Dark Surrealist Fiction
He had five days to murder his daughter. That’s what his daughter told him, anyhow. He had trouble believing it. Why would a child put a bounty on her own head? It must have been some scary stories from the older kids at school. He should write a note to the teacher, maybe the principal. Still, it wasn’t such a bad idea. Compared to the last thing she said that really stuck… Better not to think of that last thing she said right now. It’s disturbing. Besides, it would throw off the pacing of the story. Better to give a hint that this kid’s got some issues and leave it for later. Let their curiosity grow.
He was packing her lunch. Had to send her off to school right, at least for the next four days. Leftover spaghetti from last night. As he thought, he’d been massaging the pasta and sauce together wrist-deep in the Tupperware. He unanchored his hands from the sludgy mess and looked at them a beat, then sighed sharply through his nose. What’s the point of that? Whatever. Hopefully those sorts of questions stop coming to mind as this thing progresses.
You ready, daddy? He whipped around to look at her, eyes massive. His heart beat rapidly, hardly needing a half-hearted simile to describe how it pounded like a beating drum. Oops. It’s annoying how his mind works like that. No time to think that over, for his train of thought followed no discernable tracks. Another simile (metaphor?). He looked at her overexerted, childish grin. Of course it was. He raised his saucy hands and flicked meat-grease laden tomato chunks in her eyes. She flinched, dropped her smile, wiped her eyes, and found it again.
You’ll have to try harder than that to kill me, daddy! He didn’t like how she called him daddy. Maybe he watched too much porn, because that’s what the word reminded him of. The association was beside the point. He wouldn’t fuck her, he’d just kill her. Or maybe he wouldn’t. He snapped the lid back on the Tupperware, shoved it into the child’s waiting arms.
Here. It was covered in oily sauce ladled from his hands to the plastic. At least it was mixed. But how would he kill her? He washed his hands to help himself think. And why? What would happen if he didn’t? The story would end. It had to either way, sooner if he did kill her. Though the aftermath could still provide some interesting conflict. But God, he wanted to. She was an evil child. What sort of kid asks to be killed? Only one that should be. The exfoliating soap had rubbed a cut into his palm, but as he reached for a paper towel his hand was intercepted by the child, who squealed as she slapped it with the saucy Tupperware lid. He screamed, and it sounded just like her happy squeal. Deciding the scream was worthless, he puked beet-red into the sink, mimicking the color his face was turning. Having spit, he thought that we should get this back on track, which seems like a rather good idea. He kneeled down in front of her and looked her in the eyes.
I love you, you know that, right?
I know, daddy! I love you!
Let’s try to avoid spoofing The Exorcist. It’s dated.
Da-ad! You’ll have to kill me, not exorcise me! He stood up, knees popping, and grabbed a paper towel, awkwardly ripping through the bottom half of another piece past the perforation. He wasn’t sure when the kid could’ve seen The Exorcist. He held the paper towel to his hand, and it soaked through with blood. His lips stuck sugary together, so he wiped them with the paper towel slice replacing red sticky with red sticky. He had no clue how to do an exorcism. Besides, those only happen in Christian households, and this one was… not that. A smile pierced his face as the child forced fistfuls of pasta down her throat, choking on and inhaling spaghetti noodles as she went. How unappetizing. He couldn’t see who that would possibly appeal to. Some sick, sick people. Noodles hung snotty from her nose, dangling like toddler feet suspended from a high chair at dinner time, when spaghetti is served red on white. Their faces matched now in color, though his sported a thick scar which ran vertically up his left cheek.
You’re not going to have anything to eat for lunch now, you know. She stopped scarfing, looked up, and pulled the noodles from her nose. Thank God.
You didn’t give me breakfast!
Guess you distracted me. Now if your mother –
Your mother sucks cocks in hell!
Let’s go. They went. Blood, sauce, sweat, and puke mixed together like a fresh-blended smoothie. That’s not very appetizing. Who would want to drink that? As he thought he drove. His daughter took potshots at people walking down the street with multicolored bird eggs she’d collected from nests around the neighborhood. She certainly wasn’t societally useful, but he couldn’t kill her, could he? There was something holding him back, but he couldn’t place it. Besides, what was this whole ultimatum about? Was it a demon thing, or a supernatural thing, or just bad influence, or… Hadn’t he already gone after this? The plot wasn’t moving in the right direction. Isn’t? He’d passed the school. His daughter was nowhere to be found. She’d probably jumped from the car as they passed the school. Maybe that killed her! But no, she’d done it too many times. She was too experienced. He pulled a U-turn out front of the school, running up on the curb opposite hard enough to snap his teeth shut. Fuck that hurts. He bit tongue and warm blood oozed in his mouth, rolled fresh down his soiled, decaying face. He couldn’t taste it, of course. Blood had graced his mouth many times this morning and this new addition brought mostly pain and gross warmth. He spit red on the beige floormat, scraping the bottom of his car as he pulled off the curb. This constant exposure to pain probably doesn’t do any favors to the mental state. Could be that his daughter wasn’t saying any of those things, that he was making it up because he wanted to kill her. Hell, could be that he didn’t even have a daughter. Doesn’t. But he was pretty sure he did.
Shit! The car screeched to a halt, skid marks burned from back down the block to just inches away from his daughter, lying on the asphalt in the middle of the street. That was close. The story would’ve ended too damn soon if she died just like that. She jumped up, pounded on the driver’s side window staring him down with a pouty look. He swung open the car door and kneeled down to hug her. Christ, what was she doing out there?
Don’t scare me like that, hon! He squeezed, then pulled back to look her in the eyes with his hands on her shoulders. Quite pathetic. How could anyone send their child to school like this?
Why did you stop, daddy? You almost had it! I was trying to help you! She stomped her little feet for emphasis, clad in browning white sandals riddled with rubbery pins of purple butterflies and pink-red hearts. Weathering that storm of adjectives, he looked at her. Was it love that was preventing him from doing it? He certainly loved her. He also didn’t want her around anymore. Their relationship was filled with complicated feelings that he didn’t understand. That he couldn’t describe. She couldn’t either. He picked her up by the armpit, lifting and throwing her through the open driver’s side door.
We’re going back to school. It might be better to avoid dealing with those feelings altogether, wouldn’t it? Mightn’t? He thought some of these things. Said others. It was hard to tell which was which, but the daughter made a break for it, scrambling out the other side.
Oh no you don’t! He lunged through the car, grabbed her ankle as she dove so that she swung hard out the open door and slammed her chin on the bottom of the doorframe. Of course blood spilled from her mouth, a tooth even tumbled clacking to the asphalt like rolled dice but bloody mouths have been described enough, it seems. Hopefully it will suffice to say that she was pleased with the arrangement, and so told her dad that, while she would happily continue to be knocked about until her candle snuffed, she was simply trying to go to school, which did not need a car ride since it was right across the street. In more or less words. He turned wheeling like a stunned buffoon, finally letting go of his daughter’s ankle. Well now, that is the school, isn’t it? The students had long since filed into their classrooms, so he tossed a thick mop through the car door opening to check the time. Well past ten. What a horrible father! Sure, he knew that he loved his hated daughter sincerely, but love doesn’t mean much when you can’t get anything practical done. How many times had he dropped her off late before? He couldn’t remember because he hadn’t really thought about it until this point. No matter.
Alright, run along to school. She started running, with exaggerated slaps of the cutesy dirt sandals on the asphalt. She crossed the street with these jolly sandal smacks, smiling through candy apple copper syrup and toothy gaps. At the opposite sidewalk, she turned to give him a little wave, but her rotation instead ended with a dropped smile. He was thinking, so it seemed, faced away from his daughter half-sat on the beige driver’s seat peppered with foul stains. She must feel quite a bit of trauma to be acting this way. He should get her professional help to try and lead a healthy, productive life, not kill her! He submitted a savage brow-wrinkle to the world for consideration, perhaps overlooking the fact that no human character feasted their eyes upon him. The abuse probably wasn’t helping her act more normal, but he made up for it with love! A scoff shot from his throat. He couldn’t believe himself. He shut the doors of the outdated Japanese dinker, shifted into drive, and pulled out. Then again, she was horribly provocative. Before the story began, she insisted on wearing blackface to school all week. Rather insensitive, and in this cultural climate? He screeched to a halt at a stop sign, sweating in rather gross volume down his as-yet-unanswered brow crease. Fucking sign had been hidden by a tree. Six years old is young enough to be ignorant, but is it young enough to be a real-deal racist? Any normal six-year-old would stop! Shit, almost missed that one too. Would stop at seeing those teachers in such shock. She was either racist or liked the reaction he gave. Or a demon. But that’s the easy way out. Every time he had tried to clean her face, she’d threatened to cut his toes off. That’s what happens when you rely too much on the ‘little piggy’ bit at the expense of other ones. His tire crunched a squirrel, smeared the body popped and leaking. Man is America a violent place! She cut off his pinky toe last Friday. When he raised his fist, she told him to kill her. He told her he loved her. He found the toe in his oatmeal the next morning.
Cut back to the car, as though now is the right time to start indicating temporal jumps. He switched on the car radio in an attempt to act like your ordinary American. How abusive is your ordinary American father? How psychopathic is your ordinary American daughter? How surreal are the scenes that play out in an average American’s day, if you aren’t already engulfed in them? He thought that he was living a stereotype, but then again normal people don’t listen to the radio. He switched it off, cutting the country tunes with silence, and swung a sharp left into his driveway. It’s easy enough to guess who he saw, standing on the front porch with a one-sided smile, staring hard right through the car. Her frilled purple dress was muddied by the route she must have taken home, but even if she cut across the stream it was still impressively quick to make it home before he did. Now the demon theory looked more likely, but it was still a bit early to pull the trigger on her. He needed more proof, whatever that could mean in this situation. A twist of his hand murdered the engine, he stepped from the car maintaining eye contact with his daughter, an apparent human whose face hadn’t moved a millimeter since his arrival. If you’re looking for proof that your daughter’s a demon, you’re probably a shitty father. He winced putting light weight on his right foot and hobbled grimacing toward her.
What are you doing here? Only her eyes moved to stay locked on his. Did they have a color?
I think you meant to say the power of Christ compels you. His stupid brow furrowed again. He wasn’t much of a Christian, wasn’t too concerned with faith in God. With three grubby fingers, he crossed himself.
Don’t cross me again. A quick smirk from one of them. Scents of tomato sauce, blood, and mud still singed the air.
But really, why are you here? She spit bloody phlegm, whistled shrill mist through the tooth hole, resumed the crooked smile.
Nobody could be bothered to write school scenes, I guess. Didn’t she have an independent existence? Shit. If she’s saying things like that it probably means that she’s a figment of his imagination. He cracked his knuckles, groaning as the pads of two of his fingers pressed the skinless piece of palm. It might be better just to kill her, then. Probably how his mind needs to recover.
There you go, now you’re getting on the right track. As a gentle cotton cushion, her miniature hand wrapped around his thumb. His mind spiraled through its thought cycle still, driven by a relentless, inevitable inertia. How could she not be real? Her hand, tinged with a thin sheen of perspiration, blood, and dust, wrapped sticky-moist with a powdery touch on his thumb like flour churning into cookie dough. He followed her into the house, its dingy, cracked interior so devoid of home. Had he unlocked the door? How did she get in? She must be real. She felt too real. And what can you trust but your senses? Probably not the words of his daughter. Probably not the words in some story. He was fully aware that his philosophy regarding this matter, his thoughts, even, were disjointed and incomplete, trackless trains running aground as soon as they pulled their loads of garbage from the waystation. But what could he do to change that? Your thoughts rely on your situation, and in this situation, he was stuck. Flies swarmed around the kitchen, attracted not only to the fresh spots of tomato sauce and blood littering visible surfaces of the scene, but to the putrid moldy spots from however many past confrontations of a similar nature. Still, he grasped the thumb, still, his mind tumbled about the familiar thoughts on the situation, twisting cause and effect again and again until molded into an indecipherable ball stabbed at uselessly by whatever he might have called a consciousness. Is just trying to raise a daughter too much to ask? Conflict can’t help but rear its pockmarked face partway though every apparent lull, breathing hot dust down his neck until the graying sludge composing his mind thought not of clear solutions but cascaded into hellish blooms of waking nightmare. Luckily, he isn’t the narrator. The story is cloudy enough as it is. She freed his thumb from her grasp. He didn’t have a clue what to do with it. A thumb without a home; a conflict without a cause. She pointed to the knife block dripping grease from plastic handles atop the counter.
Oh Jesus. Why the hell did she have to say it like that?
Shove it in my throat, daddy! He paused, gazed dumb at her with a furrowed brow and hanging arms. Did he react before she said that? Or was he just tweaking? He thought the thought came before she spoke, but now he unlocked his eyes from the block and aimed them back at the soiled thing bouncing eagerly on her toes, looking up at him with expectant vigor.
It’s only me and you. This is all we have. You don’t really want it to… end, do you? We’re running short on time as it is. His thoughts made their way into the hopeful phase of the cycle, where things seemed clear and a future looked possible. It brushed reality little as his thoughts of demons.
I don’t want it to end, daddy. But you just have to kill me, you have to! What a sight. She stomped up and down, laying harsh slaps of impatience upon the dustgrease tile. Impatience made sense when the goal was life, but as death collected above them, he tried to hang onto moments in what ended as only futility. He kneeled before her and opened his gullet. She shoved her baby fist in the trap and he bit, gasping nasally snap, the skin broke and blood lined his lower teeth pooling, he wrenched open his jaw but the fist stayed; she wedged her back against the counter, his neck against the kitchen table, while his arms flayed in windmills slapping the iron spike locked into her shoulder, he huffed through the nose bursting high-cheek blood vessels and she sang it childlike.
You’re gonna have to kill me, kill me, kill me! His monkey paws grasped her steel cable arm and yanked at the elbow joint as he bit hard, wrenching his head the other way. The pop shot hollow off the kitchen tiles, her arm fell dangling sideways and he gasped in his own tears.
Yes! Yes! Those words rang no different than her pleas for bloodshed. He scrambled under the table away from her hiccupping cackles cascading through his ears in a witch’s laugh. There was no use anymore in trying to draw out moments with his daughter. Their relationship was dead already, rotting. Death cannot be cured; the story cannot be edited after the first draft is written. Once the pen is dropped it burns, a rough draft soon forgotten. She was all he had. He had her no longer. He chugged kneecapped up the stairs, scraping walls as he stumbled to the master bedroom which capped the hall. His ragged breaths still could not cover the tile-echoed bubble-bursts spewing from his daughter. In this life, he could not escape her. Wherever this issue had come from, his ending was preordained. He needed only to float with the current. Dangling loosely from a shattered elbow, her chewed hand and bruising forearm bumped against the railing while she swept weeping laughter up the stairs with her. The fractures of his limited mind spilled through his body. He followed the shards to the master bath, his only escape route, where the ending was to take place. He locked the door against the swelling song of joyous tear-hitches and armbreak percussion.
Okay. Where had it gone wrong? He couldn’t pinpoint a moment. In fact, memory only served clearly as far back as this morning, and everything was already fully derailed by then. Even her successful bid to divorce him of a toe felt foggy, a memory of a memory, a recall to a flashback in this story. The only other memory he could find… he had thought it more disturbing than her pleas for murder. She cried out at the bathroom door; words bastardized into animal noises giving nearly as much information. She had said that she was his mother. But of course, that makes no sense. She slammed her body against the bathroom door in harmony with the cries. No time to think, he thought. Valium, Vicodin, Advil. The last spilled into the sink as his sweaty hand slipped off in opening the bottle. He clutched handfuls of the little discs that stuck to his palms, licking them animal off his paws and sucking them down with big gulps of mouthwash. She couldn’t be his mother. He was older than her. That’s simple biology. But who was her mother? If memory served, his memory served no one, least of all him.
Agh! He belched hot fire, singeing his nose hairs with spiced mint. The valium, half a bottle, balanced on the side of the sink. The steady thumps of his daughter crashing into wood. She should be awfully sore by now, and with that broken arm? Did she feel pain? No need to think about it now. He couldn’t be part of her troubles, not any more. He’d heard the spoiler – his end was near. But first, you have to make it there. The hollow plastic cylinder dinked and spun on the dust-caked tile while he struggled to down the mouthful of pills. More mint fire washed them into a pitching cavern of rebellion. She barked outside the door, soprano rips of gutter-noise fucking the air to the beat of his heart. His eyes squeezed shut, his stomach convulsed. Shallow, desperate breathing. She’d probably die when he did. You can’t make yourself feel better about abandonment. You can only stop feeling. Her fate was hardly in his hands. Not now. Probably not before. He had to hasten his end, it was too much, all just a fucking mess and that really doesn’t make for good prose. The people want clarity. He wanted Vicodin, now, fumbling with the lid until it popped and he threw three quarters of a bottle through his mouth. Had her voice changed from barks? The pounding continued. Had they ever been barks? Heavy industrial throbbing engulfed ears and pestered the atmosphere wrenching with its omnipresence. Mouthwash again, but there was too much between his cheeks, he tried to swallow but some chalky pills got caught in the throat irritated so he coughed, pills and green liquid spit peppered the walls and floor he coughed and his storming stomach saw an out and released flame-broiled pain up the esophagus. They were supposed to love each other. Care for each other. They hurt each other, and there was no reason why. The pill-sprinkled puke hit the yellowed side of the tub steaming and neon green. It ran from his nose as did tears from his eyes. Gag cough, choke. Harsh noise. He couldn’t die quite so easily. Escape is the easy route, it’s supposed to be the sure route, but what are you to do when the escape turns out more difficult than the fight? The bright, glinting vomit lining his mouth rippled under the encapsulating assault of her mounting drone cries. He left it there, undoing his belt shakily. Life is a cold-blooded bitch when it leaves you without clarity. When it turns you against the only people you have. Condensation coated the bespeckled haziness of the mirror, but that was behind him, for he faced hunched the shower. She must be eroding now. Few bodies can take such a beating, and only so many doors. Time runs short. He threw the naked end of his belt over the shower rod, having pulled it through the buckle. He began tying a sweaty a fumbled knot around the rod, but how awkward is it to tie a knot in a belt? He stepped onto his bathtub to gain leverage, but his puke begged to differ and he slipped, grabbed the rod as he fell and they all crashed down together into a steaming shit pile lying dazed in the tub.
Fuck! His heart gunned for his chest; his blood for his brain. He threw violently the rod back into the bathroom proper. It would likely have clattered, if not for his daughter’s continued drone. Through that it all melted together, his actions figments of drift perceived in scattered mosaics in his mind. He heaved himself over the tub’s edge, crashed to the other side of the room, and opened the window. Just below – a metal post for the fence he was going to put up between his house and the neighbor’s. How did he know that? Wasn’t his memory wiped? Weren’t things blending into the unrecognizable? The door crashed open. He gaped his mouth and jumped out of the window, headfirst.
A moment like this, such a crucial moment of suspense held at the fork between life and death, the only two paths along which one may walk – a moment like this is often taken as a good place to pause. This scene would make a good flash forward, perhaps as a cold open. The harried, desperate scramble to meet death as an unseen animal pounds at the door, the final jump out of the window right as it burst through – it would keep the audience thinking. So, pause right there and rewind, chronologically. Start one to two weeks before and show how he got to that situation. Then show the outcome of this tense situation at the end. Here, however, we will not be afforded the luxury to go back chronologically. Only to step out of time and comment on the narrative. Upon return to the action, it is quite clear that he aimed well.
He dove a graceful spread eagle down, open to a fate which shoved its metal post up his throat, ripping through his esophagus to make a circus tent of his stomach. He choked on it, gagging moist while teeth clanged the post. Viscous blood drooped in strings from his lips, tears from his eyes. He seized, he suffered. He did not die. Wiggling uncontrollably like a hooked fish, he raised his eyes to peer out from under the umbrella of his brow. Distorted through the reddening lens of blooded sweatdrops tinkling from his brow it was clear. Having once risen from a lush landscape itself risen from fire, his house behind him, his neighbor’s house before him – these cubes of modern construction had themselves been risen upon. The houses were no longer. His green grass lawn was no longer – his post was planted in silty, light brown dirt. Were they ever? The grass, the houses, had they been? It can’t be said at this point. But the kaleidoscope fluids overlaying his eyes painted him a picture of what surrounded him now. And he surrounded the pole. He sunk deeper onto it, it into him, stopped again. He reframed his view. Dust puffed dry into his nose, stemming some bleeding through sterile stench. His daughter’s ambient animal engine rev had expanded to encompass not a room, but the whole stadium. A stadium of wooden stands with a dirt pit center was where he speared the ground. His living carcass rose from the pit’s center.
How foul a sight, this man. She said that. Those were words, said in his reality, brushing his blood clogged ears. The floodgates found her words their liberator, and sound poured in as they opened to the understanding that his daughter’s drone had morphed into the cheers of many thousands, who lined the stands through his liquid view. His vision castrated to a sink of muck, sound now centered his perspective, dominating much of his understanding. There was little understanding to be had for a man choking on a spike. She was behind him, speaking powerfully in a voice much grown past five years of age.
This man had only one job. Her voice projected quite nicely over the sound of the crowd, carrying easily to all those in the stadium. He squirmed no more. Only listened.
His job was to murder his own daughter. It was to sole purpose of his life, the sole goal he had ever been tasked with. And though he abused and slandered his daughter, he would not kill her. The crowd’s cheers pitch-shifted, turning to chipmunk heights paling still in comparison to the daughter’s booming echoes.
What sort of man is it who will not appease his own daughter? What sort of demon? Yet only faster did the crowd noise become, rapidly disintegrating into a metal-scratch squeak which cut so sharply stinging through the air that it couldn’t help but pull the daughter’s voice along with it. She continued to speak, slinging rhetorical questions with reckless abandon under the eyes of thousands. But, with each word her voice fell backwards in time, eerie turning childlike, then reminiscent of a baby’s wail, before catching up with the crowd to squeak along indistinguishable from the rest. He shivered as the sound thrust a pole through his ears to match the one sliding up his throat toward his asshole. Foul man indeed. He shivered – he turned. Was that motion ever really a shiver, the squirm of a fish on a hook? Much more it seemed a rotation. Yes, that was it. The pole spun, him skewered conscious upon it, knowing only the sharp volume of hell’s shrieks slashing his acoustic horizon. If he wished to know other things, they must be given to him. His thoughts lost any semblance of autonomy at the jump. So here, it is bequeathed. He saw now spinning below him black grooves. Vinyl. Spinning? How could it be spinning when it looked so still through his bloodshot eyes? Still his being couldn’t help but notice the presence of motion. The pole spun; the vinyl disc locked around its bottom, his sliding guts around its top. Having arisen from his daughter’s heavy, textured song, the crowd’s roar, once turned squeaky-sharp as frictioned unoiled rust, rose still to a pitch wheezingly high, driven past the point of nausea directly into the bliss of nothingness. In silence grooves sprinted ceaselessly beneath a needle baring down upon them, the lord’s dagger held steady by a rigid arm the man could see only in glimpses as his body shot circular. This God was the master of noise making music from a scratched plastic disc found nowhere; the God who made sound from plastic will never let silence baptize the ears of those who may listen. That would stand as an affront to his power and for that he will not stand. The needle drifted toward the man on that spinning black sea, closer each time it caught his eye. Each time, he got a longer look than the last. His motion slowed until he no longer noticed he moved. At a steady pace, noise began again. It was lovely, this new sound. Full and clear, accessible, easy to read – listen to. It was a male voice, powerful and bold, but not too loud or harsh. Relaxing, in a way. Following that bit of third-person narration, the voice took over, itself, the record playing out the end of the story.
There was once a man, who fell in love with a woman with a crooked arm. Their love was beautiful, pure, and limitless. Their feelings were so strong that they married soon after meeting. Not long after that, their child began to grow inside her. It was a smooth, uncomplicated pregnancy, or as close as you can get to one, the type of pregnancy that you can’t help but see as a good omen for your child’s birth and future. Then the day came. Her water broke, contractions began. It wasn’t easy. The baby ripped her in half before the doctor could cut it out, and she died on the spot, leaving a little girl for her widower to raise alone. The girl was not easy to raise. Her colic lasted a year. He was tired all the time, not to mention depressed, and his job performance dropped off. He was fired, and for the next four years lived on the payout from a meager life insurance policy while his life fell apart around him. He had no clue how to raise a child, and no one to help him figure it out. He had no friends, no life outside of the four walls of his house, and just enough money to survive. Once she learned to speak, his daughter pestered him at every turn, disobeyed him, insulted him. He snapped at her more and more, and soon began to hit her, spit on her, throw her food in her face. Although he loved her, he developed a burning hatred for her. The money ran out when she was five. That’s when she told him to kill her. Of course, he couldn’t do it. Though she tried to force him into the act, she only ended up with a broken arm and the image of her father’s corpse speared on a fencepost forever ingrained in her head.
There was nowhere for her to go. They threw her in an orphanage, and she bounced between foster families for the next ten years, suffering continued abuse, growing darker and angrier. At fifteen, she ran. She hitchhiked to a new city, learned the streets, evaded authorities until she was eighteen. Not that anyone was really looking for her in earnest. At eighteen, while studying for the GED in a public library, she met a man with a thick scar running across his cheek. Just like her, he was studying for the GED. They talked. Just like her, he’d been living on the streets after leaving foster care. They fell in love quickly, and harshly. They wanted a better life together. They wanted to live comfortably in each other’s company. They robbed a gas station, and somehow got away with it. By some miracle, they robbed another with the same result. They got their GEDs, bought dress clothes, and rented a cheap room above a deli. Within days of each other, they found entry-level office jobs. They got an apartment. They got promotions. They built credit. They bought a house. At thirty, they conceived a child. The pregnancy went well, but on the night of the childbirth, at the moment she pushed out her baby boy, her husband had an aneurism and died. She grew horribly depressed, and decayed mentally as she struggled through a year of her son’s colic, losing her job in the process. Her son annoyed her, disparaged her, and, at five, told her to kill him. Soon after that, she found herself wedged against a table with his fist in her mouth, and was forced to slash him across the cheek with a nearby knife in order to escape, and eventually commit suicide by jumping mouthfirst onto a fencepost from her bathroom window. Her son was thrown into the orphanage, but eventually grew up to fall in love with a crooked-armed woman at the age of eighteen.
And the record ended. And the lord lifted his dagger, and silence reigned again.