Famished - Meghan O'Flynn (learn to read books TXT) 📗
- Author: Meghan O'Flynn
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Book online «Famished - Meghan O'Flynn (learn to read books TXT) 📗». Author Meghan O'Flynn
I should buy myself some more flowers.
After dinner, he slothed off to the living room, though sloths are cuter than the face Jake makes sucking on his after-meal cigarette. Maybe instead of Mario the philodendron, I would get a tree, so Jake could hang out in the branches all day on his machete claws, looking dull. Doing nothing.
I washed the dishes with irritation burning in my chest like a nasty infection you couldn’t scratch lest you make it spread. I tried to picture the flowers on my work desk. I should have brought them home so I could be more easily reminded of the good things. Things like the way he used to hold me when I was too afraid to sleep, though he thought I was just an insomniac. And the compliments used sparingly, so I knew he really meant them. And what about that time he spent all day cleaning the apartment after he got angry and…well, there were other good times, too. Lots of them.
When the last dish was clean, I poked my head into the living room where Jake was glued to the TV, eating what looked like a fast-food apple pie from a paper sleeve. “I’m going to get the mail.” My voice dripped annoyance, but if he heard it, he didn’t acknowledge it.
“Mm-hmm.”
He even talks like a sloth. I rolled my eyes and yanked open the apartment door, but glanced back toward the living room once more as if really expecting to see a sloth lounging on Jake’s recliner. The television droned on, flashing lights on his face as he chewed with his mouth open.
I squared my shoulders and hurried down the hall and downstairs to the wall of mailboxes. A slip of white paper poked from the corner of my box, probably an advertisement for housekeeping services. Or pizza delivery. Maybe a new takeout restaurant. My keys clattered against the metal doors as I unlocked the box and grabbed my bills and the rogue paper. A scent like lilies wafted into my nose, but it was sharper, more acidic. Citrus. Oranges, maybe. Weird. Perhaps I’d be a scent detector if this thing at Harwick didn’t work out. But they already had German Shepherds for that. Doggie jackasses, stealing all the good jobs.
I opened the mystery sheet.
Jake
Miss you, babe! Come down tomorrow after she leaves for work. I picked up that lingerie you like and some whipped cream. xoxo
~Me
Jake? Snakes in my stomach awakened and writhed. Acid climbed to my throat. Behind me, someone entered the building, and the blast of bitter air turned the dew on my skin to ice. I fled to the stairwell. My feet on the metal stairs thudded like an executioner’s drumbeat.
How could he do this to me? I reached my floor and grabbed the door handle, but it was heavy, much too heavy.
No one else will ever put up with me the way Jake does. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything about it at all.
I let go of the door and collapsed on the top stair, face against the dilapidated railing. My tears tasted metallic.
Just leave. Run. Start again.
Stay. Don’t say anything. It’s not worth fighting.
I won’t make it on my own.
So what? What have you got to live for anyway?
My hiccuping gasps echoed around me, then, from the phone in my pocket, a text message plink: Baby, where’d you go?
The snakes lashed themselves against my esophagus. I wiped my tear-stained face on the sleeve of my shirt and stood, fist clenched around the letter. Lingerie. Whipped cream. I had never had a chance.
The apartment door clicked softly closed behind me. Sometimes the beginning of the end was a whisper. I resisted the urge to throw myself at his feet, begging him to stay.
“Where’d you go?”
I stared at my shoes, the wall.
“What’s in your hand?”
“The…mail.” No use delaying the inevitable.
He snatched it from me. “What the fuck is your problem?”
Paper rustled. I walked around him into the kitchen and turned back to face him, my butt against the dining table.
“What the hell?”
Jake flicked the letter with two fingers. “I have no idea who this is! It must be for someone else.” His face was flushed, neck corded.
Don’t talk. Tears slid down my cheeks. I swallowed back bile.
“Baby, it isn’t for me! Someone is fucking with you. I want to marry you! I’ve asked you a dozen times!” His hands clenched into fists when I didn’t respond.
“How could you even…so what, it’s over now? We’re not going to get married? I have to start all over?”
I clamped my lips shut, stealing glances at him, gauging his distance.
I’m sorry, forget I said anything, please don’t hurt me!
I don’t care who you screw, please don’t leave me alone!
His knuckles were white. “You’re going to believe some stupid note over me?” His voice grew louder with each word, escalation steeped in rage. “We’ve been together for years, and you’re just going to throw it away on this shit? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Don’t speak. You’ll make it worse.
Jake’s fist unclenched, and everything around us slowed until there was only the motion of his hand, reaching along the counter. A weapon? A knife? My heart slowed too, then seemed to stop, the throbbing of my chest replaced with white noise, so deafening I couldn’t even hear what he was shouting, though spittle flew from his moving lips. Then movement, sudden as lightning. He grabbed a plate from the stack of drying dishes, and I flinched, preparing for the pain, for the shattering glass to embed in my skin. It flew past me, and the breath from the hurtling dish whispered in my ear: Run. Run away. I flattened myself against the table. Don’t move. Watch the wall. Nothing but the wall.
Footsteps pounded toward me, reigniting the furious beating of my heart, and then he was there, his breath hot with rage and reeking of tobacco. His fist slammed into my temple with a dull, wet thud. Stars exploded behind my left eye, and I was falling, plunging over the edge of the table, crashing against the linoleum. Pain roared up my side.
He panted above me, breathing fast, much too fast. I curled into a fetal position and squeezed my eyes shut. I waited. No more blows landed.
“I’m done. I’m fucking done,” he said. I heard footsteps stomping away from me, and then the door slammed.
As my tears puddled around my throbbing head, I wondered if I would survive without him.
It was dark, as it had been in his younger years, though he no longer waited in patient silence for the feathery kiss of tiny legs to climb over his dirty bare feet. Nor did he listen for the disembodied groans coming to him through the closet door, or the wet thwack thwack thwack of skin-on-skin, those strange songs that had once held a faint promise that maybe he would eat tonight.
He stretched his eyes wide, adjusting to the gloom. As a child, he had once wondered if he could develop superhuman sight if he strained hard enough against the dark; comic book superheroes certainly had no less outlandish ways of acquiring power. But he had dismissed the idea just as quickly, even then. Most children will believe anything. He’d believed nothing.
Moans filtered through the memories and snapped him back to the present. The drugs must be wearing off. The man on the table groaned again, louder this time. He could get as loud as he wanted; no one would find them here.
The cement building had long been abandoned, each stinking puddle of rat urine a tribute to all the wretched lives that had once spent time in these rooms. Crumbled walls, crumbled dreams. From the windows on the upper levels, a power plant lit by feeble floodlights was visible in the distance, belching eerie clouds of grayish smoke into the obsidian sky.
Cities like Ash Park were punctuated by isolated pods of despair where the silence was so complete that even vagrants seemed to avoid them. Here, a child could go undiscovered for weeks on end before anyone in the apartment building noticed the smell of their mother’s rotting corpse. These streets felt like home and beckoned that quiet child back into focus.
But he was not a child anymore.
Around him, the basement room had retained its shape, unlike the rubble-strewn rooms on the above floors. A lantern in the corner cast the floor and ceiling in amber. His captive was on his back, supine and naked, stretched across a four-by-four-by-six concrete table constructed from cinderblocks and covered with a clear plastic tarp specifically for this occasion. The filthy gray cement made Jake’s pale skin stand out in striking contrast, though he was
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