Vincent
woke up cursing and shielding his eyes from the glaring whiteness of
the early morning sunlight, which wrenched its way into the fog in his
head. The last thing he remembered was the disembodied face of his
wife.
"Laura!" he bellowed, his voice careening off of the tall
oak trees that circled the camp site he had chosen for last night's
fishing expedition, "Where the hell are you? I want my coffee!"
He
waited for her to come rushing towards him clutching a canteen of hot
coffee, and standing quietly before him with her eyes peering downward.
He would sip it quietly for a few moments, waiting for the beads of
sweat to appear and trickle down her smooth pale forehead, smelling her
fear, relishing her fear, before he eventually pounced. It
was always the highlight of his mornings.
Grunting with effort,
Vincent struggled to lift his girth off of the ground, almost
falling flat on his face. Then, looking around, he noticed that this
morning, unlike all other mornings, Laura was not rushing towards him,
on call to carry out his day's commands.
"Laura!" he shouted,
"Better be in front of me in the next five seconds or it's
gonna be a kick in the ribs instead of a slap to the face. Your choice!"
Nothing.
The birds went on singing, their blissfully oblivious chirps the only
sound in the overwhelming quiet of the forest. A moment later, a
raccoon waddled out from behind a pine tree and sniffed the air
curiously. His glossy black eyes widened almost with a human look of
fear and he ran up the tree, scurrying up its branches.
Not
once in their two year marriage had she ever had the nerve to disobey
him. She knew what the consequences
were. He'd made sure of that the first month they were married. Irritation rapidly transformed into rage, that familiar
sizzling pop of violence, which crackled through Vincent, erupted, and
searched for a target.
"You're in for it!" he screamed into the silence, as he started stomping through the woods towards their cabin,
The
small wooden vacation cabin had been in his family for the past fifty
years of Vincent's life. Once the representation of his family's final
achievement of the American dream, the promise of many successful times
to come, it had become the last possible refuge for him after a string
of economic failures and the nightmare of one woman.
Vincent
kicked open the cabin door and began to scream out his wife's name
again when he suddenly froze at the sight lying before him.
The
well-worn furniture that had crowded the small living room had
disappeared. The woven rugs Laura had bought
at a flea market in town and which he had allowed to be one of her few
contributions to the cabin's decoration, had vanished. On the wall,
where the usually bright sunflower patterned wallpaper was now peeling
off into greying flakes, the old photographs featuring dour, unsmiling
relatives from Vincent's side of the family, had inexplicably vanished.
In every corner, there were tangled, dusty piles of cobwebs, its
whiteness shimmering underneath the ray of sunlight which shone through
the living room's newly broken window, absent of the curtains that had
been covering it since his wife had sewn them a year ago. Instead of the
bright, cheerful interior that welcomed Vincent every dawn, it
looked untouched and abandoned, as if it had long been languishing in
darkness and isolation instead of it being the familiar and comfortable
home he had lived in for the last fifteen years.
'What the hell?" Vincent mumbled dazedly.
He
stumbled
backwards into the corner, feeling something soft brushing up against
the back of his neck. He whirled around to see a large black widow
spider descending from the ceiling.
He growled and lunged at it
in one fell swoop, throwing the spider to the ground where his massive
leg came down with a mighty stomp.
Grinning with the satisfaction
that only an act of violence brought him, he lifted his leg up from
what he expected to be the mutilated remains, but like only a gentle
breeze had knocked her down, the spider in its eight-legged spindly
entirety, scurried off from the site of her near-murder and disappeared
up the peeling walls.
Before the confusion could hit him,
Vincent's vision suddenly blurred, turning into a swirling haze. Yelping
in pain, his eyes screwed tight with water trickling down his cheeks
and he clutched his ample belly, dropping to his knees. The pain was
becoming more intense by the second. It was as if a swarm
of bees were buzzing, buzzing, buzzing through the recesses of his
mind, stinging the fleshy parts along the way.
"Stop. My head! What's happening? Wha---leave me alone! Leave me ALONE!" He shrieked into the shadows of the cabin.
As swiftly as it had started, it stopped.
Vincent
opened his eyes to see the bright wallpaper with its cheerful yellow
flowers back as it had been. His comfortable easy chair with the
ever-familiar butt imprint of a million beer and football nights was
sitting there like always, almost mocking him with its sameness. The
cabin was filled with the soft glow of the antique porcelain lamps his
mother had brought over from the old country, illuminating the cabin
amidst the shadows of outside. It was no longer the early morning
sunshine but the weak moonlight streaming in. He glanced at the
television set back in front of his worn in, broken-down easy chair to
see glimpses of an old black & white sitcom he
loved to watch while eating the enormous dinners he demanded his wife cook every night. She's causing all of this, Vincent thought. She
slipped something into the food. Vincent's heart began to thump
as if he was running a marathon, and cold sweat trickled down his
multiple chins onto the hardwood floors.
"Yeah, that's right," he said out loud as if to reassure himself, "This is all an hallucination."
He
turned to his left and there was his wife, standing with her back to
him. Her bony spine protruded through the thin fabric of her tank top
and her frail shoulders bobbed up and down frantically as if she was in
the middle of hyperventilating.
Vincent stomped over to her, his rage at full-throttle.
"Hey!" he barked, "Just what do you think you're doin' to me, bitch?"
She
still stood with her back to him, her loud breathing not skipping a
beat. Her slender frame began to shake uncontrollably, her
jagged breathing almost bouncing off of the walls, a sharp sound of
long-buried agony ripping, tearing into the air like a thousand needles.
"I've
had enough of whatever tricks you're pullin'. Maybe you slipped
somethin' in my dinner last night or maybe you put some kinda
hex on me. Whatever it is, it's gonna end right here. Turn around and
start actin' normal!" he yelled.
With her back still turned,
Laura lifted a revolver, that she had been clutching tightly,
desperately, to her right side, and aimed it directly in front of her.
It glinted beneath the moonlight--her body was no longer trembling.
"You-you
LIED. You said you were going to be a good husband to me, give me a good life."
she whispered. "You said you were going to make me happy, happiness
like nothing I've known before." she shook her head, " Just misery like nothing I've known before. Cruelty
like nothing I've known. You lied because no woman would have you...you're
garbage on the inside."
Vincent
lunged then for his wife, his beefy arms eager to wrap themselves
around her thin neck and choke the life out of her, choke the defiance
out of her, choke the words out of her. Just as his fingers came near
her throat, he felt a violent jolt and stared at the wooden floor
beneath him. He looked up, dazed, to see that he was crumpled in a heap
at her back. Her arm was still outstretched, pointing the gleaming
pistol in front of her. She had not even flinched. Suddenly cutting
through the seemingly endless moment of silence was a pathetic, begging
voice. A male voice. His own.
"Baby...honey...please think for a moment about what you're doin!" the voice wailed.
"On your knees," Laura said quietly.
Vincent
went cold all over, as if ice water was flowing through his veins
straight into his heart. Beyond her gun, he stared into the wide,
frightened eyes of his mirror image. Cradling an arm where a gunshot
wound had created
a raw bloody hole in the meaty part of his massive shoulder, the second
Vincent's thinning hair was matted with sweat, which had mingled with
the tears, both from shock and from pain, that were spilling from those
bug-eyes.
"Can't be happening." Vincent muttered as he stared,
numbly, at the duplicate of himself pathetically kneeling on the hard
wooden floors, almost as before a religious icon.
"Oh GOD, I don't wanna die!" the wailing voice of his double shrieked.
"Shut up." Laura replied.
"It just can't be happening," Vincent repeated.
"Please, baby" the quavering voice of his double pleaded, "Put the gun down. We can get past th--"
"I told you, SHUT UP!" she suddenly screamed, her voice reverberating through the walls.
She placed the pistol against his sweaty temple.
"This is the end of you, Vincent" Laura said, "You hear me good? END. No more hurting me, no more putting your hands on me, making me feel dirty, like I'm not human."
"You whore!" Vincent roared behind her and his double, as he charged
like an angry bull towards her again, landing ineffectually at the
back of her scuffed tennis shoes.
"I'm begging you--" the second Vincent pleaded.
"You
caused me to lose her. Our child." Laura went on, tears spilling from
her eyes, her knuckles turning white as she tightened her hold on the
gun.
Vincent struggled to get to his feet. The air felt thinner
and the buzzing in his head came back, slowly at first, a muted throb.
The second Vincent reached out his hand to her, his eyes pleading.
"Baby...you're
right....I've treated you like no man ever oughtta treat a woman. I
swear to God, I'll change and make life better for you. Please put the
gun down."
Laura said nothing, her hand still pointing the gun at his head. She began openly
weeping.
Vincent was clutching his head, moaning now, the
throbbing turning into an electric strumming, slowly reaching a
shattering crescendo.
"Everything will be different," he went
on, his voice repentant, "We'll have another baby, move outta here. We'll both go to
counseling just like you wanted!"
Her arm still pointed the
gun at him, but the fingers slightly loosened its iron grip. The corner
of her mouth began to quiver.
Reaching out both hands to her now, ignoring the blood steadily streaming down his arm, the second Vincent edged closer.
"I'll
be a good husband, the kind of husband a jewel like you deserves, baby.
We'll be happy...I'll put the gun to my own head and pull the trigger
if I ever get out of line. I SWEAR to you!"
As if she was a deer in the headlights, Laura stood there, frozen and suddenly unsure.
Her arm lowered
slightly.
"Maybe--" she said haltingly.
Then he
leapt upon her, bending her arm backwards with all of his strength, his
garbled howl of victory piercing the darkness of the cabin.
She
desperately thrashed in his grasp, then reached out and deeply slashed
his doughy face, her long fingernails scraping his flesh from the chin
to the eyeballs.
There on the floor, Vincent gazed on as a
useless bystander in numb horror, his sight clouding over, struggling to
hold onto his consciousness. It was all getting very hazy...
Vincent shrieked, his hands instinctively covering the deep
red slash marks on his face, dropping to the floor, half sobbing-half
screaming in pain.
Laura grabbed the gun and crouched down, ramming it into his mouth.
"Goodbye,
Vincent," she said sadly, her face inches from his, "May you be trapped
in the kinda hell you created for me." She then pulled the trigger with a decisive
click.
Vincent did not hear the blast or see the back of his own
head splattered against the sunflower-patterned walls. Instantly, he
was catapulted into a vast empty whiteness, his body vibrating like a
massive machine.
Chuka-chuka-chuka-choo, chuka-chuka-chuka-choo, chuka-chuka-chuka-CHOO.
He
tried to scream but nothing came out except the electronic hum
radiating from his head to his fingertips. He looked upwards and saw
her face. She contentedly smiled down at him, her eyes radiant and
sparkling. He tried to reach out for her but his limbs were paralyzed.
He tried to speak, but his voice was gone.
Suddenly he was
free-falling downwards, into a flourescent glow, further
away from her face until it became a distant speck.
Vincent opened his eyes.
He started cursing and shielding himself from the blaring sunlight. It was a beautiful day, the birds
cheerfully singing their early morning song.
"Laura! Where the hell are you? I want my coffee!" he bellowed.
