by H. D. Gordon
Just don’t look at it. Just crumple it up right now and throw it away. Better yet, rip it into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. That’s where shit you don’t need belongs. Just don’t look at it.
Sure, she could do that, but that wouldn’t stop whatever was depicted on the paper from coming true. That wouldn’t stop her from worrying over what bad thing was coming. That wouldn’t help anyone, not even her.
Joe looked down.
Oh…no.
It was her mother and father. There was no mistaking that. Both of their beautiful faces were turned toward her clairvoyant camera, orange and red light brightening the scene to high noon, though outside the window behind her parents’ bed the darkness said it was sometime during the night. Yes, the sketch was set in her parents’ bedroom, at night, and Joe’s throat closed up as she took it all in.
Just had to look, didn’t you? Just had to look.
Her mother was strapped to the bed with what looked like duct tape. Her manicured hands were held to bed posts with it, her feet free and seemingly in mid-kick. Her pearl-colored silk nightgown was up above her knees
(where a proper lady’s skirt should never be)
and her face was twisted in agony, her eyes wide and terrified, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream. Joe couldn’t see it, nor did she realize it, but looking down at the sketch, the expression on her face matched the expression on her mother’s face almost identically. The resemblance between the two of them was almost visible.
Her father was further away from the camera, standing on the opposite side of the bed, and staring down at his wife whom he must have taped to the post. The look on his face was the single most terrifying expression young Joe had ever seen. It was all hate and anger and justified satisfaction. A slanted smile played on his lips. That orange and red painted his face. If demons truly existed, Joe thought that this is what they might look like. His eyes were locked on her mother. A red can of what Joe figured had to be gasoline hung from one of his hands. A silver lighter was clutched in the other.
In the sketch, her mother was on fire. And in the awful sketch, it was obvious who had set it.
Oh no.
You got that right. Oh no.
Joe took her earlier advice then, and tore the paper into tiny pieces and flushed those poisonous things down the toilet. Where
(shit you don’t need belongs)
no one but the rats in the sewers would ever see it.
Now what?
It was a big question for such a young girl, but she entertained it nonetheless. What other choice did she have? She couldn’t just
(let it burn)
let it happen. She hadn’t even realized things with her parents weren’t well. Well, that wasn’t precisely true. There was Tom, wasn’t there. Yes, there was Tom.
Her father spent a good deal of time at work. He was an oral surgeon with his own practice, and a man who enjoyed going out for drinks with his pretty, young dental assistants after the work day was through. This wasn’t what he told his wife, of course, because in his own strange way he loved her. Maybe, Joe would think years later as she replayed the incident over in her head, maybe, he loved her just a little too much. She was after all, quite beautiful. Her mother suspected something was going between her husband and at least one of his assistants, but she never said anything to him about it. She had Tom.
“He’s just a friend of mine,” she told young Joe on the first occasion that Tom came by during the day, when her father was at work.
The girl had only nodded at her mother, not wanting to think about the way her mother said the word “friend”. A friend was okay. A friend was just, well, a friend, right? Sure. Right. Kyle and Kayla were Joe’s friends, and Kyle was a boy, so surely her mother could have a male friend too. Surely.
To a jealous husband, the answer to these questions was No. Not right. Not right at all. Joe didn’t know just how not right at all it was. She was only twelve, after all. She was only twelve.
Now the image on her twelve year-old mind was that of her father setting her mother, who was duct taped to their bed, on fire. How could this be? Better yet, why? Why would her father do something like that? Wasn’t the fire that had taken her friend down the street three years ago bad enough?
No, it will never stop. As long as you have this gift, it will never stop. And when you get out into the big ole world, baby, it’s just going to get worse. Evil is not just a thing of fairytales. Evil is real and it walks among us. Evil is jealousy and hate and fear and fire. Yes, evil is fire. You saw it in his eyes. The fire reflected from those jealous, hateful eyes, and whether or not you want it to, it’s going to happen. So,
What now? What are you going to do now?
Not eat, for one thing. No sleep, either. And what would happen if she tried to tell someone? A police officer, maybe. Well, then that officer would tell her parents. He would tell them and her mother would be embarrassed and her father would convince the officer with his white, straight smile and suit that there was nothing to worry about.
“She’s just strange, that girl. Big imagination. We’ve had her looked at by all the quacks in town. She just a little off her rocker.”
Yes, that’s what they would say. That’s what they always said in whispers behind closed doors when their raven-haired, strange-eyed daughter embarrassed them. And everyone believed them because, yes, they had to admit, the girl was very strange. Telling someone was not an option.
Then be ready. When it happens—and it will happen—she would just have to be ready. When the fireworks started, she would feel it, just as she had at the daycare so many years ago and during the fire down the street three years ago. All she had to do was get ready and wait. It was all she could do.
The waiting was harder than the planning. The waiting was making her shake and take useless, shallow breaths. The waiting was costing her sleep and at night she would lay awake, waiting for that unmistakable feeling to flood through her stomach. It was a rough four days.
Her plan was a simple one, and she gathered the necessities for it quickly. The fire extinguisher was the hardest to obtain without her parents notice, but the frying pan and the blanket were easy enough. She folded a thick blanket and placed it under her bed. Under that she placed the iron frying pan. The fire extinguisher she got from the drug store around the corner after school on her walk home the next day. It was a small one, and her parents kept a bigger one in the house mounted to the kitchen wall in case of an emergency. But if she took that, they would more than likely notice its absence. This one fit right into Joe’s backpack, and she read its usage instructions over and over until she’d memorized them. And she waited.
On the fourth night, just before Joe turned the lamp off in her room so that she could make an attempt at sleep, she made herself recall the sketch she’d drawn. One detail of it had been particularly important to her plan, and she learned then the foolishness of destroying the paper before she had time to study it a little longer. No matter, she knew that the side of the bed where her father had been standing was the side of the room where the door was located. Her father’s back had been to that door as he’d stood looking down at her mother with that awful look on his face. That was good. That might make it easier.
Sleep did come on that fourth night, easier than Joe would have expected. Whether this was because her body’s need for rest had finally won, or because the Gods had a cruel sense of humor, she never knew. Young Joe fell asleep without ever realizing she had done so. And she had slept well. Until about two o’clock in the morning, she had slept well.
Joe awoke abruptly, ripped from that dark, peaceful place where not even dreams were allowed. She sat up quickly in her bed, her bedroom dark all around her. Throwing the covers off her sweaty body she stood up, her bare feet sticking to the cold hardwood floor beneath them. Her heartbeat buzzed in frantic, inconsistent, and rapid fury, as if angry over the stress it had been under for the past four days. Her whole twelve-
year-old body shook involuntarily. Awful, awful feeling.
Just breathe. Just wait.
Then she heard her mother’s voice, shrill and high and clear in the silence of the dark night.
“What are you doing? Stop that! Have you lost your mind? Stop it! Pleeease!”
Then her father’s.
“You must think I’m some kind of fool! Is that what you think? You’re a dirty slut and you’ll get just what a dirty slut deserves!”
For a moment, Joe found that she was unable to move. The voices were those of her parents, but the tones were all wrong. The voice that sounded like her mother’s was off somehow. The voice that sounded like her father’s was…broken somehow, like the deep bellow of an angry hound dog who has found himself caught in a nasty bear trap. Maybe if she just crawled back under her covers and closed her eyes these imposter-parent voices would go away. Maybe—
“What is that? Gasoline! What are you going to do with that? Untie me! Untie me right now, goddam it!”
Her mother again. Then the sound of a hard, cold slap. It made a thwack! sound that was so loud that Joe heard it perfectly from down the hall in her dark bedroom. Then, her father’s broken voice again.
“You just shut that pretty little lying mouth of yours before you wake up Joe. You just shut up and take what you got coming to you. You thought you could run around on me and I wouldn’t find out. Is that what you thought? Well, we’ll see how much that wife-fucker Tom wants you when your face isn’t so pretty anymore. We’ll see. We’ll see.”
Tom? Joe thought. What does Tom have to do with—
That was the night young Joe learned that “friend” doesn’t always mean “friend”.
Her paralysis broke, and Joe rushed across her bedroom to the door. She came to a skidding stop on the hard floor and ran back to her bed. Dropping to her knees, she retrieved the frying pan and blanket and the fire extinguisher. Cradling them in her arms, she pushed her door open slowly and stepped out into the hallway.
Her mother was screaming now. “JOE! JOE! WAKE UP! JOE! WAKE UP! CALL NINE—”
Joe never heard the next thing that her father said, because he spoke too low for her to hear it. He bent over the bed and kissed his wife gently on her head. Then he whispered, “I gave her some heavy sleeping pills. She won’t hear you, darling. It’s just you and me. You and me. That wife-fucker Tom ain’t gonna hear you, either.” He flipped the top of the silver lighter back with his thumb.
“JOE! JOE! WAKE UP! JOE!” her mother continued screaming, and outside in the hallway, young Joe felt as though she may very well pass out or throw up.
Just breathe. Just breathe. Just breathe.
She pushed herself forward, her sweaty feet peeling reluctantly from the hard floor, and stopped outside of the closed door to her parents’ bedroom. Joe set the blanket and the fire extinguisher down by her bare feet, and gripped the handle of the heavy iron frying pan in her left hand.
Her last thought before entering was: Swing hard and breathe. Don’t forget to breathe.
It was what her coach at school had told her when they were practicing softball in gym. It was good advice. If she failed to follow it now, her mother would die. If she missed, who knew what her father would do? He had obviously fallen off his rocker, and really, he had never been particularly fond of his strange little girl. He was a man of few words, and of those few he hardly spared any for Joe. Did this mean he would kill her if she got in his way? By the sound of that broken, angry demon’s voice that was coming out of him, she was pretty sure that the answer was yes.
In her parent’s bedroom, her father flicked the flame to life on the lighter in his hand. Red and orange flickered across his face. Her mother screamed, shrill and high and horribly terrified. Outside of the door, young Joe’s resolve strengthened. Inside the door, her father dropped the silver lighter onto the gasoline-soaked bed.
Joe pushed the door open slowly, restraining herself from throwing it open with all her force. A huge part of her plan depended on her father facing the bed. If the door crashed open, he may turn around—and then who knows what would happen?
Young Joe had been under the misconception that seeing the sketch of the event had prepared her mentally for what she was going to see here. She was wrong.
The room was brighter than Joe had expected. Too bright in comparison to the dark hallway and bedroom from which she had just come. Her parents’ bed was a red-and-orange blaze which lit the room like a tiny and powerful sun. Heat poured from its flames in rolling waves that washed across Joe’s horrified, frozen face. Her mother’s screams were awful now, just awful, and they wrenched the heart of the girl who was standing in the doorway with an iron skillet in her left hand and made her stomach clench painfully. Joe spared her only a moment’s glance. Her mother was too occupied to see her. Her silver-blue gaze went to her father.
His back was facing her.
This was the worst thing the poor girl who had seen so many terrible things had ever seen. It was by far, the scariest moment of her life. There’s just no other way to say it. Her reaction time was actually only seconds. But as she stood there, that cold iron clutched in her small hand, the heat from the hell-fire in front of her growing rapidly and spreading just as quickly—her mother’s agonized screams filling her ears and her father’s back turned toward her, with that angry, hateful and justified face watching the woman burn—there was just no other way to say it. It was the worst, scariest moment of the girl’s life.
Then her hand drew back fast and strong, her left hand, and then it was swinging forward as true as a homerun hit, connecting with something hard and solid. A sound sort of like a GOOONG! and sort of a firm PIIING! hit her ears, and the man who had his back to her slumped and fell to the floor. Next she was running to retrieve the heavy blanket and the fire extinguisher that she had left outside of her parents’ door. She threw the blanket on the top of the bed, where she briefly was able to think and later recall a conscious thought, which was: Probably where her head is. Then she was following the instructions she had memorized, spraying thick white foam from the nozzle of the fire extinguisher. She wondered at how long it felt to take the flames out. Her face was dripping sweat. Her heart had either stopped beating altogether or was beating too fast to be registered. Her mother continued to scream through it all.
Then as the flames made their reluctant retreat, another thought came to her. If she’s screaming then she’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
Finally the fire went out and her mother stopped screaming and began to moan ugly, agonized moans. The bed was a mess of black and white foam, her mother a shivering, duct-taped mess, her father unconscious on the hardwood floor at her feet, with blood running from his ear. Joe retrieved the phone from the nightstand, and called 911.
There had been a trial by jury, where her father was convicted of attempted murder. Joe had been made to testify. When they played the 911 call back to her during her testimony, she broke down and cried, hard, sobbing and reliving that terrible night. Hearing it was another one of the worst days of her life. Her voice sounded calmer than she would have expected when played back on the recording. Her stutter hadn’t even been as bad as she remembered it being, but it had a horrible subtle note to it that had made even the judge cringe.
Nine-one-one what’s your emergency?
“My muh-mother has buh-been burned very buh-badly. 795 East Maple Street. Puh-please hurry.
Okay ma’am, stay on the line. Help is on the way. Did you say your mother has been burned?
“Yuh-yes. Buh-burned. My father threw g-g-g-gasoline all over her and buh-buh-burned her! 795 East muh-Maple street! Huh-huh-hurry!”
Units are on route, Ma’am. Stay on the lin—
The phone had fallen from her hand and hit the floor. On the other end, the 911 operator kept on talking into space. Joe had gone to her mother then, moving slowly, shuffling her bare feet along the floor. Joe glanced down once at her father’s u
nconscious body, and soothed her fears with the confidence that he was not getting up any time soon. She figured that he had a concussion at least, perhaps a fractured skull, both of which he did.
Her mother was still moaning. She would eventually pass out before the paramedics arrived, but the last thing she said before going into a coma that would last for four weeks, was, “My face. Is my face okay?” Young Joe did not answer this question, because no, her mother’s face was not okay. In fact, the whole right side of her body was not okay.
Her father got sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for attempted murder. Joe’s mother was pretty much scarred for life, both physically and emotionally. Her father both hated Joe and blamed her. Her mother showed no gratitude for what Joe had done. One time, when Joe was sixteen years old, some four years after the incident, her mother said, “You shoulda just let me burn. Look at my face! Look at what happened to my goddam face! Why would I want to live like this? Now I’m a freak. Just like—”
Her mother hadn’t finished that thought aloud. Instead she just broke out into tears and retired to her bedroom, but Joe finished it for her in her head. Just like me. Gee, you’re welcome, Mom. Don’t worry about how I feel. It was just a walk in the park for me, too. No big.
But it had been big. It had been a life-changing, rapid moment that had altered the little raven-haired girl forever. For better or worse, it was one of the moments that had made her into the person she was today, permanently changed her outlook on life and wiped away the moisture behind her young ears.
