CHAPTER FIVE

That night before bed, the b*****d killed the lights in the tiny brick house at the end of State Street. Twenty-four hours post rape and murder, and he was already in compulsion like a junkie whose pipe had been rummaged clean by bleeding nostrils. Adrenaline wired his veins with impulses that surged his closed fist upward and above the hollow of his right shoulder. Pitch black spaces of room paused as he walked, and his fist descended through the air that Maggie exhaled as she slept. His fist lifted again; his murderous shadow puppet formed on the bedroom wall. Faster. Another step. His fist raised, came down, raised, came down, raised, came down, raised, came down. He was a madman carving the darkness that threatened him with blindness. He stopped where he could feel the heat of my sister’s breath. Face to face, he became erect. Just barely visible in the moonlight that flooded through the window were the breasts of a woman soon to be. In the moonlight, he saw the velvet lining of her labia, which hugged the front of her panties greedily.

Maggie felt him penetrate her, his hand a noose around her throat, his pleasure her pain, his pleasure my pain. He was the scaffold for her crime of virginity. Consciousness evaded her pursuit, no matter how fast she ran after it. Consciousness was faster than she was; consciousness was bright like the moon she saw through the window.

Consciousness fading.

The moon, cold and blue as if it was dead, began to speak, my voice loud and clear and not at all meager under the b*****d’s tumultuous panting: “Maggie! No! Get off of her! Mom! Somebody! Anybody!”

Panting increased.

Consciousness lost.

His closed fist lifted slowly, in it, an unsheathed hunting knife with a smile of blooded teeth. It came down again. 

Maggie sat upright in terror. Her forehead dabbled in the shallows of perspiration. It was just a dream. A very bad, terrible, frightening dream. She looked out her window at the moon still plausibly in its cabinet of nightfall, but before returning to her slumber, she saw in the moon a hint of distant fire.