Wrath White - The Resurrectionist

The mattress looked like an abattoir. It was saturated in red. There was a small red puddle where she had lain. The blood had soaked through the sheets and stained the bottom of the comforter.

“What the hell?”

Sarah flipped the mattress, then took the sheets downstairs along with the stained comforter. Her hands shook and tears ran down her cheeks as she shoved them into the washing machine. She dumped a scoop of detergent into the machine, turned it on, and ran out of the room.

Scooping up her cell phone, she dialed Josh’s number. There was no answer. He must have already been on the casino floor. The voice mail picked up after six rings.

“Josh? I think something’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding. I mean…I think I am. There’s blood all over the mattress. I don’t think I’m on my period, but there’s blood everywhere. And I keep seeing pieces of that dream, that nightmare. It just feels so real…and…and all the blood. Call me back. Please call me.”

Sarah hung up the phone and sat down at the kitchen table. She tried to remember the dream from the night before but the images were growing increasingly faint. By the time she took the sheets out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer, the dream had been completely forgotten. She started the dryer, then piled the comforter into the washer. She dumped a scoop of laundry detergent into the machine and shut the lid.

Sarah gradually convinced herself that she’d simply started her period early and experienced an unusually heavy flow. She thought about going to the doctor’s office. It couldn’t be healthy to bleed that much but she supposed that that was the reason they made the jumbo-size tampons for “heavy-flow days.” She’d never had a heavy-flow day before. It looked like someone had bled to death. Sarah tried her best to ignore all the elements of her menstruation theory that didn’t fit. She walked into the kitchen and popped a multivitamin and an iron pill.

While the sheets were drying, Sarah decided to go for a run. She needed to clear her head, to get away from the house, to think about anything but blood and death and nightmares. Feeling the wind in her hair, her heart pumping hard in her chest, the steady rhythm of her own breaths synchronized with her footfalls always made her forget about everything else.

Sarah put in a panty liner just in case she started to bleed again; then she pulled on a pair of running shorts and a dry-fit tank top. Sarah grabbed her iPod and her Garmin GPS navigator and headed out the door. She went through a quick routine of stretches on the driveway, staring at the new neighbor’s front door as if she expected him to burst out of the house and attack her on the front walk. The vertical blinds on the front window parted slightly and Sarah hit the play button on her iPod, squeezed the tiny headphones into her ears, and took off jogging down the street faster than she’d intended just as “Kerosene” by Miranda Lambert began to play.

“Light ’em up and watch them burn, teach them what they need to learn…” She sang out as she pumped her legs at nearly a full sprint. She was breathing hard after only three blocks. Sarah checked her Garmin and realized that she had just run three blocks in less than three minutes. She had to adjust her pace. It took her another two blocks to calm herself down and steady her breathing. She hated the fact that the guy freaked her out so much. She wanted to go knock on his door and kick his scrawny little ass just to get over it.

Sarah jogged briskly past rows of for-sale signs lined up like tombstones. Nearly every third or fourth house was abandoned. It had never occurred to Sarah before how deserted the neighborhood was becoming. When she and Josh had moved in the community was still under construction. New couples and families had been moving in daily. Then construction had slowed to a halt and a mass exodus had begun as home values plummeted and people began defaulting on their loans. Now, half the homes in the neighborhood were in foreclosure. Her morning jog had grown increasingly depressing as every day she noticed a new house with a for-sale sign in front of it. Most of the signs contained the ominous sub-caption BANK-OWNED.

Miranda Lambert clicked off and Revolting Cocks came blaring through Sarah’s headphones screaming, “Let the bodies hit the floor!” Sarah had to resist the urge to start sprinting again. Something about that song always got her blood pumping and it struck her as oddly appropriate as she jogged through her dying neighborhood, which was turning into a ghost town little by little.

There was an elementary school a few blocks away and Sarah felt a stirring of her maternal instincts at the light, airy, high-pitched squeals of children’s laughter. She stared at the joy-filled faces climbing on the jungle gym and running in reckless circles on the rubberized playground. Every time she passed the playground she reconsidered her decision to wait to have kids. She wanted to have Josh’s babies. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted them right now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to give up her carefree lifestyle, her freedom, and most of all, her figure. Sarah continued jogging past the school and soon the laughter faded into the background.

After another mile, Sarah passed an active-adult fifty-five-and-older age-restricted community that was also half built. Construction had been ceased once funding had run out and the real-estate market had frozen after only a quarter of the houses had been built. Finished homes stood interspersed with dirt lots. Yesterday, there had been an ambulance in front of one of the homes and Sarah had seen a gurney being carted out with a body covered in a white sheet. In this community, a for-sale sign didn’t always mean a bank foreclosure.

Sarah checked her pace on her Garmin compared to yesterday’s run. The little computer screen showed where she had been at this time the day before and she was nearly half of a block ahead of her previous run. She picked up her pace, trying to put a full block between herself and the imaginary runner in her device, racing against herself.

An hour later, when Sarah made it back to her house, she was drenched in sweat. Josh had always told her that she sweated like a man. Her dry-fit tank top was completely soaked. She checked her Garmin and saw that she had shaved a full minute off her run and burned 620 calories. She looked across the street and the vertical blinds in the new neighbor’s front window were swaying back and forth as if someone had just closed them. Sarah hurried into the house.

The dryer had stopped. Sarah gathered the sheets and dumped them into her laundry basket; then she wrestled the big down comforter into the dryer and set it on high. She was walking up the stairs with her laundry basket when the phone began to ring. Sarah ran up the last couple of stairs, dropped the laundry basket on the bed, and snatched up her phone.

“Are you all right?”

“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t passed out on the floor bleeding to death.”

“Are you on your period?”

The way he asked the question infuriated her for no reason she could articulate.

“No. I just woke up in a pool of blood…my blood…I–I think. Maybe my dream was real. Maybe the neighbor really did stab us both to death.”

“Are you serious?”

“No, I’m not serious. Do I sound like I’m dead?” Sarah shot back in an irritated tone. She couldn’t explain why she was so annoyed with him today.

“Do you need me to pick you up some…um…some feminine products on the way home?”

“No, I’ve got plenty of tampons at home. Thanks. Next time answer the fucking phone.” She hung up and sat down hard on the bed. She knew that she was wrong for lashing out at Josh but she also knew that in minutes he’d be so wrapped up in his work, laughing and joking with his customers, that he would have forgotten all about it. He was good that way. It was one of the things about him that annoyed the shit out of her.