A Piece of Me

      Aha, here is my favorite victim as of yet!  Easily, this victim is one of my finest works!  My Rembrandt of my art collection!  My diamond in a coal mine!  A real needle in a haystack, this one was!  God yes, I absolutely loved killing her off to reap her soul!  See her there, lying on the morgue’s stainless-steel autopsy table?

      …

      Yes, I know this looks almost exactly like the morgue you saw your own body in, but trust me, it isn’t; I would never do anything that cruel to my new assistant.  Believe it or not, I’m actually a pretty decent demonic entity.  Have you noticed that the Medical Examiner is not present in this wonderfully dismal room?  Well, he’s out to report an anomaly to his superiors; when he cut this woman open, she had absolutely no organs whatsoever.  I think you are going to enjoy this one!  Just sit back, and let me tell you her story….

      Frederica Bowerman Saumon is your typical twenty-one year-old housewife, she wakes in the morning, sits all day, doing chores and shopping as needed, then makes dinner for her husband.  When he gets home, they discuss their days, make love, get high, sleep, then rise the next morning to repeat it all over again; like clockwork.

      This morning would be her last.  You see, Freddie’s marriage was falling apart all around her, and she was oblivious to her husband’s antics with other women (and other men).  Her husband was planning on coming out to her that night; he was gay.  She was planning on telling him about the affair she had been having online with an eighteen year old for the past three months.

      One of the things she had noticed, however, was that he was no longer enthusiastic in their love-making.  When they had first gotten married, he was like a bull in a china shop.  But now, almost three years later, he was like a deflated balloon, every time.

      She had decided the night before that she would soften him up with his favorite barbecued chicken dinner before revealing her secret, so today she would go shopping for everything she would need.

      She arrived at the local Shaw’s supermarket and trotted in, grabbing a cart from beside her car on the way.  Upon entering, she immediately headed for the meat, in search for the perfect chicken to slap on the Barbie.

      As she was picking through the plastic-wrapped birds, she started to feel ill; she had suspected her husband was gay for about five months now and she had had no problem with the thought, in fact she had believed it was kind of kinky; but now she couldn’t even stomach the possibility that it was true!  She felt a kind of emptiness in her abdomen and was suddenly not hungry, so she left the cart where it stood and left the store empty-handed.

      She drove home and immediately booted up her computer, hoping that her lover would be on Skype so she could be comforted by his presence…  Unfortunately, he wasn’t…  She glanced at the digital clock on her phone and realised that he was in class right now at Rhode Island College.  She sighed, her eyes starting to fill with tears; comfort would have to wait.

      The feeling of nausea washed over her once again and she felt like she was going to vomit up her intestines.  She ran to the bathroom, just making it to the toilet in time to throw up her breakfast.  There was a little bit of blood in her vomit, but she didn’t worry about it; her doctor had told her it was normal for people with ulcers.

      After she had finished cleaning herself up, she went to her bed to lie down and think about what she was going to say to him when he came home from work later that afternoon.  However, try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound spiteful or resentful.  She still loved the guy; for Mephistocles’ sake, but it was just so hard to come clean to the man with whom she had fallen in love with as a teenager…

      She didn’t have the guts to tell him about her teenaged lover, so she went to the bathroom again; this time, she turned on the shower and began to strip down.  Stepping into the steamy, sauna-like shower-stall, she inhaled deeply, hoping the heat and steam would help clear her head.  It didn’t help at all.

      When she stepped out of the shower, there was less than an hour before her husband arrived home.  She stuck some leftovers in the microwave to reheat and sat down to wait.  About a half hour later, Freddie began to feel out of breath, as if she had just completed a triathlon and the Iron Man competition in the same day.  She realised she couldn’t break her husband’s heart by revealing her relationship to him, but she knew that she had to tell him what was going on before he found out on his own volition.

      The feeling of suffocation continued to haunt her until they went to bed that night; that’s when she told him; she needed to get her guilt off of her chest.  She told him everything, from the sexting to the webcam sex, to the flirting, to the feelings she got every time she spoke to her lover.

      She was surprised by how well he took it, but she could tell he was hurt on the inside; she could see it in his eyes, his facial expression, and his body language.  She lay in bed, arms drawn tightly around her chest, and her eyes filling with tears.  She fell asleep, her breathing growing troubled again.

      Her one dream during her first hour of REM was disturbing, yet also her last.  She had felt heartless for breaking the feelings her high-school-sweetheart had for her, and her dream was of her tearing out her own heart and stabbing it with a kitchen knife.

      Her husband awoke the next morning to find her on her side, dead, on the bed.  The cause of death was determined to be heart failure, which made sense; her grandmothers and mother had died of heart failure as well.

      You know the actual way she died though, well you, me, and the Medical Examiner.  Remind me to wipe his memory before the end of our time together.  Do not tell me you think this is heartless work; you need a heart in this motherfucking job!  You need to be able to choose how to kill someone and if it is the right time for them!  There is no way for you to back out of this now, so don’t you even f*****g try!

      …

      You are beginning to really test my patience; so let us move forward to our next victim before I change my mind about you!

Reviews

[Cal Iginis]

The premise of this story is excellent: A woman, dead inside, gutted by her own seeming indifference to life. The characterization is intriguing, and the details, especially meeting the lover on Skype and looking at shrink wrapped meat while contemplating her husband's homosexuality, are great. The only part that drew me out of the story were the demonic trappings, but maybe that's just me. Great job.