Their decision was quick, unemotional, and not particularly just. No jury questioned her motives, no lawyer attempted to persuade the court, and no one was present to mourn her fate. She tried to look directly at them to plea for mercy, but it was impossible. Her eyes met the ground as the final sentence was pronounced. She walked away but there was nowhere to hide from them. Feelings of anger, remorse, or guilt did not consume her, but there was something about the darkness and shadows that forced her to keep walking.
She ran her fingers across her arms and neck to see if her body was still intact, touching her forehead to wipe away the dampness and felt a small spot that was wet and sticky. She didn’t have to look at the dampness to know it was blood. It had started as they had said it would.
Karine sighed deeply, not being able to remember how long ago she had appeared before the three judges. With a weariness that embraced no rest, she lay down for only a moment before it all began again in no specific order or pattern but with a vengeance that allowed painful, countless memories of her whole life, those that had been forgotten and hidden and others fresh and raw, to be transformed into reality; each day or what seemed to be a day started with a new set of stories, the images blending and changing into the next with no warning. It was the ending that was always the same. She placed her head against the coldness of a rock and waited…. to relive them, one after the other…
Karine awoke and thought she had only dreamed that she was thirsty, so thirsty she was ready to drink her own urine. She tried to tell her friend she was sorry that she had gotten her into this hopeless situation, but her lips, cracked and dry, barely moved. There was no more water in their water bottles; the streams nearby were dry where last summer they had run so freely. During the night they could hear a waterfall from a nearby mountain, but the only problem with reaching it from the summit on this side of the mountain was scaling down a sheer 2,000 foot wall.
She spit out the root beer barrel she had attempted to suck on; without saliva, it was like rolling a jagged stone around in her mouth. Karine and her friend had gotten off the trail, thinking they were skilled enough to forge their own trail, only to admit to themselves that when they backtracked, everything looked the same, the trees, the boulders, the sky.
Suddenly she realized that Susan was nowhere to be found. No strength left to call out Susan’s name, no mobility in her legs to get up and search, Karine prepared to die and waited for the hot sun to rise in all of its glory. She untied her boots, not caring that her feet would swell, not worrying about the remote possibility of ever getting them back on. She might as well be comfortable before the sun baked her skin. It took so long to untie the one boot and slip off her dirty wool sock she wondered if she could undo the other boot, when she noticed the blood on her feet. Almost as if sharp stones had embedded themselves in her flesh. She was fascinated by the blood, blood that was so red, so fresh.
Staring at the blood, she saw that it was caked even between her toes. Leaning her body on the rock to gather one ounce of strength to take off the other boot, she had a strange sensation of falling. It was as though she were Alice in Wonderland, dropping down the rabbit hole, scratching herself against the dirt sides of the hole, but continuing to fall until she landed on the floor, the floor of her room. She glanced around her bedroom and couldn’t believe it. It was the same bed, pillow and dresser. Running her hand across the sheets that hung over the side of the bed, she remembered the designs. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. They were there to protect her at night while she slept. Her grandmother had laughed at her when she related that story.
Stories were something that her grandmother Kratzen, her dad’s mother, had told her since she was old enough to understand words, but they weren’t the usual kind of bedtime stories that most grandmothers and grandchildren enjoyed; they were more like warnings and threats. She grew up with a fear of the darkness, a fear of wetting the bed, a fear of waking up to hear her own screaming with no one to comfort her. And the greatest fear was falling off her bed. Big girls did not fall out of their beds. Night after night Karine had held her body in a rigid position so that she would stay tucked under her blankets, but once in a while she awoke to find herself on the floor. A paralysis would set in and she would lie there for hours. That was when she was seven years old. And now she found herself on the floor of her bedroom.
Grandmother Kratzen would open the door any minute, giving her a fresh opportunity to chastise and reprimand. Karine inched herself under the bed, digging her toes and nails into the carpet. When she calmed down, she rubbed her hands together, feeling a warmness in her hands and feet, a warmth that colored her fingernails a ruby red, that discolored the carpet. So afraid that the blood would stain the Mickey Mouse sheets, she closed her eyes tightly. Maybe if she couldn’t see the blood and if she kept very quiet, her grandmother wouldn’t know where she was and what she had done.
"Karine?"
It didn’t sound too much like her grandmother’s voice; in fact, it wasn’t her voice at all. "Karine? I like the sound of your name. Why are you hiding from me? The woods can be a scary place at night and I told you I wouldn’t hurt you anymore. It was a mistake when I hit you. My temper gets the best of me sometimes."
She had struck him on the side of the neck, hard enough to make him pass out, but not hard enough to kill him. At least it had given her a chance to run away from him into the woods. She had seen the rope and duct tape in the back seat and tried desperately not to think about what he had planned for her in a quiet remote area. Her will to survive took over and the thought of hurting him did not bother her. Had she thought quickly enough and had she been a little braver, she would have gauged out his eyes, but now she had to stay quiet and pray that the darkness would hide her. Why had she trusted someone that she didn’t really know? Gabe, he had said his name was Gabe and she believed him when he said they were in the same chemistry class freshman year. She admitted to herself that his blond hair and brown eyes and good manners had lured her into forgetting to be cautious. After all, he said he would drop her off at her car, so she wouldn’t have to walk by herself in the parking lot. A kind offer, nothing more.
He had hit her hard across the mouth and cheek when they had gotten into his car, telling her that if she screamed or made an attempt to get away, he would not hesitate to kill her. A shallow breath escaped from her lips as she waited for him to find her. She touched her cheek and remembered the sting of his hand and wiped away a drop of blood, dried on her face. If only she had stayed at the bar with her girlfriends.
As if she were that little girl of seven in a bedroom decorated with Disney characters, frozen with a fear of not knowing where to turn, she listened for his footsteps for hours, only to realize that he had left her. Alone, all alone and she was too scared to move.
Sunlight broke through a sky of clouds and the woods looked a little bit like…like Michael’s apartment where she and Michael were talking. No, he was talking and she was listening to his explanation of why he didn’t love her anymore. Her Michael. They had always been together in high school and college with no desire to date anyone else and now he could hardly look at her.
"Karine, I don’t know what more to tell you. I don’t want to be cruel, but how did I know that I was going to fall in love with your best friend. It just happened. We never meant to hurt you. You can keep the ring if you want to. We’ve already looked at something…oh, just forget it. I’m sorry, but I want to be with Rachel." Unseeing, she had walked away from him, unsure of what to say or do. Somehow she drove herself home and walked to her apartment, not turning on a light, not feeling the blood from her bitten lip as it oozed down her chin, not blocking out the wish to cut herself to show him how much it hurt. Karine sat in the darkness and after a long time, she took the knife from the kitchen block and drove back to see Michael.
It was still dark but she no longer hovered over Michael’s body and no longer felt the weight of the knife ripping and shredding her own veins and arteries. Before her eyes closed, she didn’t sense panic or cry for the loss of her life. An embrace of warmth wrapped itself around her body, almost like a comforting hug. Soon they would be together again.
She sat in the middle of a meadow or something like a meadow although she had not seen a wildflower or heard the movements of a small animal and the grass seemed rough to the touch, like running her fingers over a pile of straw.
It wasn’t the darkness, or the shadows, or the uncertainty about where she was, or even the sound of an occasional scream from someone she never saw that troubled her the most; it was the realization that she was being punished, over and over again. She clung to an image of walking by the river that was tinged with fire, defying the boiling muddy waters for just a minute to rinse her hands and feet, to heal the wounds and to be whole again with a promise of finding Michael, but there was no Michael here.
She knew the blood, the red rich blood that permeated every pore of every memory would not be washed away so easily. She placed her head against the coldness of a rock and waited… to relive the memories, one after the other…
Bio:
"In a past life I taught English, speech and creative writing at the high school level. I found that after a number of years I preferred writing rather than teaching. When my students wrote, I also followed my assignments and discovered that I was my best student.
"I have been writing short stories and personal essays for several years. I love writing horror short stories, probably due to years of watching The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Thriller and being mesmerized by the movie The Night of the Living Dead. In my spare time I work as an account clerk at Purdue University, read mystery novels, and take care of my pet chinchilla."
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