Monday

I awoke, yet again, to find myself lying in a pool of blood. I am in the kitchen, but not near the sink where I was before. My dream had caused my body to erupt in fits that had tangled me up into a pile nearer the kitchen table. It’s pointless to attempt to move. I am too weak.

My mom may come home today.

My mother wasn’t one to stay away longer than a weekend, so I thought she could get home in time to save me. I could sense the fever had broken because my body was shaking and cold.

The pain wrenched my gut and caused me to twist and quiver on the floor. It wasn’t bandaged, so the blood and puss pooled around me on the linoleum. Every so often, I’d hear the Click Click sound of dog paws walking on hardwood floors, stalking me from just outside the kitchen. In a rare moment of physical endurance, I was able to reach up and take a butcher’s knife from the drawer. The exertion was so much it caused me to pass out again, but holding the knife provided me with a weak sense of security. I'd stab it in the throat if it came near me. For Charley, although I wasn't so sure anymore that Charley was dead. It was hard to make sense of anything, to know what was real and what wasn't.

I dreamt many dreams, and the Husky was in them all.

He is trying to get into my head. He’s punishing me for being human, for being small and weak.

In my frightening nightmarish world, I willed myself to remember every special moment I’d ever shared with Charley. I fell into a deep depression when I realized my memory had been erased, and there was nothing left except the memory of pain never-ending.

When I woke up again the sun was high and spilling through the window across the dining room. That meant it was three o’clock, or nearly so. I opened my mouth to call out to her, but only a raspy moan escaped my throat. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Mommy?" If she were home, she would have heard me, but she wasn’t home. I grew certain that she was never returning. She’d abandoned me there. She’d taken to leaving more and more often and it was on account of me. It was because I was bad. No good kid. I didn’t keep my room clean, and if it wasn’t for me her men would stick around. She'd be better off if I was dead. Charley was the only person who’d ever cared for me and I'd maybe got him killed.

A single tear escaped my eye, as I made my last plea to God. I asked for soundless, dreamless sleep. I begged for no pain. If that meant death, I accepted death.

The poison was swelling under my skin, near bursting. I could feel it in my neck growing like a goiter in my collar bone. I thought I heard the sounds of paws again coming across the floor and then fading away. A part of me demanded a self-sacrifice be made to appease him.

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“Just do it!” I screamed. “Rip my throat out. Do me the same way you did Charley. Show yourself and do it!”

The pain was so much I couldn’t fall asleep anymore. It stiffened me and radiated constantly throughout my entire body. Each time it sent waves of pain, I grasped the knife a little tighter. It was a sharp knife. When mom had a man living here, and we had cable television, she’d ordered a set of knives that could cut through tin cans.

The poison was getting closer to my brain. Once it set into my brain, I was certain I’d die or become that dog’s slave. If he planned to kill me, he would have done it straight away. He wanted the poison to get to my brain. He wanted me to do his evil bidding, which sounded like a fate worse than death. I didn’t want to be that dog’s zombie for the rest of my eternal life. So, I looked at the knife already smudged with my blood, and I contemplated its power.

Getting the poison out is the only way I’ll make it.

I placed the knife just under my shoulder and closed my eyes and counted backward from three.

It can’t possibly hurt more than it does now.

I shoved it into my own putrid flesh with a strength I’d wish I’d had when I was trying to save Charley from his violent death. I stopped when I hit bone and was unable to continue because even knives that can cut through tin cans can’t cut through a little girl’s arm bone. Not that I could have continued because it did hurt more, it hurt so much more. Blood shot out in every direction. It exploded out of me like a fountain of cherry red Kool-Aide, but that was nothing compared to the hot internal slicing and the pain of my heart thumping, desperately trying to escape my chest cavity. My heart couldn’t pump blood fast enough to account for what was erupting from the wounds I’d inflicted.

What does it matter if I bleed to death anyhow? No one is coming home. I’m a failure. I can’t even saw off my own arm.

I felt I had a fever again, and there was a dull thud in my brain meaning the poison had reached its ultimate destination. I’d attempted to cut it out too late, and the dog had taken control. I believed it was him who’d sent the message to my brain telling me I could do it. I could cut off my own arm. Only I couldn’t do it because arms have bones, and bones are too thick, and no one my size has ever had the physical strength to put aside pain and grief in order to cause far more pain and grief. And it was so much worse.

I found my voice and screamed louder than I’d ever screamed.

Thoughts mingled in my brain, and they smashed together like a crowded toy box. I couldn’t make sense of anything except that dog’s expressionless eyes. I realized that soon the beast would have me, and that sent me into a panic because maybe it would make me hurt my mother, or attack some innocent child like I was when it attacked me. I felt I had Charley with me, and I could hear his voice in my mind telling me I was braver and stronger than I thought; that I couldn’t let the dog win, so I plunged the knife into my own neck. Best to get it over with. Anything to make it stop.

I felt myself being pulled backward into an abyss, into abysmal eternal darkness and nothingness because on the other side there is really nothing except black emptiness, but it is thankfully devoid of feeling. The pain was gone. It subsided into nothing until it was as if it never existed. Someone had dug a well behind me, an endless hole in our kitchen floor into which I was slipping further and further down. The kitchen was a small circle of light above me, and the farther I fell, the smaller that circle became. I glimpsed my mother and brother’s eyes watching me fall, and I waved to them before realizing I didn’t have arms. I felt quite like a calm feather drifting aimlessly falling from the stratosphere, catching on errant winds.

Charley’s voice is far away but I can hear him screaming my name. My mother is crying. Someone says, “Get her to the car,” but I was too far away to get to the car, to get anywhere really. I was becoming nothing, but energy.

I am gone now.