Caroline.
“Another night in hell,” she said softly, to no-one, watching the rain as it dripped out of the night sky like treacle. Thick, dark, wet, sticky. It didn’t fall to earth so much as ooze its way down an indifferent black backdrop, toward the frigid ground below.
The general population were cozied up inside, in unspoken agreement that this was a night for the fire and a glass of wine, the repugnant weather best ignored and shunned as the despicable insult it was, to what had earlier been a fine February evening.
But she thought it was fitting. Perfect. Maybe even a sign.
She leaned against the front doorway frame of her little laneway house-for-one. Yellow light from the hall behind her yawned out into the dark, a pale flicker against the ink of a starless sky. She pulled so hard on her last cigarette that it fluttered out of existence; but not before whispering a searing goodbye. Burning ash crumbling across her fingers like disintegrating dreams. She gagged, as hot smoke seared the back of her throat.
He was late. Not that she had ever been punctual in her sorry life. But this, surely, she’d assumed, was a milestone prone to panning out on time. Where was he?
‘Here.’ Someone said. Said? No. Thought? ..Maybe. Indicated, either way, above and behind her. And there ‘he’ was. A towering fog of darkness, much the same as every other piece of darkness in the endless night around her, but somehow vastly different. She tried to put her finger on what (or how) he … was, but the human mind won’t bend that way. He was insubstantial mist and crushing concrete, all at once. There and not there; everywhere, nowhere, everything, nothing. A grey glitch, or an unexplained tear in the fabric of the Universe. Behind her, her little tuxedo cat growled long, hissed short, and bolted fast, under the coat rack.
‘You summoned me?’ he said / thought / indicated, into the night beside her. She almost choked on what she knew came next. Almost. But in a white-hot flash of pain, she remembered the reasons she’d “summoned” him to begin with…
“I did. I’m ready,” she said coldly, projecting a calm she feigned rather than felt. He chuckled, if the scraping spade-against-stone noise emanating from the space he occupied could be called a chuckle. “Ready… Both word and concept, insufficient.” He didn’t need eyes for her to know he was regarding her with contempt, or maybe pity?
“I’m ready,” she repeated boldly, trying and failing to inject a little steel into her shaking voice. A piercing wail suddenly severed the silence around them. A nearby car, roaring its alarm, spat a startled orange alleycat out from under its bonnet. The tabby fled through a nearby flower-bed, while the car continued caterwauling into the empty night.
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Her heart was attempting to beat its way out of her body, through her eardrums. “‘Ready…”, he inclined what she assumed to be his ‘head’, skyward, and this time there was no mistaking the derision, “You jump at your own shadow.”
He was right. She couldn’t even do this right. Her vision swam with welling tears and she heaved out a sob of sorrow so potent it could crack a stone, Before she could still her shaking knees, she was on them, retching out fear and hurt and the legacy of a decade long smoker’s cough. She shuddered and shook, while her chewed-up fingernails grappled against the wet, grubby ground. It was blessedly cold and she pressed her forehead against it, hoping it would quiet the chaos within. It didn’t.
“So…,” he said. All derision gone. The two letters said “Take your time. Breathe. I’ve got all night.” It was more empathy than she’d enjoyed for days, or had expected from this looming spectre. It brought her to her knees afresh. It didn’t matter, they had time and she took it, courting closure.
She forced herself to watch it all play out before her one more time, on the black canvas of her closed eyelids. She watched it happen, for the something’th time, on a track that looped forever. An argument. A text. A woman from work, He’d shouted… She’d screamed… He’d tried to leave… She’d tried to stop him. Then the world fell apart. Adrenalin had crashed over her like the tortured waves of a storm, battering common sense against the shore. The parts of her that were still her had shouted at her from inside her own mind: “Stop! What are you doing?? No! Put that down.” But the parts of her that were now more wildcat than woman hadn’t listened. She’d kept going. Kept screaming. Kept flailing, hysterically, in his general direction. Had she hurt him? There’d been blood… It still stained the kitchen wall not ten feet behind her.
Berserk, they call it in war. Assault, they call it in suburbia. And in the papers.
Those she cared about the most had said it would be ok, that she hadn’t meant to, that they could fix it, that it wasn’t her fault, that no one was really hurt, that no permanent damage had been done… Maybe they’d even believed it. But she knew better. In that frenzied moment, a billion seconds of her soul had been undone, in just sixty. A lifetime of hope, ambition, faith, fake confidence and conquest; all crumbled under the weight of too many gins and too much old baggage. There was chum in the water now, camera-clicking sharks were circling and the hunt would never stop.
“So.” Her arms objected to the effort, as she pushed herself from the ground and into a position that could just barely be called standing. She ignored their complaints and leaned one against the wet, stone wall. The little house still belched warmth and light into the ungrateful night, through the front door. All manner of tiny winged creatures now danced, hypnotized, around the yellow globe hanging from the hall ceiling, and the cat who’d hissed so viciously when her spectred guest arrived, was now yowling plaintively at the closed kitchen door, in the hopes that heart-rending bellyaching could implore it to offer up what frantic, repeated scratching could not: an escape route. She pulled the front door shut and its closing thud reverberated in her temples, like the last beat of a song.
“What happens now? How do I do this?” she asked him. Her voice did not shake. “You take my hand and it stops,” he offered simply.
“It stops?”
“It stops.”
She grasped the edge of his cold, black nothing. And cold, black nothing she became.
