“I don’t like it when you fight with
Melanie.” She looked up at me with sad eyes. “It’s okay honey. It’s just a little disagreement. We’ll be fine.”
Sarah hugged my leg despite my dirt and looked up at me with a smudged face.
“Let me get ready now, okay honey?” “Okay.”
By the time I got out of the tub Melanie had left. Her absence at dinner left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have liked to have resolved our differences before she left but I supposed that that was not possible. It was the first time we had quarreled with such conviction. I worried that she might not return. I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Amber was deliberately provoking her and I had been weak and impotent.
Sarah and I ate a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs which Melanie had prepared before I got home from work. Sarah had the table set and dinner served by the time I walked into the kitchen fresh from my bath. Sarah also had lit two white candles which she had positioned in glass candleholders molded into doves.
“Birds of peace.” I said out loud with a hint of sarcasm.
“That’s what Melanie said.” Sarah smiled at me from across the table, “Do they really bring peace?”
“Apparently not, but they look pretty.” “Why does Amber have to come over again tonight? She always ruins everything.”
I didn’t want to sour Sarah towards Amber any more than she instinctively had been predisposed since I was sure that we would have to endure her visits for the foreseeable future. “Be nice. Amber has helped us a lot more than you know. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have a place to live.”
“We could live with Melanie at her house.”
“You liked living there did you?”
“Yes. Her house is pretty. Ours is ugly.”
“Well you’re just going to have to get used to our ugly house and to Amber coming to visit because we’re kinda stuck here for a while.”
“What if she dies?” “She’s not going to die.”
“I know, but if she did she wouldn’t come over anymore.”
“No I suppose not. Eat your supper. I brought home a new movie to watch tonight. It’s an old scary movie, but you have to eat your supper or you’ll miss the beginning because I’m going to put it in when Amber gets here.”
When Amber arrived she was carrying her black leather satchel filled with sex toys.
She smelled like a flower garden and she had dressed deliberately sexy in her short red skirt with a low-cut top that revealed the better part of her tanned cleavage. I was washing the dishes and Sarah was clearing the table.
“Hello lover.” She whispered more loudly than she had intended; apparently loud enough for Sarah to hear because when she said it Sarah turned her head and scowled at Amber.
We turned down the lights and sat on the couch. Amber sat close to me but Sarah climbed up and wedged herself between us.
We watched “The House on Haunted Hill” and then we watched “Psycho”. But just after Anthony Perkins was preparing to slash Janet
Leigh into a puddle of blood Sarah’s eyes began to twitter. She fought a courageous fight but her eyelids soon won the battle and she drifted off to sleep. I tucked her in on the sofa and Amber and I retired to the bedroom where, among other things, Amber tied me up and, with a strap-on prosthesis (and despite my fervent protestations while tied and gagged), anally raped me.
Afterwards Amber untied me and I curled up in the fetal position and pulled the blanket overtop of me. Amber climbed into the bed behind me, nudging me to the opposite side of the bed, and she spooned with me and cupped my breast as though I were the woman. I felt completely emasculated. When I woke up the next morning I was covered in blood and Amber was lying flat on her back next to me as cold and grey as a headstone. Her eyes were wide open as though she were staring at the spidery crack in the ceiling. Her face was splattered with a fine mist of blood as if she had caught the stray sprits from a garden hose. Her throat was ripped apart as if someone had taken a large bite out of her neck and the serrated kitchen knife with the black wooden handle was sticking straight up from her chest. How I didn’t wake up during the attack I really don’t know. Sarah must have been particularly stealth in her approach and I must have been sound asleep. I was probably in the midst of a good nightmare reliving my last sexual experience with Amber; after the abuse I had endured I was certainly exhausted enough to sleep through a cyclone. I don’t know. I only know that I woke up, my own naked body smothered in Amber’s juices, to a gruesome scene that caused me to rush to the bathroom and vomit.
I was panicked and my heart was pounding like a snare-drum and my image in the mirror was horrifying; the hair on my naked body was matted down by the thin basting of blood that covered me from head to toe. I looked as though I had bathed in a tub of claret.
I crawled from the toilet to the tub and I put the rubber stopper in the drain and I turned the handle to the hot water on full. I got to my feet and I stumbled to the kitchen, steadying myself on the bathroom doorframe, and then grabbed a large black garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and I scrambled back to my bedroom and latched the door from within. The knife made a blood-curdling meaty noise
(like the sound of a large chilled shrimp as you bite into it) when I pulled the knife from Amber’s chest. I rolled her body up in the blood-soaked blanket that covered the bed and I pushed her onto the floor (to the side of the bed opposite the door) with a low thud so that the whole mess would be hidden from view should Sarah enter the room (at that point I thought that Melanie had committed the murder). I flipped the mattress over on the bed-frame and I pulled some clean linen from my dresser and I made the bed up with a fresh blanket. I wrapped the pillows into the bed sheet and I bundled them and stuffed them into the garbage bag and I pulled the yellow drawstring and tied it shut. I took a brand new quilt, a thick dark blue comforter still wrapped in cellophane, from my closet and I stretched it out on the bedroom floor. I rolled Amber’s body, bloody quilt and all, into the clean blue comforter and I shoved it up against the bed once again on the side opposite the door.
Back in the kitchen I found a bottle of citrus cleaner and a roll of paper towels. I returned to the bedroom and I wiped the blood from the bed frame and the wall and the nightstand and the alarm clock which showed the time, in red boxed LED letters, to be eight twenty-seven in the morning. I sprayed the kitchen knife with the citrus cleaner and I wiped the blood from the blade and the handle and then I wiped the hardwood floor from my bare footprints at the bed and through the hallway and the living room and the kitchen and all the way to the bathroom, around the toilet and over to the tub. The whole house smelled like a citrus grove.
I went back to the bedroom and closed the door and I slipped back into the bathroom and fell into our tiny tub and I tried to soak the death from my body and melt the stress that was balled up in my abdomen. The water turned red as soon as I sank myself into the balmy stew. I washed my hair and scrubbed my skin with a soapy washcloth and I ground my fingernails into the green bar of soap to loosen the blood that had seeped beneath them. But I still didn’t feel free of the death so I drained the tub and drew a new bath and I washed myself all over again.
I knew that no matter how many baths I took that the feeling was not going to leave me. It wasn’t the blood on my skin that was causing the wretched feeling in my stomach, it was the death; the second death in my own bed in twelve months time. Death was following me. I felt like Angela Lansbury in an episode of “Murder She Wrote”. Death was waiting for me at every turn. I began to wonder if the demons that haunted me in the dark might not be real. I wondered if I was cursed. I wondered what it was that I had done to provoke my god to torture me so.