Tim Meyer - The Switch House

[“You’ll keep him safe?”]

“Why?” Terry asked, the knife falling to the turned soil. He put his hands on the side of his head. “Why did you do anything with him? He was our son!” She’s never seen her husband cry so much before. As he wept, his entire body shuddered with the rhythm of his outbursts.

[“He’s safe with her. Where he’s going, he’ll have lots of friends to keep him company. The other boys and girls, special like him.”]

“I couldn’t do it, Terry. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I just couldn’t. I know that makes me a horrible a person, but I couldn’t do it.”

“You bitch,” he spat. “You bitch! YOU KILLED OUR SON!”

The blade near her feet reflected moonlight, catching her eye.

“I told you, I didn’t kill him.”

Quicker than Terry could react, she went for the knife.

[They each take one of William’s hands and begin walking, toward the hustling throng of shoppers.

William glances back over his shoulder. Their eyes connect for one final moment.

“Ma-me,” he says.

She closes her eyes as a wave of dysphoria bowls her over.

“Ma-me?”

When she opens them, the trio is farther, about to be swallowed up amongst the bustling pedestrians. She focuses on William’s face, and she briefly thinks his face is filled with worry, which isn’t possible because William doesn’t worry, never has. He doesn’t laugh or smile, frown or get angry. He doesn’t do much at all. He’s just…

…he’s just William.

That’s all he’ll ever be.

She begins working on her lies, training herself to believe them.]

Terry bolted forward, grabbed for the knife, but he was too late. She snatched it first, and he immediately altered his intentions. Instead of scrambling on the floor for the only weapon, he barreled into his wife and knocked her back, sending her inside the shed.

The interior was utterly dark, the only light filtering in through the open door and the small awning window opposite the entryway. She wore the darkness like a cocoon, immediately crouching on her toes and creeping over to the darkest corner.

A shadow filled the entryway.

“Angela… why? Why did you do this to us? Why? Why? WHY?”

No more questions, she decided.

As he stepped foot inside the shed, she rushed forward, jamming the knife into where she thought her husband’s neck was. A wet sucking sound interrupted the silence, leaving her ears as quickly as it had arrived. A sticky warmth flowed over her fingers, down her hands, tickling the nerves of her soft skin. With force, she withdrew the blade, and this time the wetness dotted her face.

Terry stumbled into the puddle of moonlight in the center of the shed with both hands wrapped around his neck, gushes of crimson squirting through the cracks of his fingers.

“I told you…” she said through her teeth, “I didn’t kill our son. He’s still alive. He is safe. He is with her in the Everywhere, you dumb fucking bastard!” She stabbed him again, this time in the back, between the shoulder blades. “YOU NEVER LISTENED TO ME!” She slipped the knife inside him again, this time in the ribcage, retracting it, stabbing, retracting it, stabbing, repeating the process over and over; flowers of scarlet blooming across his midsection. “YOU NEVER PAID ATTENTION! YOU WERE NEVER THERE FOR ME!” The next swipe slashed up his arm, ripping open fabric and flesh, creating a dark red furrow which spat copious amounts of blood. She drove the blade up under his arm, penetrating the soft muscle of his armpit. The blade stopped when it struck bone. “You never understood how I felt,” she said, more calmly now. “About William. About our situation.” She ripped the knife free and pointed it behind her, back toward the house. Scarlet dripped steadily off the tip. “About this house. I hate this fucking house. I never wanted to move here and you NEVER FUCKING LISTENED TO ME!”

Terry dropped to his hands and knees, coughing up a wad of dark—almost black—fluids. It spattered the floor before him. He tried to speak, but a mouthful of thick blood prevented the words from making it past his lips.

Angela kicked him in the ribs, where the knife had punched through flesh and cartilage, and flipped him over, onto his back. At the ceiling, he stared, his eyes starting to glaze over.

“You were never a good husband to me.” She brought the knife to her side and stepped over him, placing a foot on each side of his body. She dropped to her knees, planting her bottom on his punctured midsection. “And an even worse father. Where were you during his doctor’s appointments?”

He spat out a word that sounded like working, but it came out wet and unintelligible.

“Where were you during the countless hours of therapy?”

This time Terry kept quiet.

“Where were you, Terry? You were supposed to be there for me. For us . ”

He grunted a word that might have been sorry, but a burst of scarlet sputtering over his lips was the only thing she could make out for certain.

“You were never there. Never there for me, never there for our boy. You abandoned us.”

He didn’t deny her account.

“Then you made us go on that stupid fucking show. For what? To repair us? To fix us? Our marriage isn’t one of your stupid cars. You can’t just turn a wrench and expect us to be okay, fine-fucking-dandy.” She closed her eyes, breathed, and inhaled the metallic odor overruling the air. “There’s no fixing us Terry. There’s no fixing me. I’m the one who’s damaged. I am the one who’s broken… I’m… I’m…”

Angela raised the knife over her head and, without giving it much thought, buried the blade in the base of her husband’s neck. Terry spasmed many times over the next sixty seconds—spastically at first, then intermittently—and then his body went stiff as a log, his flesh taking on frigid temperatures.

She sat on top of him for what seemed like the length of a long dream, ignoring the burn in her quads and staring through the awning window, at the moon, and wondering what lay beyond the stars. She imagined a sea with a pirate ship getting dragged beneath the black surface by massive tentacles. A house in the middle of some cosmic existence called the Everywhere. The skulking shadow of a boy she used to know. An endless, blue-lit room with wandering souls, most of them grotesque and previously savaged.

Before she could shove the blade in her own neck, ending her pathetic excuse of an existence, the night was filled with a cacophony of sirens and anxious voices. Just when the suicidal thoughts occurred and started to make sense, she felt hands grabbing her wrists and loud, commanding voices screaming in her ear. She resisted as much as she could, but all her energy had been spent on butchering her husband, and she was easily overpowered. It wasn’t long before the men in uniform dragged her from the shed, toward Trenton Road where red and blue lights bounced off neighboring houses and bushes, filling the night with kaleidoscopic visuals she’d never forget.

From behind the doors of the capacious room where Angela Shepard sat at a long cafeteria-style table, staring at the wall and doing little else, Barry Harrison and a tall man with glasses, holding a clipboard, observed. Barry turned to the studious man, a doctor at the facility Angela had called home for the last ten months, the place where she had prepared for her trial and talked about her feelings and attempted to make sense out of what exactly happened.

“Think she’s ready?” Barry asked the tall man, whose clip-on name tag read Daniel Stevens M.D.