A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Fiction

The brutality.

The glass cuts clean and the fingers get slippery. Inside the house. Looking out into the broad world, where the sunshine nourishes.

The fear slipped inside the house long ago. It lingered past the trauma, the shocking explosion.

The fear is an Other more distant than the fingers, off of which the bright red drips – and the blood is free of its house, running down the window, burned pale and thin by the sun.

Its liberation pins fear in the corner, beneath the brown water stains. Freedom with a baseball bat bars fear in the corner, and laughter dances.

But so much. Blood. Too much. The fingers slide as though oiled. The blood falls out, beading on the shoes, splattering on the floor. Will the jagged edge stop it up? No, pressing makes it more. Pressing the jagged edge makes it pour. And fear leaps like a tiger over the baseball bat, and its fangs rip into the nerves (like the cut glass screams into the fingers) and the room, empty, spins.

**

Later, I awake in the dark. My fingers burn, but they are cold and dry. I feel blankets, a bed.

She is in the room. Always. It is too dark and I can't see but I feel her presence. Will she touch me now? Or just watch? Just listen?

God, if I could believe that she's in conflict; that she wrestles the demon; that she stands there trying not to touch, instead of merely getting off by looking.

I know if raise my head I will see her silhouette in the doorway in the nightgown and she will be still and I'll wonder if it is the devil come to beat me, until she coughs.

No. No this is not now. I'm not seven. I'm forty-seven and it's pitch because my eyes are closed. If I open them I will see the street light slanting in the window and I know this is true because there is no bed beneath, only the hardwood floor, and my fingers ache in the crust of blood.

The pain is my anchor. I open my eyes. I see the fear like a trace leaping from the slant into shadow. Fear is the watcher now.

**

I am alone this moment. The sun in the sky again. The room is bare white walls lit by the shiny hardwood. Outside, in my memory, there are daffodils nestled in grass and cats winking to nose the petals.

The explosion came from outside too. The war is outside (maybe resting, machinery paused while strewn limbs are gathered, but it is there). The heart ramps up and there is no blood in the cut. None.

The fingers twitch. The blood of liberation. Salvation.

In the distance a pounding rocks the ground, followed by the tap-tap-tap of guns. There blares a car alarm, and again enters fear.