by Brian Rella
He rolled his head back and laughed. “Or what? What exactly are you going to do? You going to sue me? I’ll bury you, bitch! You’ve got no leg to stand on. I’ll crush you like a tiny bug! Now it’s four thousand, to pay for cleaning up the mess you made on my floor!” And he kicked the brushes and paint cans at her. “Say another word. Go ahead…say it! It’ll be three thousand. No…no. Say another word and I’ll throw you out on your lazy ass!”
Elsy started to shake. The rage flowed through her like river-rapids of fire. She burned with fury. Her skin was on fire. Her vision went blurry. A pure, angry, hatred coursed through her body. That energy welled up inside her and the well rose until it was spilling over. She’d never wished anyone dead in her life, but in that moment, every part of her body, mind, and soul wished a horrible death on Sandstein, and she projected all that hateful energy out at him. She could see the waves coming off her like heat waves off the pavement in the summer. Those waves of hatred were directed at him and at the damn wall behind him she’d just spent the last four days slaving over.
Everything slowed down. The noise of his cackles was drowned out by an eerie silence. She could see his mouth open and knew he was laughing at her, but she couldn’t hear him. Then the sound came back to her ears, but it was muted or muffled, like…like as if her head were underwater. Then something caught her eye on the wall behind him. Something that was impossible to believe. She blinked and shook her head and looked again. Yes, it was. The wall. The mural behind him. The fish were swimming. The water. The water was moving. There were bubbles coming up from the coral. Then the walls of the room were gone. She was wet. She was floating. So was Sandstein. She could see his combover flowing off the top of his head in the water’s current.
He wasn’t laughing anymore. He was floating out of the chair. His face looked shocked. His mouth was wide open and she could see bubbles coming out of it. From behind him and to his left, three tentacles reached out and grabbed hold of him. She saw something she’d never seen before on Sandstein’s face. Terror. He beat at the octopus’s tendrils with his fists, but it was no use. The giant tentacles pulled him toward the octopus’s body lying on the coral. Elsy watched the bubbles come from Sandstein’s arms and legs as the octopus squeezed and broke his bones, which poked through his skin. His femur burst through his leg, sending clouds of blood into the water. His mouth was a huge “O”. He must have been in tremendous pain. Elsy felt a smile spread across her face.
The shark came around from the other side of the reef, its head bobbing back and forth, its body zig-zagging toward Sandstein. The octopus raised Sandstein up and the shark opened its jaws, taking Sandstein’s head and torso into its mouth. The shark bit down and the water turned red with more clouds of blood. The shark thrashed its head and body back and forth, ripping Sandstein in two. It chewed the top half of his body, trying to swallow him down. Elsy could hear the muffled crunching of bone as its whole body rhythmically chewed and swallowed him. The octopus took the rest of his body and tucked it under its enormous head. Sandstein’s shoe floated to the bottom of the coral and rested there.
Something else caught Elsy’s eye as she followed the shoe down to its resting place on the coral. A glimmer. It was the treasure chest at the bottom of the reef. The lid was open. There was the gold and the jewels that she had painted in the chest. She had a thought. Can I take it? She cautiously swam over to the chest. Steadying herself on the reef, she grabbed hold of the handles on either side of the treasure chest. She felt its weight and pulled with all her strength. The treasure chest came up. It was heavy, but she could carry it. She looked around for the shark and the octopus. Neither were paying any attention to her. They were focused on their meal. She turned back around and saw a window to the room where she had been painting. The chest in her arms, she walked along the reef toward the room. She came through the wall with a splash. The treasure chest hit the floor with a thud, the gold coins and jewels spilling over the floor.
She was soaked. She looked back at the mural and it was still again. Elsy sat down on the wet floor. She grinned. How am I going to get this into my old Honda?
THE FORTUNETELLER
THE PLASTIC HANDLE on the shopping bag cuts into my fingers as I walk down Eighteenth Street with a big grin on my face. I pass the laundromat and the UPS store, and see her sitting at a little round table with a cat in her lap in front of her tiny storefront. The sign in her window says $5 Readings. Seems like she’s always been there; at least, she has been since we moved in last year. She’s old and wrinkled and gray and rather ordinary looking. She could be anybody’s grandmother. I’ve passed her dozens of times and we’ve never spoken, until today.
“Big night tonight,” she says as I pass her by.
I stop. “What do you mean?” I ask. As soon as I say it, I know it’s a mistake. Now she’ll try and con me into thinking that she can tell me my future and I know better than to entertain a passing comment from a hustler. I’ve got a full bag of groceries in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Anyone trained in the art of confidence could guess I have something planned for tonight. I should have kept walking.
“Don’t worry. She will say yes,” she says.
“She will, huh? What will she say yes to?” I ask, skeptically. But a little voice in my head is not so skeptical. Does she know that I’m going to propose to Gwyn tonight?
“You have her heart. You two have the true love. Very rare. You are two halves of a whole. Very rare,” she says.
The heavy grocery bag is still cutting into my fingers, and as I switch hands that little voice in my head is growing louder, considering the possibility that this woman is not a fraud and, in fact, knows I’m going to ask Gwyneth to marry me tonight. How does she know? She’s psychic! This little mental battle goes on within me—she’s psychic, she’s a fraud!—as I take a mental inventory of what I’m wearing and carrying to see if there’s anything that would give away my plan to propose. She’s a con artist, for sure. There must be something that’s giving me away. Must be.
As if she’s read my mind, she says, “I know things. Things about people. I can tell you things you want to know,” she says, with a smile that seems just a bit too big, too sincere.
I don’t have time for this right now. I took the afternoon off to make dinner before Gwyneth gets home from work. “That’s nice,” I say dismissively. “See you around.” And I walk on.
“You’ll be back,” she says.
I half smile and tell her to have a good night.
“I will,” she says. “See you soon.”
I keep walking.
***
My eyes adjust to the dim light of morning seeping through the cracks between the blinds in our bedroom as I roll out of bed and shuffle to the bathroom. I shower, brush my teeth, shave, and run some wax through my hair, messing it in the front just how she likes it.
I pull a black V-neck sweater from the closet and put it on with a pair of dark blue jeans and my black leather jacket. She picked the jacket out for me when we went shopping at Saks last spring. I remember that day in vivid detail. I try to remember all my days with her in detail. The details keep me going.
I lean into the mirror on the closet door to inspect my forty-year-old face in the shadowy light. Crow's feet have formed around my eyes, the wrinkles in my forehead have deepened, and streaks of silvery gray accent my dark-brown sideburns. She thinks the gray makes me look distinguished, but I think I'm starting to look old.
I go to her dressing table, stepping over the dark spot on the floor. Sitting in her chair, I take the ring box from the drawer, open it, light the candle, and call her the way the fortuneteller taught me. She takes her time coming to me in the morning, but I don't mind. She’s worth the wait.
The room grows cold and I can see my breath in thick, white puffs. I shiver. The candle flickers. The hairs on my arm stand up.
I smell her. Shea butter and a hint of vanilla. I close my eyes and inhale and memories of
her flood my mind: her smile; her slender curves and sexy walk; her smooth skin gliding under my fingertips. I’m in a semi-trance, blocking out everything but my mental highlight reel of her.
I open my eyes and she’s there in the mirror, her strawberry-blond hair in long, luscious curls that frame her face and flow down to the front of her shoulders, lying loosely above her breasts. A crooked smile forms under her perfectly shaped nose. Her blue, doe eyes meet mine and I'm in rapture, just as I was the day we met.
"Good morning," I say.
"Good morning, John," Gwyneth replies.
"You look so beautiful this morning,” I say. “I may just stay home to be with you all day."
"I’d like that," she says, seductively.
My heart swells, I feel a rush, and turn around in the chair to take her hand, my lust building…but she’s not there. I panic, forgetting for a moment and then, I remember. She’s gone. Dead. She’s a ghost now. I can only see her in the mirror. I can’t touch her anymore—not yet, anyway.
My lust withers and changes to sadness as I swivel back around in the chair. Something wet touches my hand and I drop my gaze to see the splatter by my thumb. I shudder as tears stream from my eyes, blurring her image in the mirror. Sobbing, I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
"This just won’t do, John,” she says.
“I know,“ I croak.
The horror of that night flashes through my mind. The broken window; her twisted body on the floor; the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be; the blood, pooled around her, in her hair, and sticking to my hands as I cradled her head in my lap on the floor. My screams for help echoed into the empty apartment and still resonate in my ears today.
I spoke to the fortuneteller for the second time a week later when I was walking home after her funeral. She was sitting outside her store, the cat in her lap like always. “She’s still here,” she said. “Would you like to see her?”
The little voice in my head told me to run—run away from her and don’t look back. She’s evil. But I didn’t run. I said nothing and just stared at the fortuneteller who I’d only spoken to once before: the night I was supposed to propose to Gwyneth; the same night she had been murdered.
Part of me didn’t believe her. Part of me believed that she was a bottom-feeder, looking to take advantage of me in my grief, believing me a fool and wanting me to give her money so I could talk to my dead wife. This image popped into my head of the two of us sitting around a crystal ball in some dark room, holding hands, as her eyes roll back in her head while she fakes being possessed by my wife's spirit.
I'm no fool. My wife's obituary was in the paper. That's how she knows. She was conning me, just like the first time we spoke. It made me angry and I thought about picking up her table, throwing it through her window, and yelling at her: "You bitch! I know what you're doing! Go to hell!"
Another part of me wanted to believe her; needed to because I wasn’t ready to let go. It’s not like Gwyn and I had grown old together and she had died of old age. We were just starting our lives when she was taken from me. Stolen from me. I couldn’t accept it. I wouldn’t. If there was some small chance that I could talk to her again, I would take it. Maybe this fortuneteller was conning me, maybe not. I was weak with grief and needed to believe, and that’s the part of me that won that day. I went inside her shop and she led me to the back room.
There was no crystal ball and no shrine, just a worn-out couch and a coffee table in a dark room with no windows. She didn’t show me any tricks. She just said there was still time; Gwyneth hadn’t crossed over yet and I could be with my wife if I wanted to. Yes, I wanted to be with my wife, and she told me how to do it, how I could see her again whenever I wanted. She taught me her dark magic, how I could call Gwyneth from the in-between place where she was now and spend time with her. Then she told me how we could be together again forever. I let the fortuneteller take control of me that day.
She still has control of me.
I pull myself back to the present and lock eyes with my wife in the mirror, regaining my composure and breathing easier.
"I have to take care of something," I say. "Then we can be together. Forever."
Her eyebrows arch. "What are you going to do, John?” she asks. “I can’t stay in-between much longer. I need to move on, and so do you.”
The words “move on” sting me. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I'll see you tonight, Gwyneth.” I close the ring box and put it in my pocket and she vanishes from the mirror.
The sadness and longing try to resurface, but I fight it back, forcing pain to turn into anger, and then harden to resolve. I know what I have to do. It’s time for me to finish my task for the fortuneteller and then we can be together again.
I take the gun from the top drawer in my closet, pop out the magazine, make sure it’s loaded, and then slap it back in, holstering it in my waistband under my jacket. I take the knife the fortuneteller gave me and clip it to the side of my belt. The box she gave me gets slipped into my bag, which I sling over my shoulder as I walk out the front door. I hear the old woman's voice in my head telling me where I will find him, the man who killed my wife. It won’t be long now, Gwyneth. I just need to finish this one thing.
It’s bright outside as I get into my car and drive south, heading downtown. I drive past the police headquarters and the city courthouse. Both failed my wife.
I keep driving and reach the tenements on the south side of the city. This place reeks of neglect and fear and injustice. This is where the seeds of decay find root and grow, wild and untamed. I despise these people. They are the human trash that litter society. My anger foments as I drive deeper into the belly of the beast.
I reach my destination: The Howard Projects. The cancer of the city metastasized here, where my wife’s killer grew up to become a murderer and this is where I will end him and erase him from the Earth.
The building looks like a vertical prison as I step into the main lobby. An empty guard booth with smashed glass greets me; years of grime and dirt cover every inch of the lobby. Animals. I push the cracked button for the elevator and wait. Perspiration forms above my lip and on my forehead. The elevator shows up, and I step in and push 65. It moves up with a jerk and takes me to a higher level of hell.
I pull the gun from my waistband and cock it, then turn the safety off. Thirtieth floor. Fortieth floor. I wipe my brow with the back of my hand. My armpits are wet. My palms are sweaty. I’ve never killed anyone before, but I can do this. I know I can. He took everything from me, and now I’ll take something from him. And bring my wife back.
The elevator jolts to a stop and I get out and go right to 65J, the gun in my hand. I’m standing in front of his door, staring at the peephole, getting my head together, readying myself.
I kick the door. The door opens a few inches and stops. The safety chain. I kick again and knock the safety chain off the frame. The door creaks open and I raise my gun and move inside.
I’m watching a movie of myself, sweeping the gun left to right, looking for him. I turn left down the hall and hear movement and muffled voices. There are two doors on my right. I push open the first one and find a crib and some toys on the floor. I back out of the room and stand in front of the second door.
I hear muted talk and movement inside. I knock the door open and hear a woman scream.
I enter the room gun-first and see them. A woman and a boy who looks to be about two are on the bed with him. They have the covers pulled up around them.
“Please,” he says. “Please don’t hurt my family. Just me. Leave them out of it.”
“You took everything from me,” I growl. “Now I will take something from you.” I raise my gun. Kill them all or just him? I don’t give a fuck about them. Neither does she. It’s him she wants.
Fine. Just him, then.
“Please,” he begs. “Not them. Just me. Please…”
“Please,” the woman says. “Please don’t hurt my baby…”
<
br /> Go ahead and beg. Beg, like my wife did when you murdered her in our home. You beg before I end you.
”They had no part in this,” he says. “I had to do it. She made me. She has power…She’s not human…”
“Shut the fuck up! What do you mean she made you do it? Who made you do it?” I ask, confused by what he’s saying.
“The fortuneteller,” he says. “The one on Eighteenth Street. Please, you have to believe me…She’s evil. She’s…the devil!”
The gun is shaking in my hand. The fortuneteller? “You,” I say, pointing the gun at the girl. “Take the boy and lock yourself in the other room.”
She just stares at me. I take a step closer and stick the gun to her head. “You wanna die, too? Move your ass, bitch! And take the boy!” The rage is consuming me. I’m speaking these words but it doesn’t sound like me anymore. I’m a negative of myself: where there was light before, there is only darkness now.
“Go,” the man says. “Go! Now!” He pushes her toward the edge of the bed with his foot.
She slides off the bed, pulling the boy with her and she moves toward me, reluctantly. I’m shadowing her with the muzzle of the gun as I move to the side slightly to let her pass, then mirror her steps with my gun leveled at her chest. One eye is on her as I watch her enter the room next door; the other eye is on him. She closes the door and I hear the click of the lock. I turn back to the man on the bed.
“Why?” I snarl at him. “Why did the fortuneteller have my wife killed? Why her? Tell me, now!”
“She’ll kill me,” he says.
“You’re dead anyway,” I say. “I can make it quick or I can make it slow.” I pull the knife from my belt to show him what I mean.
“I don’t know,” he says. His bottom lip quivers; his eyes brim with tears. “She needs your hearts to stay here, in this world, in this form or something. I’m telling you! She’s not human, she made me do it! You have to believe me! I don’t know any more! I’m sorry…please, I’m so sorry…”
