Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

“Who did that to you?” Cora demanded.

“Dolf,” Trix replied dully.

“Look at this,” said Cora. Her heavy body bent closer. With unusual tenderness, she cupped her hands around Trix’s face and turned it gently towards us.

“Oh my God,” said Lien.

For just a moment, in the dim light of the compartment, it seemed as if Trix’s left eye had been plucked out, leaving behind a dark crater that ran from her eyebrow halfway down her cheek. I wanted to run out of the compartment so I wouldn’t have to see it. Port-wine stains, harelips, spastics, hunchbacks, mongoloids, cripples — if I don’t look, they don’t exist. Motionless, I took in the left half of Trix’s face.

The skin was a dark purple. Her eyelid had swollen, practically obscuring the entire eye. I wondered if she could see out of it at all. A cut across her eyebrow was clotted with dried blood. It looked so bad it couldn’t possibly ever heal, like she’d spend the rest of her life with a face that was half angel, half leper. Her good eye, usually an intense blue, was now gray and expressionless.

“Why?” Cora asked.

“Because he’s a bastard.” Trix turned away and looked at the floor. It was very quiet in the compartment. The rain streamed down the outside of the window. My wet socks began to dry. They itched me, but I didn’t dare scratch.

“Does it hurt?” I heard myself ask, my voice hoarse.

“It hurts here ,” said Trix, cupping a pathetic hand beneath her left breast and darting a quick glance at us with her one good eye.

“What happened?” asked Lien.

Trix sighed. “I knew I was going to have to explain. I wish I could just drop out of sight for a month. What can I say? It started Saturday night, at my brother’s wedding reception. Eppo Engelhardt, a friend from when I was a kid, he was there. I hadn’t seen him in years. Last time I saw him, he was a skinny little boy with zits — I remember I beat him up once, after school. He’s grown into a real man , though, with a bristly black beard, I could hardly believe my eyes. If he hadn’t been there, nothing would have happened. It’s so stuffy in here. Can I open a window?”

“It’s raining,” said Cora.

“We danced and laughed till we practically couldn’t stand up anymore. It was crazy—” her voice softened, and we had to lean forward to hear her — “but, just for a moment, I thought, this is what I live for, just to be able to enjoy a night like this once in a while.”

She fell silent.

“What can I say? It happened.”

“ What happened?” Lien asked again.

Trix examined her fingernails. “The more fun I had, the more upset Dolf got. He was storming around with an evil look in his eye, like he wanted to mow everyone down with a machine gun. At eleven-thirty, he pulled me off the dance floor. He wanted to go home. ‘Go,’ I said, ‘I’ll be along later.’ But he didn’t want to leave by himself. ‘Then stay,’ I said. ‘My brother’s only getting married this one time.’ ‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘If that’s all you have to say for yourself,’ I said, and pulled my arm free and headed back to the dance floor. But he came after me and hissed, ‘You’re going home with me right now, or you’re gonna get it!’ That did it. I put my lips right up to his ear and whispered, ‘Piss off, Dolf, and leave me in peace.’ He turned away, furious. And then he was just gone. Excellent, I thought, that’s got rid of him .”

She rearranged herself in the seat, trying to find a comfortable position. “Has anyone got a cigarette?”

Lien scrabbled in her purse and handed over a whole pack, with the eager expression of a teenager shoving another coin in a jukebox to keep the music playing.

“I look pretty gorgeous, don’t I? Be honest: How bad is it?”

“It looks more like you’ve been in a car crash,” Cora lied.

“You think they’d believe me,” said Trix eagerly, “if I said I smashed my car?”

“Get back to the story,” Lien pled.

A bit less nervously, Trix went on: “I got home about three a.m. All the lights in the house were on. The only house on the block that wasn’t dark. That doesn’t mean anything, I told myself. But when I walked into the living room, I got the shock of my life. Have you ever seen a car crash, some poor soul dead on the ground, covered in blood? That was Dolf, spreadeagled on the couch, his clothes all red. Except when I got closer I realized that it wasn’t blood, it was rose petals, from the bouquet he gave me last week for our anniversary. He’d picked the roses apart, petal by petal, there must have been hundreds of them. He lay there leering at me. ‘Madam finally graces us with her presence,’ he said, ‘at three-thirty in the morning.’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘and madam is going straight to bed.’ ‘That’s what you think,’ he said, jumping to his feet, scattering the petals to the carpet. He grabbed my arm — his fingers felt like steel claws. ‘Now it’s my turn,’ he yelled. The veins on his forehead were swollen, his eyes were bloodshot and feverish, like the animals in the zoo, pacing back and forth in cages too small for them. I felt contempt for him, I wished I’d never met him. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said again. ‘No, you’re not.’ He was squeezing my arm so hard . ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said. ‘Now that he’s had his, it’s my turn.’ ‘Now that who’s had his what?’ I said. ‘You make me sick. You don’t even know Eppo.’ Well—” she shrugged indifferently — “that’s when it happened. What else can I say? You can see for yourselves.”

I didn’t want to see for myself, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Trix. Her smooth perfection had always seemed incorruptible. That the emotions contained within another being, balled together into an angry fist, could change all that and leave such horrifying evidence of its power was terrifying to me. And, meanwhile, the itching was driving me crazy. I realized that itching — when circumstances make it impossible for you to scratch — can be just as bad as pain.

“Did you faint?” asked Lien.

“Yes,” Trix said. “No. Well, sort of.” She hung her head. “I fell down. My ears were ringing. I only half realized that he was pushing my dress up around my waist. He held my wrists together above my head with one hand. I could hear him cursing. I thought it would never stop.”

“What a pig,” said Cora. “I wish I could get my hands on him.”

They say Cora once broke up a fight at the factory, banged two men’s heads together. She’s incredibly strong, they say. In a vision, I saw her as an omniscient goddess of revenge crushing Trix’s husband to her breast, a faint smile on her lips, a bonbon between her teeth.

It was almost impossible to breathe. There was condensation on the inside of the window. We were sitting in a steam cooker under high pressure.

“What are you going to do?” asked Lien.

Trix stared at the toe of her shoe with her one good eye. Her long hair spilled loose across her face.

“I can’t leave him,” she said. With trembling fingers, she shook another cigarette from the pack.

No one spoke. Lien pulled out her knitting. Cora helped herself to a bonbon. I finally scratched my leg.

We had reached the edge of the comprehensible and dashed against the contrariness that lives inside each of us and perhaps leads us each to our doom. We We had reached the edge of the comprehensible and dashed against the contrariness that lives inside each of us and perhaps leads us each to our doom. We acknowledged that reality in silence.

I knew exactly how it felt to be powerless. Whenever I sat behind Ruud on his dirt bike, I could sense the other girls’ eyes boring into my back. Before Ruud came along, they barely acknowledged my existence, but now they just had to know where I bought my skirts and my black ballet slippers, how I managed to keep my ponytail standing so tall. Even my bad report cards worked in my favor: They proved that I didn’t care about our parents’ world, a world where ambition, self-discipline, and appearances were all that mattered.