AllFreeNovel
Share Us
You are ready to fight—to live.
You spot a kitchen knife poking out of the wire dish rack next to the sink. You lunge forward and grab the knife that seems perfectly placed just for you.
It is not your time to die. After all, you have been here before. You remember this, an all-consuming boil of rage that replaces common sense.
You spin around, dodge the next attempted blow by a mere inch. The bat whizzes past your ear. You feel the soft puff of air against your skin.
You release a guttural scream and plunge the knife into your attacker’s stomach.
She stills, her bat raised mid-waist, the silver twinkling in the moonlight. An aluminum Louisville Slugger.
Your eyes meet.
The world seems to stop around you.
“Oh…” she says in a breathy whisper. The bat drops from her hand, clamoring onto the tile floor.
With your eyes locked on hers, you pull the knife from her abdomen and shove it in again. Again. And again. The grotesque suction-like sound as the knife severs her internal organs mirrors her gasps and moans.
You do not recognize this person inside you as you viciously slice the old woman’s abdomen.
In the final thrust, you step close to her, nose to nose. Eyes locked, you twist the knife.
She doubles over, her head falling onto your shoulder, her weight collapsing against yours, her blood pooling onto your hand.
You step back, pull out the knife and allow her bloody body to crumple to the floor.
You watch the old woman die at your feet.
So, back to my initial question: Who are you pretending not to know?
For me, it is myself.
I am pretending not to know myself. This dark side of me. A part of my personality, my genetic makeup, that makes me do evil, vile things. No matter how hard I try to suppress this person, their ugly face arises unexpectedly like a virus coming alive after lying dormant for years.
Yes, I am pretending not to know this side of myself.
The side of me who murdered Marjorie Stone.
2
Twenty Years Later . . .
Sylvia
“Hand me that bottle of wine over there, will you?”
Shirley looks at me from her perch on the armrest. Lazy black beady eyes, one milky with blindness, the other heavy with disinterest and boredom.
We engage in an overly-dramatic stare-off, me and my half-blind cat, whom I have recently started having full-blown conversations with. My cat does not talk back, I should be clear, it’s just me, vocalizing a tangled mess of jumbled half-thoughts laced with curse words. … Well, this is not entirely true. Shirley does talk back, in her own way, of course. The saunter of annoyance, the tail-flick of I’m-only-kind-of-interested, the slow look-away of dismissal. Yes, Shirley has much to say—and quite the attitude for a hairless runaway missing half of her vision.
Shirley breaks eye contact first, bored with my childish antics. Per usual.
“Fine.” I fling my feet off the coffee table and, using every bit of energy I have left in me, push to a stance. My hips groan in protest, my lower back pops. A dizzy, heady feeling swims through my brain. Likely from the half-bottle I’ve already consumed.
It’s two-thirty in the afternoon, a bleak, cloudy day, the crisp autumn air bordering on frigid. According to the weatherman, Thorncrest, the quaint little Vermont town I call home, is in the middle of a cold snap, with daily temperatures only reaching the mid-fifties. A sign of a bitter winter to come.
I stumble while my body adjusts to being upright, much like waking on a cruise ship after a long night wasted at the bar.
