by A. R. Wise
Something inside of her mouth cracked as her jaw fell slack. He pinched her chin and pulled her mouth open to reveal the denture was now partially detached, a pink gel stretching between. He gripped the denture and pulled it free, revealing mostly bare, bleeding gums beneath. The smell was awful, and he retched when it hit him. Terry had been trying to hide the extent of her dental problems, and hadn’t taken out her teeth the entire time Michael had been visiting. The result was a rabid infection that had turned her once pink gums purple. There was even a sack of pus beside one rotted, black tooth.
He knew he had to get all of her teeth out, and grimaced as he reached in to pluck the rotten remainder. He pinched it, and wiggled until the blister popped, squirting fetid fluid over his hand and wrist.
“I can’t,” said Michael as he took his hand away. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
Terry’s arm twitched, but Michael assumed it was some trick of her nervous system. Surely she wasn’t still alive. No one could handle the sensation of a tooth being pulled out without screaming.
He went to the sink and scrubbed his hands clean, dry heaving every time the smell hit him. “Hurry up, Ben,” he said to himself before turning back around to stare at the junkie he had once entertained the notion of caring for. He absently started to bite his nails again, chewing until they bled as he stared at the corpse.
Michael had made it through tough times. He was a survivor; an alpha male. He could live through this. Like a cockroach through the apocalypse, Michael Harper would find a way to survive this low point.
Ben returned with his arms filled with bottles of cleaner. Michael took one of the bottles and inspected the label. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but pretended that he did, a sort of pathetic attempt to appear confident in front of his boy. Then he started to unscrew the top off one and got on his knees, beside the tub.
“All right,” said Michael as he set the opened cleaner down so that he could bite his nails again. “This is what we’re going to do. This bitch is dead, and we’re going to have to get rid of her body. I know we can do it. Okay?”
“Dad, I don’t think she’s dead.” Ben was doing his best not to tremble, but couldn’t stop himself. Michael knew he had to get Ben to pay attention.
Michael slammed his palm on the side of the tub. “Don’t be an idiot. She’s dead, dead, dead, and you killed her. You stupid fuck, I’m trying to help you. You want to go to jail for the rest of your life?” Michael was high, and he always regretted the way he treated his children when he was like this. That’s why he forbid them to come up the stairs at the cabin. Jekyll wanted to protect them from Hyde.
“No, sir.”
“Then do exactly as I say and don’t contradict me again. Terry is dead. We have to figure out how to get rid of her body. Are you crying? Are you seriously crying?”
Ben shook his head, but couldn’t stop his tears.
“You’re the one that did this. You’re the one that came into the bedroom when you weren’t supposed to. You’re the one that thought he was an adult. Well, this is what adults have to deal with. Okay? You need to act like an adult now.” Michael was aware of his evil and felt awful for it, as if his soul was jailed within a monster’s body. This was how he always felt when he was high.
“I don’t want to,” said Ben pathetically. “I want to go watch my movie with Alma. I don’t want to be an adult.”
“Too late, Ben. It’s too late for that. Now go downstairs and see if the water is boiling. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.” Ben ran out of the bathroom.
Michael yelled out to him, “Bring the water up once it starts to boil.”
He looked back in the tub and saw Terry twitch.
He glanced back at the door of the bedroom, terrified that Ben or Alma would see that the junkie was moving. Ben had been right, she wasn’t dead. Michael’s heart thundered and sweat rolled into his eye. He was panicked, and knew he had to act. Sanity would’ve demanded he pull the girl from the tub and call an ambulance, but Michael was deep in Hyde territory now.
Terry moaned and moved her head.
“No fucking way, bitch.”
He turned on the water and plugged the drain.
“Mike?” asked Terry through her red, cracked lips, her voice mangled by her lack of teeth and her swollen gums.
He slapped his palm over her mouth and pushed her down as the tub started to fill with water. Michael decided to drown her, but the tub was taking an agonizingly long time to fill. She was on her back in the basin, her red hair lifting with the rising water, and her bloodshot eyes looked up at him. Terry jerked her arm to the side, and Michael expected her to fight back. He pushed his hand down harder on her mouth and then placed his other hand on her waist, prepared to keep her down despite how hard she flailed, but she stopped fighting. He kept pressing while looking back at the door, frightened that Ben would catch him in the act. All the while, Terry hardly moved. She didn’t have the strength to fight back, and Michael was reminded of his mother lying on her sister’s couch, succumbing to cancer after the tortuous disease had drained her strength.
“Fuck you, Mom,” said Michael. It was a statement born of the dark recesses of his drug and rage addled mind. For an inexplicable moment, he had every reason to blame his mother for this.
Michael took his hand off Terry’s mouth so that he could pinch her nose. She gasped before he took his other hand off her belly and covered her mouth again. He didn’t want to wait for the water to raise enough to drown her. If she wasn’t going to fight back, then he’d suffocate her this way. She continued to stare up at him and he had to look away from those bloodshot eyes.
He felt her wet lips wiggle, and her tongue touch his palm. Then she began to convulse and the white foam flooded her mouth, but he kept his grip tight.
Michael heard his son coming up the stairs.
He let go of Terry and wiped his hands off on the wall. The white foam bubbled up from Terry’s red lips, but he focused on her eyes. They were open, staring up at the ceiling, and Michael was confident that she was finally dead.
“Good job, kid,” said Michael as Ben came in with the boiling water. “Set the pot on the toilet and get the bleach. That’s the white jug over there, with the blue cap.”
Ben was being a good boy. He was trying to do as his father asked.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Go ahead and push down on the cap and turn it. There you go, you’re doing good. Now bring it over here and pour it in the tub. We’ll figure out how to do this. You and me, kid. We’ll figure it out. We’ll melt this bitch down to bones if we have to. Okay?”
Ben started to cry as he poured the bleach in. The ten-year-old had to look away as the chemicals stung his eyes.
“Good, good. Just pour it in the water like that. You’re doing great. You’re a real adult now, a big boy. All adults have to do this kind of thing from time to time. There’s no need to cry, just keep pouring. Yeah, all of it. The whole thing.”
Ben set the empty bottle of bleach down and Michael looked at the others that the boy had brought up. There was a bottle with a Spanish label, probably all-purpose cleaner purchased at the dollar store.
“Go ahead and get the purple stuff. The bottle with the yellow cap. Twist it off the same way you did the bleach and then pour it in too.”
Ben did as his father asked, trying his best not to cry too much.
“That’s a good boy. You’re a pro. You’re making me proud.”
Michael backed away from the tub, finding solace in the corner of the bathroom. He chewed his nails and watched as Ben did what he was told.
“Go ahead and pour all of the bottles in. Fuck it, just pour them all in there. One of them’s got to do the trick. Is that everything that you could find downstairs?”
Ben nodded.
“Yeah? Okay, well I guess it’ll have to do. Pour the hot water in. Just do it. Don’t even think about it, just pour it in.”
Ben held the pot and leaned
over the clawed tub. Michael covered his nose, sickened by the stench of the various chemicals that Ben had poured in. His plan was to melt away Terry’s skin. He’d read somewhere that bodies could be dissolved with basic household cleaners, but wasn’t certain what type needed to be used. Certainly the caustic soup they’d dumped into the tub contained whatever dissolvent was required. He had no way of knowing if it would work, but he was determined to try.
Ben was doing such a good job. He tilted the pot and let the bubbling water begin to pour over the nude corpse.
Terry screamed out as the water hit her skin. She wasn’t dead, and the searing water woke her from unconsciousness. She reached out and grabbed Ben’s head in an attempt to find anything to hold onto.
Ben splashed down into the boiling soup of chemicals in the tub.
Michael rushed to the boy’s aid, but the damage was severe. Terry had pulled the child’s face into the tub and he’d taken a gulp of the soup when he went in. The junkie thrashed her nails at Michael like a wild animal, but her strength was fleeting. She seemed to come in and out of her furious state, as if desperately trying to ward off exhaustion one second and fighting for her life the next.
Michael pulled his son out of the water and threw him to the floor. Then he punched Terry in the throat, causing her to gasp as she fell backward. Michael took a towel off the rack and threw it to his son. He wasn’t sure where he should put his focus, and ended up just standing in the middle of the room glancing back and forth between Terry and his boy.
Ben screamed out in torture as he wiped the fluid off his cheeks. His eyes had become immediately bloodshot from the searing chemicals.
“Hold the towel over your face,” said Michael.
“It hurts!”
Terry started to crawl over the edge of the tub, gasping as she reached out to the tile floor. Michael had been about to help his son when he saw the girl trying to save herself. “Get back in the tub, bitch.”
Michael grabbed Terry’s hair and pulled her back into the tub. She tried to fight, but was too weak to stop him as Michael slammed her head into the porcelain several times. Ben staggered into the bedroom, his wails muffled as he held the towel to his burned face.
Michael wrapped his hands around Terry’s throat and squeezed as hard as he could. The sensation of choking a living person was far more violent than he’d ever suspected. He’d had his hands around a woman’s throat in the past - there was a girl in Kentucky that used to like him to choke her while they had sex - but this time it was much different. He could feel her esophagus press against the web between his index finger and thumb. He could feel the muscles of her throat rise and fall as she tried to breathe. He could feel her blood pulsing through her neck, pumping fiercer every second as she writhed beneath him. He saw the white foam rolling down her cheek, and he stared in her eyes until she lost the strength to stare back.
“Alma,” said Ben from the other room. “Get out!”
“Alma?” asked Michael as he let go of Terry’s neck and walked back into the bedroom. He wiped his hands on his pants as he approached his daughter. “What did I tell you about coming in here?”
Alma held up a butcher’s knife and Michael stopped at the edge of the bed. He was furious, but didn’t have the chance to punish the girl before they were all startled by Terry’s scream from the bathroom.
The junkie was still alive.
The chemicals in the tub had severely burned her, causing her skin to turn a brilliant shade of red, like a lobster leaping from its pot. The water had become thick and gelatinous, dripping in syrupy strands from her arms as she pulled herself from the tub. She was crying out in pain and anger, her eyes wide as she staggered across the slippery tile. Terry had been blinded by the chemical soup, and was desperate to get away. She ran past Michael in a blind rush, and he tried to grab her hand. He thought the slick fluid was making her impossible to grip, but then realized that her flesh had actually torn loose of her arm from where the boiling water had hit her. He was reminded of a chicken’s skin being pulled up from the breast meat as it peeled away. He was horrified as he looked down at the wet strip of flesh he was left with as Terry ran from him.
Alma had been standing in the room with her knife outstretched in an attempt to defend herself from Michael. Terry was blinded by the chemicals, and ran directly into the little girl’s weapon. The two of them hit the floor, and Alma was pinned beneath Terry as the junkie screamed in pain.
Terry’s feet squeaked on the wood floor of the bedroom as Alma tried to push her away. The junkie rolled to the side and gripped the knife stuck in her belly when her cries of pain turned back into gurgles. Blood spewed from her mouth as she shook her head back and forth in agony. She kept trying to pull the blade free, but it was stuck inside of her.
Michael was determined to kill her for good this time. He grasped the handle of the blade and ripped it free, causing Terry’s body to jerk upward and then flop back down.
“Die, you stupid bitch!”
Michael fell to his knees over the nude woman’s waist and started to stab at her stomach over and over. He plunged the blade into her more times than he could count, and continued even after she stopped flailing around. His assault turned her abdomen into a hole of tattered meat and blood, and he continued to eviscerate her. Pink intestines protruded from the gore, and he pulled at them in a maddened attempt to disembowel the woman that had attacked his children. His hatred for her was as uncompromising as it was unexplainable. There never existed a single thing that he hated more than this woman, and he had no idea why.
When Michael was finished, he stood and shook the gore from his hands. He was winded from the assault, and heaved as he tried to catch his breath. Then he stared at Alma and said, “What did I tell you about staying out of my room?”
The little girl’s eyes were filled with tears.
That’s when the fog swept in.
Chapter 12 – Suffer His Hell
Do you remember your first memory?
I thought I did, but I was wrong. I swore that the first memory I had was when I was just a toddler. I had found my mother’s Polaroid camera, a large, boxy thing that spit out a picture moments after you clicked the massive red button on the front. I’d been warned never to touch it because the film and bulbs were expensive and she didn’t want me wasting them.
I coveted that camera.
Then one day I saw it on the kitchen counter, and I reached up and grabbed it by the strap. I was still shorter than the counters, and had to dance away as the camera swooped down. In a daring move, I had plundered a treasure, and I darted away with it. I went to the first safe place I could find, which ended up being the stairs to the basement that were beside our home’s backdoor, just off the kitchen.
I aimed the camera, put my finger on the red button, and pushed it.
The bulb flashed, and I swear that camera was the loudest thing on Earth as it ka-chunked out the picture. I was terrified, having committed my first crime, and saw the picture as everlasting proof of what I’d done. I plucked the picture out of the camera’s feeder and tried to figure out what to do with it.
The wooden stairs that led to the basement had no back to them, meaning that you could see down to the cement floor below between each step. In a panic, I tossed the picture through the stairs and then ran back to the kitchen.
Years later, I told my mother the story about the camera and how I’d tossed the picture through those stairs. She laughed, and said it must’ve been a dream. She explained that the house that I’d lived in until I was five didn’t have a basement.
Are you sure your earliest childhood memories aren’t just dreams?
Widowsfield
March 14th, 1996
Claire tapped her fingers on her desk, bored. She could hear Darryl on the other side of the room, eating a bag of chips while typing incessantly. The click-clack of his keys was the only noise in the otherwise silent call center.
There was an odd sort of s
elfishness to feeling bored while working at a 9-1-1 call center. Claire felt a certain amount of guilt knowing that she enjoyed the busy days more, since that meant others were suffering to help make her day go by quicker. She attributed her work ethic to upbringing, but wondered if there was a morbid ghoulishness to it as well.
Nancy came back in from her first smoke break of the day, which she’d taken mere minutes after arriving. Claire smiled at the young mother, happy to have someone to talk to.
“It sure is a nice day out,” said Nancy as she returned to her desk behind Claire.
“Days like this make me want to make sun tea,” said Claire.
“Sun tea?” Nancy sat in her seat and put on her headset.
“Haven’t you ever had sun tea?”
“No,” said Nancy as if Claire was playing a joke on her. “What is it?” She clicked the buttons on her phone that would halt the transfer of her calls.
“It’s where you put out a big old jug of water with some tea bags in it and let the sun do the brewing for you. Are you seriously telling me you’ve lived in Missouri all your life and you’ve never had a glass of sun tea?”
Nancy smiled, shrugged, and shook her head. “Sorry. Does brewing it in the sun make a difference?”
“I’m sure you could find a million people to tell you there’s no difference, but I think those people must have themselves a wooden tongue. For me, there’s no sweeter thing in the world than a glass of ice cold sun tea on a hot summer day.” She closed her eyes and smiled as she gave a content sigh.
“I’ll have to give it a try sometime,” said Nancy.
“Darryl.” Claire called out loudly to their coworker a couple aisles over.
“Yup?”
“Do you like sun tea?” asked Claire.
“Nope.”
“No?” asked Claire, acting offended. “What in the blazes? How can anyone not like sun tea? I swear, all you drink is coffee and beer. Is that right?”
