J. Redmerski - The Swan and the Jackal

“Have you remembered anything?” he asks softly.

I swallow down my nervousness and interlock my fingers together tightly so that I don’t look so afraid.

Shaking my head gently, I answer, “No. Nothing new, anyway.”

I can feel his gaze on me, seeking my attention. I yield to it and look at him.

“I’ve told you before, Cassia, that even if you think you’re repeating yourself, that I want you to tell me what you remembered, what you saw while I was gone.”

I swallow again and glance down at my hands.

“Just the fire,” I say. “I was daydreaming. Yesterday. And the flames licking the ceiling bled through my memory, just like last time.”

“Was she there?” he asks and it hurts my heart.

It always hurts my heart when he asks about that woman.

I nod slowly, reluctantly. “Yes.”

He remains quiet and incredibly still, waiting for me to go on, to tell him everything I saw down to the last detail. But I don’t want to this time. I want him to lay next to me and hold me in his arms like he did not long ago. I had never felt so safe. I want to feel like that again. Right now. Not because of my enigmatic fear of Fredrik, but because of the fear I feel when I see that woman’s face in my memory. A woman with jet-black hair and sinister dark eyes. A woman I always tell Fredrik that I do not know, that I can’t remember, but the truth is that I don’t want to remember. And the more he presses me, tries to help me regain the memories of my life before the fire, the closer I get to knowing what she did to me. As much as I fear her without even knowing her, I know she must’ve done something horrible, unspeakable.

I would rather leave my past far behind if it means that to know it again, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

But worse than that, I fear more than anything that once I remember and I give Fredrik the answers that he seeks, he’ll find her and forget all about me.

“Tell me, Cassia…tell me what you remember.”

I look beyond him, past his tousled dark hair and deep blue eyes, past the attractive scruff of his face that I often feel prickling against my cheeks even when he isn’t touching me, and I let the memory blur into focus.

The Fire…

The screaming in the apartment building wakes me. I shoot up from the bed, my face drenched in sweat, my lungs beginning to burn from the smoke filling the tiny room. It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening and still it’s not even the smoke that makes it all apparent. It’s the screams. I realize that if I was the only person in the building, I never would’ve woken up at all. I look down at the bed and imagine myself lying there, curled within the white striped sheet, flames engulfing the mattress, licking the walls and the headboard and slithering toward my long blonde hair spread out against the pillow, fast, like a desert snake moving in a sideward motion over the top of the sand.

I don’t remember standing from the bed. How did I get here? I ask myself.

The screams in the hall are getting louder. I hear crashing and pounding just outside the door, but it’s not my door that someone is beating on. And the crashing noise I can’t make out, but I think it’s the ceiling caving in. I see from underneath the door the lights flicker in the hallway and then go out.

The screams cease and I feel my heart in my throat.

Then as if time skips, I’m not standing in front of the bed anymore. I’m climbing out the window and making my way down the fire escape.

I slip and everything goes black.

Quiet.

Though I still hear my breath expelling from my nostrils unevenly as if my sinuses are clogged. The sound of my heartbeat I hear and feel in my head, racing, beating violently through the veins in my temples.

But everything else around me is quiet; the sirens and horns fading quickly into the background.

Then I hear a voice. A woman’s voice. At first it sounds distant as though she’s talking to me from behind a wall, or across the length of a giant field. But her voice is getting closer.

“I told you I’d find you,” the voice says with a hint of cruelty, mockery, satisfaction.

I try to open my eyes but the lids are too heavy. The tips of my fingers scratch against a hard, coarse surface. I move one hand around, pressing my palm fully against the surface, trying to decipher what it is and why I’m lying face down on it. My body solidifies and I recoil into myself as I begin to cough, my cheek scraping roughly against the hard material that is beginning to feel like concrete or asphalt. I taste the smoke in my lungs, I feel it burning my esophagus and the back of my throat and my nostrils.

I cough again violently and try to catch my breath as my body goes still. I sniffle once feeling the drainage behind my eyes and it burns like a hot poker is being shoved into my nostrils. I cry out in pain and then lie still, trying to breathe only through my mouth. My lips are dry and cracked and bleeding, and they too taste like smoke.

Tears seep from my eyes and my body shudders against the cool, hard surface like a quivering ball of muscle and bone. I think I’m going to die here. Wherever here is.

I’m freezing.

“You should’ve known better, Cassia,” the voice says and it sounds like she’s right behind me.

Determined to place a face with the voice, I try desperately to pry my lids apart, but like everything else inside of me, my eyes are burning.

“Who are you?” I ask weakly and my voice cracks. I need water. I need something to wet my mouth. Anything…

She laughs quietly and the cruelty in it frightens me to my bitter core. I feel heat on the side of my face, the side not pressed against the hard surface. And then I hear her voice again and I know that she’s right there, hovering over me with her mouth near mine, tracing a path from my earlobe to the corner of my lips.

I feel her lips on mine, so warm and soft and tender. My body is cold, so cold, and her lips so warm that I don’t have it in me to protest. I feel her tongue slip into my mouth and gently tangle with mine. My eyelids, heavy before, now slam shut and leave me absolutely no control over them anymore.

“You’ll always belong to me, Cassia,” the woman whispers onto my mouth. “You owe me.”

The coolness of her hand grazes the skin on my stomach and she slides her hand into the front of my thick cotton pajama pants. I feel her fingers hook inside of me harshly, painfully, and my eyes spring open to see her face looking back at me with malice and menace, her dark eyes swirling in the blue hue of the night sky, her slim outline illuminated by the streetlamp several feet behind her. Her hair is jet black, cut short around her oval-shaped face, each side following the curvature of her jawline. She is beautiful. She is evil.

I’m afraid.

And then in a whirlwind the vociferous sounds of the frantic city catch up to my ears again. I begin to choke, coughing so terribly that I think my lungs are going to come up with the black-tinged saliva I expel into my hands. I roll over onto my back and stare upward at a starless black sky, rolling with winter clouds and brisk with winter wind. My body shakes so harshly that it feels like my bones are going to shatter like glass if I can’t control it. My head falls back to the side and I see a pile of boxes. The leg of a couch. A black trash bag with a hole ripped in the bottom and some kind of fabric pushing through it. A cracked mirror with a weathered wooden frame. A red milk crate full of random things: old beat up boxes of food, a bottle of anti-freeze, a crushed soda can.