"Help. Mom." My father's voice is barely a sound at all. Just breath shaped into words.
I look back down at him. His lips are dark, almost purple, and his tongue is dark too, coated in red, but his eyes are still on mine, still focused, still my father. Barely.
"Go." He mouths.
"I'm going," I whisper, hot tears flowing down my face, tracing paths down my cold cheeks. "I'm going, Dad. Just stay with me."
I pull my hands off his chest and stand up.
My legs don't feel like mine. They're heavy, disconnected things, moving through molasses as my entire world collapses around me.
I move to the end of the aisle and peer around the shelving unit, too scared to actually step into the aisle. I can see the top of a man's head. His dark hoodie is pulled up with a ski mask underneath it. He's bent forward, his back to me, but I can't see my mother.
Did she get away?
The man lets out a strangled noise as he sits up to full height. He lifts his arm into the air. There's a knife in his hand, dark and dripping, then he brings it downhard.
A wet, rhythmic thud fills the small shop.Shh-thunk. Shh-thunk. Shh-thunk.The sound of metal tearing through flesh, over and over.
No. No. No. No. No.
This isn’t happening.
It’s a dream. A nightmare.
Every instinct I have is pulling in the opposite direction, screaming at me to run, to get out, to go back to the back room and lock the door and press myself against the wall and wait.
But my father said help mom.
I grip the shelving unit with one hand as I force my feet forward, then turn the corner and step into the last aisle.
The man is crouched over my mother's body, his back still to me, his arm moving in a short, terrible rhythm. He's grunting softly with the effort of it, low sounds that don't seem to belong to a person.
Beneath him, my mother isn’t moving. She's not making any sound at all anymore, and there is so much blood on the white linoleum that it doesn't look real.
It looks like paint, like something from a movie, not something that could possibly be coming from a person.
I stand at the end of the aisle, frozen in place, watching my mother's body absorb each blow.
And I feel nothing.
Maybe not reallynothing.
But something so enormous and so far beyond anything I have words for that my body has simply switched off, gone somewhere quiet and very far away, leaving only my eyes working, recording every second with horrifying clarity.
Finally, the man stops stabbing her.
His shoulders rise and fall with heavy, ragged breathing, his head dropping forward like he's completely exhausted. The knife hangs loose in his hand, dripping.
He still hasn't noticed me standing at the end of the aisle.
Will he kill me too?
Will he rush me with that bloody knife and shove the blade deep into my chest?
Will I even feel it?
The man’s head lifts slowly, and he looks down at my mother's face.
