, and a nose and mouth that were the color of thinned fresh blood.
“It talked to you?” she asked with looking at me.
“I hear voices sometimes.”
“It talked to you,” she said. This time she wasn’t asking.
I put my hand on her shoulder to turn her around, which, to my surprise, she did. Her eyes were wide, as though she had seen too much to close them, and she was chewing on her lower lip. I felt her shiver beneath my touch, and though the afternoon sunlight still filled the room, it suddenly felt as if someone had closed the shade and plunged us into darkness.
“Melly, is this for real?”
She nodded, slowly at first and then twice more, quickly.
I looked at the clown, and, as I took my eyes away to look back at Melly, I thought that I saw its head move forward just a bit, as though it were agreeing with her. On the floor, the garbage bag filled with burnt clowns was like a bag of toys that the devil would bring if he were Santa Claus.
“This is crazy,” I said.
“But you’re crazy, Orin. You’re perfect. You’re the only person I know that-.”
“That what?” I asked. “Are you saying that I’m the only crazy person that you know?”
“Well…well, you are,” she said, and moved up against me. “I just take an antidepressant sometimes. You’re really out of the loop. Not that that’s all bad, you know?”
My throat seemed to narrow, and my breathing got an edge to it. Through the odor of singed clothing that even the fan could not completely remove, I smelled her skin. The temptation to lick her neck and taste her was so strong that I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from doing it.
“You’ll help me, Orin,” she whispered, “won’t you?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
You’ll never get in her pants, cackled the clown.
“Stop it,” I said. “Not you,” I added quickly to Melly.
She wrapped her arms around me and said, “Orin, I’m so afraid.”
Let me at her, said the clown.
“How did you do it?” I asked her. “If you’re so afraid, how did you nail them? How did you keep them all under control?”
“They were different at first,” she said.
“Different how?”
“Weaker.”
“Look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Look at me.”
“You’ll help me won’t you, Orin? You’ll kill just that last one for me, won’t you?”
“I’ll try.”
You’re a pussy, said the clown. She’s going to put you on a leash.
“What’s going to happen when I pull the nail out?” I asked.
I’m going to eat her face off.
“Nothing. I don’t know for sure. Nothing. It’s only nine inches tall, Orin. What could it do? I’m just paranoid. Collin was a witch. He scared me.”
“A warlock?”
“Okay, he was a warlock. Are you happy? A witch, a warlock. I don’t know. They’re all evil. They’re all the same thing. And I was glad when Collin died. I was so glad I cried. He was evil. He deserved to die. Somebody should have opened up his coffin and pounded a stake through his heart before they buried him.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” I told her. “There’s only crazy and sane. Like us. We’re crazy. We’re trying to electrocute a bunch of stuffed clowns in your bedroom while your mom is gone. That’s crazy. That’s why we’re crazy.”
Melly backed off, and I didn’t like it.
“No, you’re crazy,” she said. “I’m not. I heard them talk. I’ve seen them move.”
She had come right out and told me that I was crazy. She must have thought it all along.
She used me, too, said the clown. How do you think that I ended up in this clown suit? Don’t let her trick you. You’ll be next up here, Orin, I’m telling you. She’s lying about everything. She’s a bitchy little liar. Close your eyes and think about it. She’s trying to control you with her body.
Was she lying or was she not? Did she nail the clown dolls up while they were weak, or did she control them all along or was it just that the two of us were two certifiable lunatics? How to tell, how to tell? Or were they both lying?
“I’m afraid, Orin,” she said.
She’s working you, man, said the clown.
“I’ll protect you,” I said. “Close the door behind you. I’ll open it when you can come in.”
Collin the clown doll didn’t say a word when I opened up her dresser door and ran my hands over her clothes. I found a sheer black bra in the top drawer and lifted it out, held it to my nose and inhaled the imagined fragrance of her breasts. The fabric was as smooth as her skin and I moved my fingers over it slowly, closing my eyes and imagining the softness that it sometimes contained.
I replaced the bra and closed the drawers slowly, quietly, in case she was listening outside her bedroom door. Collin the clown doll was still captived on the shelf, the last of her collection of cotton terrors.
“What’s happening in there?” she said through the door.
“Go away,” I said. “I’ll come for you when I’m done.”
Come and get me, said the Collin clown doll.
“Be careful how you talk to someone that’s not all there,” I whispered.
I patted the pocket where I kept my meds. How many and exactly what had I taken? When I was stressed, my memory would sometimes be there and sometimes not. The back of my neck felt as though it were hardening and my gums felt fuzzy, the way that they did when I went to bed without brushing my teeth. The pills would eventually flush out of my system, I knew, but for now I was at least not aggressive. I was calm. I had listened to a positive thinking hypnosis tape in the morning. I was okay.
Time for the hammer.
The twin claw blades hooked under the nail as easily as if I were a carpenter, and I moved the hammer around until I had enough leverage to pry the stake from out of the clown doll’s chest. The hammerhead blocked most of the clown’s red and white vest, so that if it bled, I wouldn’t see it immediately. But that was crazy of course- stuffed clowns didn’t bleed. Then again, they weren’t supposed to talk or move either.
I decided right then that I would leave the tape over its eyes and keep its wrists wired.
You’re a chicken-shit, said the clown doll, but I’ll choke that out of you.
On Melly’s desk I saw a pair of scissors and I considered cutting the clown’s head off and then taking the nail out, but I didn’t. Instead, I yanked back the hammer’s handle, and the nail pulled out the wall an inch.
“It must be nailed into a stud,” I said.
I was a workman plying my trade, like thousands of others across America. I was an executioner- a respected tradesman. I was a clown executioner- a lunatic without a union card. I decided to whistle.
I’m going to eat you alive, snarled the clown.
“You interested in a deal?” I asked, put my foot against the wall, and yanked on the hammer’s handle again.
This time it came out with a screech and a wail that sent my blood shooting through my veins panicked and looking for a way out. The release sent me back and to the floor as though I had been thrown from a train, and my head hit her bedroom carpeting with a thud. My vision rippled and a thick pain spread from the back of my head. The clown dropped to the floor. We were on the same level.
A vision of the clown sticking a screwdriver in my eye made me try to get to one elbow to protect my face, but I fell back on my back with a sound like that of a body being dropped on soft earth.
I turned my head slowly, afraid of the nausea that would overcome me if I tried to move quickly again. The bedroom was as quiet as a dead man’s heart. The clown lay where it had fallen on its back the way that I had.
My pulse still jumped and jerked, but I was safe. The clown lay still. It was not stalking me with a weapon from the hardware store. It shouldn’t have surprised me. I heard voices most everywhere that I went, unless I was faithfully taking my medicine. Today I had just heard a few more.
My head was humming a low buzz, like a fluorescent light on a hot summer night, and I wondered if I had a concussion of sorts. Since I had landed on soft carpeting, that didn’t seem right. Sometimes when I took too many pills, I could hear that same sound, so that when I slowly sat up at about the same time that the clown did, I thought that I was hallucinating.
Big mistake, said the clown, and it began to get to its feet, stiffly, awkwardly, the way that an angry bear might move after a winter in hibernation.
I thrashed my arms to flip over, then pulled myself across the carpeting until I was next to Melly’s bed. When I grabbed the edge of her blanket to pull myself up, it came down and covered my head so that I couldn’t see. My breathing came in jagged gasps. I shoved the blanket away from my head and screamed.
The clown was moving toward me, swaying from side to side as it did, its hands wired, its eyes taped, lurching forward as it came for me.
I couldn’t figure out how it knew where I was. It had tape over it’s eyes.
I can smell you, Orin. I can smell you and I’m coming for you.
It was.
It stopped, moved its hands up to the electrical tape and fumbled with it until it was able to yank it off. When I saw its eyes, I knew why Melly had taped over them. Its eyes were not clown eyes at all. They were not shiny black buttons or hand painted pupils, but they were instead human eyes- tiny, yes, small, yes, but human.
The clown blinked.
“It’s only nine inches tall, for God’s sake,” Melly had said. “How could it hurt you?”
I swear it blinked. Little eyelids with tiny little so human like lashes closed and then opened. This thing could hurt me, no question.
“Hey Melly,” I yelled. “I might need a little help here,” I yelled.
No answer.
“Melly,” I screamed.
Just me and you, said the clown.
“Melly, open the door. Let me out.”
The clown was growing. It was twice as tall. It had a shadow.
I pushed myself backward and up against the bed and made it to my feet and looked down.
Collin the clown doll was over two feet tall.
I kicked it in the head and sent it flying against the wall.
There were scissors on Melly’s desk, the pointed shiny steel kind and I grabbed them up and threw myself at where the clown doll lay. My left elbow and chest felt the burn of the rug as I slid, but I had my right hand up high and drove the point of the scissors into the clown’s neck. Blood oozed from the puncture- real blood, I swear it, and I pulled them back and drove the point into the Collin clown’s stomach. More blood and a dizzying feeling as I knew at that instant that reality meant staying on your own side of the looking glass.
The clown doll was over three feet long and bleeding.
I sat up and hooked a leg over its body, lifted both hands high in the air and was about to plunge the scissors straight down into its human little eye when it lifted its head.
You’re crazy, Orin. Stabbing a clown. Stabbing a clown doll. Man, that’s a capital offense.
“Melly,” I yelled. “I’m on this thing, but it’s too big to fit in your electric chair. But we can still burn it. What do you want to do? Give me a hand and we can put it in the bathtub and poor gasoline on it if your mom has one of those barbecue lighters. Melly, are you there?”
It was bigger. I was sitting on it and I could feel it getting longer.
“I got to kill it, Melly,” I yelled.
I bounced up a little and came down hard, but the Collin clown doll rolled its head to one side and I drove the blade straight down through the carpeting and stuck the point in the floor below. The clown laughed then hissed and swung its head back and craned upward to bite my wrist with sharp little teeth. It was quicker than a clown doll should be, but I pulled my hand back hard, freeing up the scissors.
When his teeth snapped together I saw a foamy yellow spittle squeeze past the corner of his lips and a flicker in his eyes that looked like a snake darting across a dark lawn.
Up to the top, both hands on the scissor handles and my legs wider to hold the clown still. He was full size now and working hard to get free, as big as Collin was when he was alive. I was running out of time.
With a straight out scream, I pile-drove the scissors straight down and into its right eye, pressing my body weight behind it, hoping to push through to its brain. There was blood, a lot of it. The Collin clown doll screamed- I mean screamed- and God the blood sprayed. But it quit struggling.
I lay forward on it, the adrenaline pumping through my body with jerking heaves and I was feeling good. I was feeling big time victorious and I lifted both fists above my head and screamed. I did it. I did it. I did it. I was going to get a cape and call myself Medication Man.
“Melly, come on in. It’s safe,” I yelled. “Another clown,” I howled and got to my feet and started dancing around the Collin clown’s body, “another clown is down. Yes, another clown is down.”
Time slipped away as I waited for Melly, as I looked down at the Collin clown doll and was amazed at how quickly it had grown to full size and wondered at the way its clown clothes had changed to blue jeans and a light yellow shirt soaked with blood.
I heard footsteps on the hallway.
I wondered if Melly would be upset with me for ruining her carpet.
The door handle turned with a metallic ratcheting sound, and the door swung open. Melly stood in the doorway. Her mother was behind her. They were like a family portrait with the doorway as a frame. They looked a lot alike, but, then, they were related.
“Oh my God, Orin. What have you done?” cried Melly.
They ask me to repeat the story every day, as though they are having a hard time understanding it. Sometimes I wonder if Melly sends them, but mostly I think that they’re just trying to do their jobs.
My parents quit coming to see me a long time ago, I think. I’m not sure that I know what they look like anymore. No one believes me about what happened. They say my memory is wired bad, like the rest of my brain.
I don’t accept packages, although no one ever sends me anything. I can’t let my guard down.
One day it will come, though.
A box from Melly.
Inside will be a stuffed clown.
She’ll have done something to it.
The others would let it through, perhaps, just to see how I would react to a clown in my room. Trapped in the room. Just me and the clown. There is no handle on my side of the door, so it really would be just me and the clown.
It would be a fair fight if they would just untie my hands from behind my back and take off this coat.
The First Cut Is The Deepest
The water pressure at the condo made the hospital showers feel like insipid watering cans for delicate flowers. This shower subverted them; it pressure-washed her shoulders and even drowned-out the Jimmy Buffet CD playing in the other room.
Steam rolled against the ceiling above the stall. Janie didn’t turn on the exhaust fan, though, as she was supposed to, like he always said to.
Mold and mildew, dumb-ass, Richard would say. Richard said a lot of things. For eight years he addressed her with gems like:
Hey, how about getting your stupid shoes off the floor? You want me to break my fucking ankle?
I like my shirts folded top to bottom. Not side to side.
Great, dumb-ass! You ruined another perfectly good piece of steak with one of your goddamned new recipes. Do you think I’m your personal, fucking money-fountain? And then the classic: Did you take your stupidity pills again today and miss the fact that there’s no toilet paper in the house?
The words made her cringe like a cornered mouse. They caused her to put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, hoping that the person on the other end didn’t hear how he treated her—or worse, that she tolerated it. Richard’s a real charmer. That’s what Janie’s mother would have said. Janie had heard enough.
Water trickled off the tip of her nose, and she smirked. It doesn’t mean a goddamned thing now . . . all things considered, does it? Janie turned her back toward the faucet and lowered her head so the hot tendrils of water massaged her neck and shoulders. A clear, plastic knob stuck out from the center of the vinyl wall. It was one of the pull for "on," and push for "off" knobs, cut into facets like an absurdly enormous diamond, as if to suggest that a shower is a priceless privilege.
It really is priceless, she thought. But she relished the privacy more than she did the hot shower. In the hospital you didn’t get genuine alone-time in the shower. You’d be lucky to get a partitioned stall let alone privacy. Even those pretend jails for rich people probably have individual shower stalls. I’ll bet Martha fucking Stewart had a shower stall, she mused. But it still wouldn’t be real alone time because there was always someone there. There was always a monitor standing nearby, some asshole leaning against the wall thinking about their next smoke-break saying, "Turn the fan on, dumb-ass! Mold and mildew, you know?" Whether it was that burly bull dyke in nurse’s scrubs named Phyllis (that everyone called Phyl, of course) or some undiagnosed obsessive compulsive cock-slinger that shared your bed for fifteen years.
Not anymore, though.
She watched a line of pink suds slither down her inner leg and curl into the drain, imagining a frothy snake exploring a mouse’s tunnel. The sweet, coconut-scented steam of the shower soothed her. She missed the smell of her own body-wash; but they didn’t have that kind of stuff in the hospital. There, she got worn-down bars of Ivory soap and some generic shampoo that came in a big white bottle with no label. It was a medicine-smelling liquid—real scalp raping shit--probably for dandruff and lice that the hospital, no doubt, purchased in bulk and distributed in generic bottles to its generic residents. They don’t say "patients" anymore, either; too degrading. Now everyone is a "resident." It was all ridiculously p-c. Whether you shit yourself every five minutes because you like the smell, or whether you feel the need to stick your fingers in everyone else’s noses because you’re dead-sure that aliens camp-out in them, you’re still a respected "resident." But Jesus, don’t say "patient" or you’ll make someone feel like an outcast.
Finding the coconut body-gel stowed away in the cabinet under the vanity would have been a pleasant surprise, except it wasn’t hers. She chewed at her upper lip and considered how Richard ended up with a woman’s body cleanser in his cabinet. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Must be a leftover from one of his whores. The shower water tasted a little like her fingers did when she’d bite her nails after fishing coins from her purse. She had never noticed a metallic tint to the tap water before.
Is it the water? Or is it the blood?
It occurred to her that she hadn’t actually tasted anything for months. Since she was put on the medication at the hospital, she didn’t even think about the foods she loved, as long as she was provided with her paper cup of colorful little appetizers before each meal. It made her cringe to realize she hadn’t had an orgasm in the same amount of time, either. And even those were self-induced, at best, for the past eight years since moving to California. Being on the medication left her empty, passive. She felt as though she observed her world through a blurry window and traveled more like an unwitting passenger in a car rather than as the driver.
But not today. She felt like the driver today. A driver with road rage. She turned her chin toward the shower-head and rubbed her face with the washcloth.
***
The house showed no indication of her having lived there. All representations of her presence had vanished, and it had become decidedly bachelor-esque. So quick. It was difficult not to think of it still as her house. Only six months now she’d been gone, but the condo spoke nothing of her eight year decorating investment. All those little feminine touches that made that cookie-cutter condominium their home were gone. Even the curtains.
Why the hell didn’t he keep the curtains? Was it because he didn’t like them? He chose them, for Christ’s sake. Or was it because we picked them out together? That’s it. It was spite. Nothing more. Because he wouldn’t budge on the one’s he wanted since he felt he was going out of his way to humor me with buying the curtains in the first place. "With all that home-makeover shit you watch all day, you’d think you could make some frigging curtains by now," he would say while flipping through the mail.
"What an ass," she said aloud in the shower stall. Her voice sounded intrusive within her wet, vinyl cocoon. She squeezed more body-gel onto the black washcloth—not one of her washcloths—and scrubbed her arms a third time. That meticulous son-of-a-bitch got rid of it all; he didn’t miss a thing. And he certainly didn’t miss me, either. How could he? With so many "business" trips overseas and around the country—a woman in every port . . .? How would he have time to miss me? He was far too fucking busy after all!
The water felt cooler upon her back. She adjusted the diamond knob so the arrow on the edge fell toward the ‘H’ on the wall plate. She leaned forward and soaked her graham-cracker-blonde hair, warming her scalp again. The heat seeped into her skin, down her neck, into her spine, and soothed her spent muscles. It recharged her.
She no longer cared about those "business trip" images in her head. At least she told herself she didn’t care. Her mind conjured lurid scenes of faceless female bodies straddling her husband on some International Inn bed upon sheets held together more by the glue of bodily fluids than by fibers of cotton. The visions only annoyed her before, in the same way those indiscriminate phantom itches do that you can never seem to scratch. She used to believe, used to wholeheartedly trust that all of it was impossible. A voice in her head would say, He may be a miserable bastard but he wouldn’t do that! She had to believe it. To question his fidelity would be to suffer his answer, and Richard Strictland was more of a doer than a sayer—a man more of actions than words.
How naïve, her new inner voice snapped.
A phone call one evening made it real to her with merely two words: I’m sorry. That’s all Janie heard on Richard’s cell phone, an intrusive voice that came out of nowhere like her own voice in the shower. She remembered he was already deeply invested in sleeping that night, exhausted after returning from Spain. Jet-lag, he’d said. When his cell phone rang from the pocket of his jacket slung over the kitchen chair, Janie was Googling recipes in the next room. In retrospect she realized she had been making an attempt to make things better, to add some spice to both the table and the marriage by trying new things. She thought nothing of the fact that his phone was ringing at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night, either. His phone rang all the time, as demanding as a needy newborn. She even pleaded with him to turn off the electronic leash on the rare occasion that they went out to dinner, or when they rented a movie on the weekends. He usually did, but he was always reluctant. Now she understood why.
Then his bitches couldn’t call because I was making him spend time with me.
Fur Elise was the ring-tone he chose. She thought the electronic rendition sounded cheesy—whiney like a robot with a sinus infection; a real friggin’ tribute to Beethoven!--but she would never say that to Richard. She remembered shuffling to the kitchen that night and fishing through his pockets so she could answer the phone and not disturb his hard-earned rest. Poor baby. Poor big infantile son-of-a-whore’s-bitch, she thought and gritted her teeth while rinsing conditioner from her hair.
She found the phone, flipped the cover back and said, "hello?" She had expected to hear Jerry’s voice--Richard’s work partner—respond: "Hey, Janie; it’s Jer. Is the old man right there?" he would say. But this voice, a woman’s voice she didn’t recognize, chilled her skin and burned her insides with those two words: I’m sorry. It was such a sweet, lilting Spanish accent that it made her stomach heave, then the connection vanished. That’s when something heavy dropped off the top shelf in her mind, way in the back behind boxes full of all those feminine touches, and crashed to the floor in her heart. The shrapnel of humiliation, disbelief, and panic imbedded her soul. The rage would come later.
The rage was today.
As soon as the woman with the lovely accent hung up the phone, Janie’s mind indulged itself with a peculiar placement of faces to supplement those flawless naked legs and that perky, plump-melon backside she’d envisioned, riding her husband at the International Inn. She didn’t picture the face of the girl on the phone, of course--unless Richard was banging J-LO or Eva Longoria. They were simply the first familiar Latina faces that came to her in the moment that it all clicked together. They also happened to be figures that most men worshipped but most women despised for being so categorically beautiful. They were more perfect than she would ever be, and her mind needed something--a catalyst--to bring together the fact that her husband had a very dark and secret life. The face finally completed the puzzle, like a missing jigsaw piece discovered deep inside a floor heating-vent. Eva or J-LO would fit just fine for now. At least the woman on the phone was real, and Janie knew that. The rest was cosmetic.
***
Janie stopped scrubbing for a second and placed her hand on her own buttocks. She pressed a little, as if testing a tomato’s ripeness, her eyes closed against the raining tap-water. She made a mild grunt of satisfaction. It’s not that bad, she told herself.
The water felt cool again. She turned the diamond more so the little arrow barely tapped the ‘H’ on the head now, rubbing her eyes and pushing the water back over her face and hair. It was so nice to smell like a girl again. She didn’t find her apricot shampoo, though-- she was certain he’d long gotten rid of that. He hated that smell. Too sickly-sweet, he would say with a disgusted wrinkle in his nose when she’d walk by him. Now she smelled of Aveda cloves--apparently Richard’s new shampoo preference--but far better than the caustic-smelling dandruff and lice crap. Yet the aromatherapy and the warm, soothing water weren’t really the purposes of the shower. They were only fringe benefits.
Getting clean was the point. Rinsing him out.
Still, it was a hard-earned reprieve. For the short time she had before they would come, this shower was a warm cozy womb safe from anyone, disconnected from the world. It was ecstasy to finally be alone. Well, possibly. She wondered if she was truly alone yet.
The last of the pink suds slithered away. She held out her hands and scrutinized. They were clean now, but still trembling of residual adrenaline. The hot water caused her two wounded fingers to continue bleeding through the bandages. But that was a trivial thing now--as diluted as the blood being washed away. She rubbed at a pale band at the base of her finger below one of the wounds, a haunting tattoo leftover from an absent wedding ring. Janie tried to massage the stubborn stain out, but the phantom band crept back. Anyone else would have to study her finger to find it, but she could still see it.
Janie noticed some crusted blood caked under her nails, picking at it. They were short these days, too. Long nails didn’t serve much useful purpose in the henhouse, and she never liked them, anyway. But he did. Richard liked the way they looked because, "women should have long, sexy nails," he said. He didn’t say she should have long, sexy nails—but women. Really, she knew he liked the way they felt on his back while he was driving himself into her. As far as Janie was concerned, they were a hindrance that instigated nothing but displeasure. Besides, they would usually break so far down into her nail-beds that it hurt more than it was worth.
But now, her concerns are all that matter.
She finally escaped from him, but not like she’d tried to with the pills. She now regarded her attempted suicide as pathetic. That was a cop-out move like a frightened animal playing dead, or an abused dog running away. Janie felt that this endeavor was entirely more effective, and as for the sadistically disturbing satisfaction of it all . . . she could live with that. She no longer possessed the tether of emotional obligation. He possessed no leverage on her soul. She had escaped him just like she’d escaped from the hospital. She considered the irony in the similarity as she rubbed the stubble on her legs. It was an irony in method as well as in madness.
She considered shaving but thought better of it. Who cares if her legs are as hairy as a baboon’s now, anyway? They served her purpose today, even went above and beyond to get done what needed to be done. Now they are strictly utilitarian, for transportation and for reaching the television set at the hospital. So who gives a shit?
At least now my socks will stay up, she thought.
It was easy to leave the hospital because it was just like Patty said: "A man could go out in public and whip-out his tool, just about any woman would scream ‘rape’ and leave him eating dust. But, if a woman went out and lifted her skirt," Patty would nod in a very matter-of-fact way here, " . . . she has power. It may be a man’s society, girls, but it’s a goddamned woman’s world. Any man’s a sucker for a nice piece of ass."
The cigarette in Patty’s mouth would bounce like a little diving board when she laughed. She always had a cigarette, too. Janie realized she couldn’t picture Patty at all without seeing that skinny white phallus hanging out of her mouth and her stringy, bottle-blond hair draped down like twisted tree roots. "Hell, men are goddamned infantile pigs!" Then, she’d laugh that hoarse smoker’s laugh, cigarette diving board bouncing away.
Janie put Patty’s theory to the test today—twice. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all. Her mother would have said that, too.
Brielson-Tave Psychiatric didn’t have any maximum security, nothing that severe. The staff consisted of orderlies and nurses. But even under the little name badges there was skin, and under some of those orderlies’ trousers, there were penises.
Alarmingly easy, she thought, impressed with herself.
Patty wasn’t a lesbian--she loved to screw men--she just hated them as a faction of the species. She was Janie’s inspiration, a mentor. Her own frumpy personal-trainer groomed and polished at some local trailer park or two. Patty preached about being in control, never letting anyone walk all over you or treat you like shit. She was all about grabbing a bull by the horns or a man by the balls and letting him know that she could keep her pants on just as long as she needed to, even though she probably couldn’t. But they didn’t know that, and it was only important that they believed she could. She was good at making people believe things. That was, at least, one of her talents anyway. Maybe that’s part of why she landed at Brielson-Tave Psychiatric instead of Darlington Penitentiary. Thanks to the devilishly persuasive charisma of Carlton Bloom, Esq., an attorney with a tongue as slick as the rear of a southern, backwoods pig, Patty had beaten a murder conviction with a Temporary Insanity plea. And she certainly didn’t give anyone else a reason to believe it was a bogus plea.
Patty buddied-up to Janie pretty quickly for reasons that Janie didn’t comprehend. She didn’t much care either. Patty was, at least, entertaining if not infectious with enthusiasm. She had been in the hospital for two months before Janie arrived and took her under the proverbial wing. Maybe she saw something familiar in Janie. But Patty and Janie came from different worlds, different walks of life, and Janie hoped that it wasn’t true. But when she considered the crusted blood under her nails, she had to admit that it probably was.
Janie’s introduction to Brielson-Tave followed the bottle of pills that she had downed like a neat Scotch at a bad Christmas party. But now she was back at home taking that bull by the horns, the man by the balls, and showing him that she didn’t take any shit. Although this really wasn’t home anymore. Come to think of it, home was nowhere—unless you count the hospital. But she wouldn’t stay there forever, would she? Home used to be her parents’ farm in New Hampshire, where fields of corn comprised her yard, and her mother and sister were forever at yard sales, while she and her father would go fishing on the weekends. But she hadn’t even spoken to any of them since her mother died. Richard wouldn’t have it. He felt she needed to cut those apron strings and act like a proper woman; not like some hick, redneck girl who’d never been more than a mile from cow-shit. Then she found herself whisked to California. She’d called Jessica once, but her sister wouldn’t speak to her.
Janie rubbed the water from her eyes and hung the black washcloth on the shower-caddy. Poor Jessica, still angry, always able to hold on to a good grudge. She wished she could talk to her father right now, though. More than anything she wished she could go home and vanish into those rows of corn as she and Jessica used to do when they were little girls. But Frank Trupper was a proud man and probably wouldn’t have anything to do with this heathen disappointment of a little girl ever again.
Pushing the bulbous plastic diamond on the wall and stopping the shower nearly broke her heart, but she had to get ready. It couldn’t last forever, she knew that. Nothing could, "not even the Earth, stars, or sun," her father would say. She accepted that. If she’d learned anything over the past six months it was how to be realistic. She’d spent, no, wasted too much time being naïve. Not anymore, and they would be coming soon, anyway.
She twisted her hair and wrung it of water. Tears that she had anticipated but no longer expected went to the drain, lost in the slurry. Janie slid open the shower door, and clouds of steam tumbled out around her. She’d wanted a bath--that would have been ideal--but it wouldn’t have accomplished the same thing as the shower had. A bath would mean stewing in the blood, not washing it away. The shower suited her needs. It was still a good escape.
***
Now she could hear a muffled Jimmy Buffet singing "Why Don’t we Get Drunk" on the other side of the bathroom door. She was never a huge fan; not a parrot-head so much. But even William Hung would have sounded good right now. They didn’t play pop music at the hospital. Not real pop music. It was always that watered down Muzak. They didn’t want any residents getting riled-up with The Stone Temple Pilots or The Dixie Chicks, after all. Even at Christmas time they played Christmas songs, but it was still the androgynous sort you heard in elevators.
She pulled a brown towel from the bar on the wall over the toilet. The light blue towels she had hung there, when it was still her house, were gone. Hers were softer. Pressing this one to her face, she grimaced at it how abrasive it was. Drying and wrapping the towel around her body, Janie went to the vanity. A corporeal suggestion of Janie Trupper Strictland hid behind the fog in the mirror. A ghost.
It’s probably what he thought when he saw me here.
She wiped her hand across the mirror. There I am, she mused. Jane Trupper--lioness. The image in the cloudy glass seemed surreal, as did the bloody knife in the sink.
She knew he’d be surprised to see her, especially in the house. It would have been strange enough bumping into her in a convenience store, but finding her standing in the bedroom, naked . . . For whatever it was worth, though, she got the response she needed. It was worth a lot. Hell, it was worth everything.
Janie opened the bathroom door, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. The cooler air in the bedroom gave her goose-bumps. Jimmy sang as if the whole world was one big, drunken beach party. She went to the bed, stepping over the body on the floor. Her towel nearly came apart and dropped when she twisted to avoid the blood that soaked the carpet. The burgundy stain was much bigger now in the ecru berber since she’d gone into the bathroom to wash.
She didn’t hear Richard make a sound, wondering if he had finally bled out. She still couldn’t bring herself to look at his face. Familiarity was a risk; at least, for a little longer. The light from the bathroom shined upon his back, but his face was enveloped in shadow. She didn’t see that his eyes had frozen into a vacant stare at something across the floor only he could see. Janie did notice that his shoulders quivered, just a little. She scrutinized and saw that his ribcage expanded slightly.
He’s still breathing!
But it won’t be for long. It can’t be. They’ll be here soon. That would be a problem. She was ready for it to be over. It was now a matter of letting the universe unfold as it should. She hoped that Richard would be dead by the time they arrived.
Janie placed the towel on the bed, shivering now as she’d expected to when standing in the same spot earlier -naked then, as well and waiting for him to come home. But she didn’t even quiver then. In fact, she’d felt surprisingly comfortable, as if she’d never left and still belonged in that bed. Even when she had taken the knife from the kitchen drawer and tucked it between the mattresses at the foot of the bed, she didn’t so much as tremble. She was scared, of course, but an invisible muse of determined rage inspired her. Her severe purpose did not allow her to settle with letting Richard treat her like a piece of crumpled toilet paper.
Any man’s a sucker, she repeated to herself. She lay there until the sun fell behind the trees, and then she heard that same venue of sounds Richard made when he returned home every day: Door opens; shoes clop into foyer; door closes, and keys go into the glass bowl on the console table; briefcase on the floor. Shoes clop, clop up stairs, and he’ll loosen his tie then, looking forward to putting on his khaki shorts and an old, but tidy, polo shirt.
She had gone to the foot of the bed and turned her back to the door. Janie placed her hands on the bedspread and stood up on her toes, trying to get her backside as high in the air as she could. It was Richard’s favorite position. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the door open and Richard’s feet halt suddenly like a dog reaching an abrupt end to its leash.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" he seethed. His voice didn’t echo in the room the way it used to. She didn’t know if he was angry or just surprised, or both, but she noticed something disturbing: her body began to tremble. She hadn’t expected his response, and it threw off her groove. She hadn’t considered any other reactions at all, and this, she realized, was not good planning. All she had to keep her going played in an endless loop in her mind: Any man’s a sucker for a piece of ass! It was her mantra. It was her safety-chute. If Patty’s crucial theory failed here, Janie would have to resort to sheer strength, something with which Richard easily had the advantage.
Janie could only stare at the bedspread, fighting to stay in character and praying for the desired response. This was after all, only an act. She stared at Richard’s shoes, "I’m doing you here, that’s what the fuck," she said, tilting her backside toward him, trying to sound submissive and seductive, but adamant and decisive. And it wasn’t all-out lying, was it? Her intention after all really was to do him here, just not quite the way he thought. But that didn’t matter, because what he thought then and there was all that counted. And he proved the theory; Patty was right.
Richard dropped his jacket to the floor and paused. Janie froze.
"Oh, I get it," he said, "I know what this is all about: one last fling, right?" He slipped his belt free from around his waste and moved toward her. "Okay. I’ll play along. You want to be my little whore, huh?"
She braced herself, familiar with his violently pragmatic uses for the strip of thick leather. But she never released the naughty smile, and she found herself uttering a tiny silent prayer behind the façade. Please not the belt, not again. Let him drop the belt. God, let him drop it.
Her arms shuddered more, in spite of herself. She tried to focus upon subduing his mean streak by appealing to what was in his pants. Janie could picture his face breaking into a devilish grin. Her mind wanted to attach shark’s teeth dripping with fetid saliva to his expression, but Janie forced the image away. She already feared foundering if she strayed from the glimmer of success she noticed pushing against the inside of his fly.
The belt dropped to the floor, a snake strangled and blackened by his touch. Oh, thank you, God . . . but whatever relief she felt was short lived at best. He ripped his pants open and kicked-off his shoes. She gasped as his voice broke her thoughts, but quickly disguised it with what she hoped was a seductive moan.
"You’re quite the ballsy bitch, aren’t you?" he continued, pants off now. He kept his shirt and socks on. She found his lust palpable before he even touched her. No distinction existed between which was stronger: her wanting to wretch or to cry. She held fast, now gripping the bedspread and kneading, trying to appear like a cat having her back scratched. He slapped his hand on her buttocks so that it stung. He grabbed her hips and leaned over her back, his face near her shoulder and said, "Don’t worry, baby. I’ll be done before you know it, and then you can get out of here before anyone finds out." His breath was hot on her skin. She grunted but pretended to enjoy, using the pain to fuel her ambition. "I’ve been needing this for a long time," she whispered, deceiving him with her own truth. Then she let him play.
For a few seconds she tried to reproduce the ridiculous faces and sounds from the one or two porn movies he forced her to enjoy with him.
She felt disgusting. Even letting the orderly have her was a mere inconvenience, a minor obstacle at best, compared to this. At least it got her out of the hospital’s back door. But now, she felt a subtle animosity toward herself. She didn’t even know the orderly, but she loathed Richard. He was vile. And all she could do was keep telling herself that it was all for a purpose; it was almost time. Janie pulled herself from him slowly, seductively indicating a change, flipping to the next page but not closing the book.
Nearly looking at his eyes, she averted her focus and looked only at his obvious point of interest. She couldn’t look at his face. The last thing she wanted was to see something in him, some flicker of the man she remembered and loved that might make her hesitate, or even break down. She knew that if she let herself quit, she really would be nothing more than a worthless, filthy slut—a crumpled bit of shit-ticket, used and flushed. She was afraid she may have appeared awkward, suspicious. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. She regurgitated that smile, prodding herself; I can do this. I’m different now, stronger—realistic.
She recovered her missed beat by feigning intense interest, and she sank to her knees, sexy, seductive, and grabbed on to the convenient handle that he offered. It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t need to look; I know what I’d see. I’d see emptiness and no sign of the man I thought I knew and devoted myself to for more than eight years. There’d be the eyes of a creepy, life-like doll that I wouldn’t want in my bedroom at night—no emotion, no compassion. There’s been no love for me in his eyes for years.
Richard’s hands dangled at his sides. She noticed his wedding ring was gone. He couldn’t get rid of me fast enough, could he? I’ll bet he had some new slut in my bed before I even had a room at the hospital. But instead of feeling thwarted, she felt empowered. She turned her rage into strength and she listened to his sounds of savoring as she teased and played. This time she was the cat, toying with its prey. And she grinned when his head lolled back, and he let her play-act to her hearts desire. He wouldn’t have cared if they were in a Broadway play or at an office board-meeting as long as she kept doing what she was doing. But while she stroked with one hand the other reached behind her and between the mattresses.
"Just the perfect way to top it all off, huh, baby?" he said, holding no inclination of her intentions, head still back, interest still pointing. When she got a firm grip on the knife, she mirrored with a firm grip of his penis. She pulled him upward with a quick yank that put him on his toes. He gasped out of his reverie, but too late to react. Janie jammed the knife into his groin. It speared with little resistance, exactly as Patty had described. "That’s the sweet-spot," Patty directed, emphasizing with a stubby finger jabbed into the air like dotting an invisible exclamation point, "below the hot-dog and between the beans. Anything else is pretty much bone."
Janie knew that she’d only get one very lucky shot at this. If she missed, he would be on top of her, beating her before she could scream. But she was hot to gamble today, and it did work. She had Richard right where she wanted him, and it was easy enough to aim while he wasn’t looking.
His hands shot to his groin. The veins throughout his body seared, and he lost his breath. His eyes blew open, and he finally managed to scream, still pitched high-up on his toes and prancing as if the carpet had become a bed of coals. Her grasp did not relent but tightened instead with the urgency of survival. He grabbed at her, getting handfuls of her hair. He growled what she thought might have been an attempt at, "Bitch". Richard pulled and twisted, tearing strands from her scalp, making her screech and jarring her neck. Janie maintained that she had a distinct advantage. Her only focus—her drive--was upon his tool of betrayal that she squeezed in her hand, his lascivious implement that had made her a fool. She twisted the knife’s handle and threw her shoulder into his abdomen knocking Richard onto his back. He continued screaming in a culmination of shock, rage, and pain. His head bounced hard upon the floor, thumping like a bowling ball slipping from a child’s hands. But she knew that on the carpet it wouldn’t have been enough to knock him out. He sat upright and grabbed for her again, his legs thrashing, the knife protruding like a second, bloody appendage. Before he could reach her she leaned back, withdrew the knife, and sliced it upward underneath his scrotum. The blade angled upward and bit into her white, gripping fingers. She flinched and pulled his shaft downward to take the blade as she delivered another quick stroke. And these were the kinds of strokes she’d dreamed about giving Richard for several festering months.
He screamed in a mind-splitting way that would have landed him a B-movie audition as his whole package -jewels within- flopped to the floor. Her husband squirmed and tried to roll away, clawing at the floor like a wounded crocodile, but Janie didn’t let go. "Taking the bull by the horn", she grunted and yanked him upward again, as if rip-starting a stubborn lawnmower. She wasn’t a mere cat now, but a lioness.
She found herself savoring the experience of twisting and pulling, as well as sporting a slightly sadistic smile. His hands flexed and slapped down on the floor at his sides as he tried to stabilize himself and regain some kind of foundation to push away. Janie stomped on his chest as if she were killing a cockroach and leaned into him. Then she continued to slice further at the underside of his beloved manhood and nearly severed it. She ripped upward again, and she could feel his flesh releasing. The ligament remaining at the topside of his shaft was difficult to free, but she managed with a gloriously bestial roar that erupted from the pit of her belly. With a final swipe she stood upright, panting, holding his disembodied penis. She waited for the possibility that he might spring from the floor in a final burst of rage and attack her, ripping her to shreds as she had done to him.
She watched Richard’s loins bleed and listened to him gurgle and sputter on the floor, like a waterless fish. His hands grasped blindly at his vacant groin, and blood streamed from beneath his fingers over his legs and onto the carpet. Janie moved away from him now, her eyes wildly glassy and watched him convulse. She couldn’t bring herself to look at his face, which bloated and turned purple with tension, tears trickling from bloodshot eyes as shock saturated him.
Twenty minutes passed, but it felt like seconds as she was so stoked with adrenaline. When he stopped moving, and she knew he was beyond dragging himself to a phone, Janie deposited the knife in the bathroom sink. She was observing how he drying blood made it stick to her hand when she realized that she was still squeezing his dismembered penis her other. She tossed it on the floor beside him, turning to speak at her reflection in the mirror, "I did you a favor, Richard. Those things are nothing but trouble anyway."
It was finished. She accomplished her task, conquered the mouse within and became the predator that devoured its prey. Janie could do whatever she wanted now. She was liberated and wanted music.
She went to the CD cabinet near the closet, which wasn’t one she recognized. It had a glass front with a recessed display box in the door. The theme was a vignette of Tuscan flavor, with little wine bottles and wedges of plastic cheese on tiny shelves.
Tacky.
She opened the cabinet and left blood on the glass. Scanning the CD collection, many of which she could have sworn were hers—bastard!—she found Jimmy Buffet’s Songs You Know by Heart and put it into the CD player on the dresser. She had been craving something from her Billy Joel CD, but it seemed Richard had gotten rid of that, as well. This will do. She turned the volume way up, not hearing Richard at all.
Janie laid the damp towel on the bed, about which he surely would have bitched. But she didn’t have to worry about that anymore, did she? She collected her folded-up hospital clothes and put them back on her freshly showered body. No identity in those clothes; only a generic resident. She sat on the edge of the bed and studied the man on the floor. Not really a man anymore, is he? The small bag of skin sat on the floor between his knees with its two tiny lumps inside. His small penis lay distorted and useless nearby. She chuckled to herself.
Janie settled back into her old spot on the bed and let the final dregs of adrenaline dissipate. She relaxed, feeling as though she’d just taken one of her cups of colorful little pills at the hospital. Her heart slowed and her mind eased into a peaceful satisfaction that it was over. She knew that she’d finally won. She’d finally released herself from the oppressive chill that lingered perpetually at her back and disturbed her sleep no matter how far away from him she could ever be. Richard would never hurt her again. She knew it, but she didn’t feel it. There was still something there, something inhibiting the long awaited closure she desired.
Maybe it all just hasn’t hit me yet.
Janie turned toward the phone on Richard’s nightstand. She leaned across the bed and reached for the sleek silver receiver. She pressed a series of digits she’d memorized for just this occasion. A woman answered. Janie said, "Attorney Bloom, please." She was asked to hold.
Janie noticed that Richard kept a picture on his nightstand now. It was a shot of a young red-haired woman, probably late twenties; guys must think she’s a knockout. The girl sat on Richard’s lap and she held her hand out toward the camera, obviously flaunting her engagement ring. The diamond cast a substantial reflection of the camera’s flash. The girl was smiling, and she had her other arm around Richard’s neck. They looked happy. But all Janie could offer to the precious moment was, "Bitch." She looked at Richard in the photo, expecting to see that smug son-of-a-bitch pretending to be happy and charming for the camera -just like he’d done for their own engagement party. She looked at his face, her mind already stocked with bitter emotion and scathing cynicism, but what she saw made her blood seem to run dry and instead snuffed any emotion in her soul.
It wasn’t Richard. Janie didn’t recognize the man in the photo at all.
An overwhelming sense of urgency forced her reluctant mind to accept that she needed to look at his face now. She needed to look at the man on the floor, really look at him. But now the fear she couldn’t stave away was not that she might recognize something familiar, it was that she wouldn’t.
Janie dropped the receiver onto the pillow, unable to see him over the foot of the bed. She slid her feet to the floor, looking at the man on the carpet. His hands still cupped between his knees, not moving at all now. She dragged her eyes up his torso, finding his chest still. And then his face; Richard’s face was next. But it wasn’t Richard at all. It was the man in the picture with the red-haired woman—his fiancé. He looked like Richard, Oh, god does he look like Richard . . . but it wasn’t her husband. She scrambled for his trousers and found a billfold in a pocket. The man on the floor smiled at her from his driver’s license photo. Alex Messier; 2447 Tamarack Heights.
Janie crumpled onto the floor, burying her face in her hands. She waited for the heaving sobs to come, but she didn’t feel the slightest urge to shed a tear. Still, her chest did heave, but she found herself laughing. Somewhere inside, not even in the passenger’s seat now, but way back in the trunk of her mind, Janie was appalled. But she wasn’t driving today like she’d believed. Janie laughed and tears did come to her eyes.
You killed the wrong man. You’re in the wrong fucking house, and you killed the wrong fucking man! But he was still a man, Janie. He still had a penis, and he was really no different from Richard, was he? You saved that woman, Janie; you did her a goddamned favor. Hell, you did all women a favor, girl. Men are pigs!
Copyright © 2008 David Byron