Not once did I question her

This is a weird story about a man who lets a strange and foreign woman inside his home without questioning. After a few years of their wordless relationship he starts to regret having let her in.

I don't know where she came from. She was outside my door on a cold Wednesday night, her hair was chopped off and her lips were swollen. There was a deep cut right above her left eyebrow. She didn't speak English, only muttered foreign words in a language I didn't understand. I guessed it was Ukrainian but it could have been something totally different. Her voice was husky. Her eyes were gray. I opened my door on that Wednesday night and I let her in. She was the most beautiful yet the most frightening woman I'd ever seen. At first I was not allowed to touch her. I gave her clothes, food and everything in between.It never occurred to me to call the police. It never occurred to me that a woman could be a monster. After a few days of feeling like a zoo-guard she spoke to me for the first time. I can't begin to fathom my surprise. The words that slipped from her mouth sounded much more beautiful coming from her than any other living person. After that day a mutual understanding started developing between us. Not once did I question her. My house was her house. My clothes were her clothes. My neighbors were her neighbors. Soon she started going for walks. She would disappear for hours and I wouldn‘t worry. She always returned. At the time I didn't think much of it but when I look back I can see the resemblance between her and a cat. She was a wanderer.

The first question I asked her was a typical one. I asked it on the seventeenth day of her stay. She answered it with her name: Meredith. Of course I knew it was a lie but I never questioned it. I just called her Meredith. We got used to each other pretty quickly and enjoyed our situation very much. People assumed we were married. At night she would watch Spanish soap operas and sometimes I could hear the voice of Oprah Winfrey coming from the living room. This had been going on for around eleven months when I kissed her for the first time. It happened by accident. I was reading the paper on my way to the toilet and she was going to bed after a night of watching The Oprah show. We crashed into each other. I looked up from the paper and she stood so close to me. I had never touched her before. Her eyes looked like these shells you find by the shore after a big wave comes in. I could see the light reflect in them. She breathed in. She breathed out. Her breath smelt like candy floss. The dress she was wearing was completely sheer. It felt like a time to say something. But talking wasn‘t our thing. The way she was staring into my eyes was hypnotizing. That was when it happened. We both leaned in at the same exact second. The kiss was dry and afterwards we went our separate ways. But ever since then I could feel her devotion to me had grown to be what I thought was warmth and love. 

I know you‘re thinking about the fact I‘ve told you I‘d never thought that a woman could be a monster. I bet you want to know why. I feel uncomfortable talking about this. We lived together for five years. On one of the last days she was with me a tingling feeling started growing inside my brain. The feeling was curiosity. I had been thinking a lot about the day we first met. How I let her inside my house without question. How she took my food and lived inside my home, slept in my bed, for years, and it all felt so natural. A few days before I had found drawings I assumed she had drawn. They were all of my head on a stick. The pictures were hidden inside the walls. Finding the pictures started some roller coaster inside me. Every feeling, every question and every doubt came over me at once. I decided to think about this. I took two weeks thinking about it. I either sat on my bed, on the toilet or in the kitchen, eating burnt toast, thinking about it. It was pretty tough to think about. We had been kissing occasionally for two years. We had had sex five times. In a row. I‘m going to tell you about that day before I tell you about the monster thing. I hope you don‘t mind. I was taking a shower. She came inside the bathroom completely quiet. It didn‘t startle me when she was suddenly under the shower with me. Her hair was wet and it fell over her face, covering half of it. I reached out and placed it behind her ear. She nodded and then she went down on her knees. When she came back up she pushed me against the wall and pulled my hair. The passion was intense. After the shower we dried ourselves in the living room watching Oprah, naked. When Oprah finished she climbed on top of me and rode me for what felt like hours. She moved slowly and her hips were out of this world. The hair pulling was still going on. After that we silently got up and walked into the bathroom where we took a mutual bath. Nothing happened in the bathtub. We lay there silently and when our toes had turned into raisins we got up and went to the kitchen, naked. She started cutting onions and she cried. That was when I picked her up and we did it again on top of the kitchen counter. And again on the kitchen floor. There was mist on the windows now. We ate raw onions in silence. The spaghetti bolognese seemed like too much of an effort. Two hours later I was walking outside in the garden. I was thinking about planting an apple tree when she tiptoed up to me and ripped my shirt in two. We did it outside. The neighbors were sleeping. It was four am. When she came she screamed loudly. An old married couple looked out their windows and instantly looked away, horrified.

That was the last time we had sex, ever. Our lives continued as usual. We didn‘t share conversations. We lived separate lives yet we lived the same life.

The drawings. I found them inside the walls one day when I was tearing down the wallpaper. It was horribly ugly, it came with the house. I teared it from the walls, room by room. In the living room I found out that it was already loose and when I ripped it to pieces I could see a small hole in the wall. It was small but big enough for a small Labrador to fit in. Somehow I managed to climb inside and that was were I found them. Taped to the insides of my walls. She had planted trees there as well. It got me thinking. Maybe the walks she had been taking weren‘t really walks. Maybe she went inside the walls. The place was rather disturbing so I crawled out and continued tearing the wallpaper down. When she came home from a real walk (or maybe from another hole in another room..) I could here a muffled scream, like when you scream into a pillow to release anger. I pretended not to notice. We ate carrot muffins for dinner, both utterly silent. The day after I walked into the bathroom for my weekly shower to find her hair scattered over the bathroom floor. I walked back to my bedroom and picked up the rug that lay on the floor and placed it over the piles of hair. I took the shower. She walked past me in the hallway later that day and was completely bald. It suited her in a weird way. It was like she was already in prison.

My roses smelt heavenly until the day she ripped them from the ground. After that they only smelt like rotten plants. My window sills were filled with little shells and crabs I‘d found at the beach until the day she ate them. The shells and crabs, not the window sills. The paper boy asked me once why I was living with an escaped prisoner and I told him it was because her hair smelled nice. He reminded me that her hair was no longer existent. I answered him with a polite nod and a giggle. He rode his green bike far away.

When you‘ve gotten used to someone‘s presence it‘s hard to imagine life without them. First you realize that maybe the person is not who you thought they were. They could be completely and utterly different. When that thought has been planted in your head you try your best to avoid it. You store it somewhere far away in a locked box buried deep in your brain. After some time of ignorance the thoughts and doubts come crawling back. That‘s when the suspicion starts. When the suspicion‘s there you can‘t turn back. There is nothing left to do but confront the person. Since talking wasn‘t our thing I tried to leave her notes. I would write down things like:Where is my wallet? & How was Oprah? Pointless things. It was one of the few times I‘d tried to communicate with her. I knew she spoke English, twisted English but still. I tried to fish an answer out of her for days when finally I received a note. It said: Your wallet is in the oven, Oprah is horrible. After that experiment I decided to do something about the mystery. I locked her in the bathroom and put bars for the tiny window so there was no way she could manage to flee. I went inside our living room and returned to the hole in the wall. She had tried to hide it with papers like Sports Illustrated and The Daily Mail. When I crawled inside a rather unpleasant smell welcomed me. If I had to describe it I would say it resembled rotten eggs and mayonnaise. I lit up the walls with my flash light and saw the pictures again. They were fewer than last time. God only knows what she did with them. The smell had vanished and my nose started identifying a new one. Gasoline. I realized the floor was soaked with it. She planned to burn the house down.

Crawling, crawling and crawling. It seemed like hours but it was only a few seconds. The ground was slippery from the gasoline and the rotten smell had returned. My head hit something solid. It was ice cold and stiff. My flashlight showed me that it was a body. It had no head.

When I returned to the bathroom I found out that it was empty. It was still locked from the inside and the bars that protected the window were untouched. Years later when I was taking my weekly shower and slipped, I found a hole in the floor. It was hidden under piles of hair that had been hidden under my bedroom rug. Sometimes I wonder where she is or if she‘ll come back to me. I‘ve laid awake at night wondering if someday she‘ll come back and chop off my head. And I hope she does. 

Author's Note

This was one of the first short stories I ever written, is it too mysterious or unbelievable? Does the fact that they don't communicate make any sense and is that a good thing or bad thing?