Right to Life

arrested. And she’s hardly able to walk or even stand and I think, heart attack maybe, maybe stroke and I stalk my wile and urge her to die, die until it’s almost one o’clock and something begins to happen.

She’s calmer.

Like she’s not hearing me as clearly.

I’m losing something.

Some power drifting slowly away like a battery running down.

I begin to panic. I don’t understand. I’m not done yet.

Then I feel it. I feel it reach out to me from blocks and blocks away far across the city. I feel the breathing slow. I feel the heart stopping. I feel the quiet end of her. I feel it more clearly than I felt my own end.

I feel it grab my own heart and squeeze.

I look at my wife, pacing, drinking. And I realize something. And suddenly it’s not so bad anymore. It still hurts, but in a different way.

I haven’t come back to torment Jill. Not to tear her apart or to shame her for what she’s done. She’s tearing herself apart. She doesn’t need me for that. She’d have done this terrible thing anyway, with or without my being here. She’d planned it. It was in motion. My being here didn’t stop her. My being here afterwards didn’t change things. Zoey was mine. And given who and what Jill was what she’d done was inevitable.

And I think, to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit. Jill is zero.

It was Zoey I was here for. Zoey all along. That awful moment.

I was here for my cat.

That last touch of comfort inside the cage. The nuzzle and purr. Reminding us both of all those nights she’d comforted me and I her. The fragile brush of souls.

That was what it was about.

That was what we needed.

The last and the best of me’s gone now.

And I begin to fade.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack Ketchum is the pseudonym for a Manhattan writer who has not yet been hanged for his crimes like his namesake was but who has suffered other indignities. The Village Voice titled their review of his first novel, OFF SEASON, simply “YECHH.” And Stephen King has said in his introduction to THE GIRL NEXT DOOR that “the only two sure things in life are death and taxes, the old saying goes, but I can add a third: Disney Pictures will never make a movie out of a Jack Ketchum novel.'

He is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels OFF SEASON, HIDE AND SEEK, COVER, SHE WAKES, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, OFFSPRING, JOYRIDE (ROAD KILL in England), STRANGLEHOLD (ONLY CHILD in England), RED, LADIES’ NIGHT and THE LOST. His short fiction collections are THE EXIT AT TOLEDO BLADE BOULEVARD and BROKEN ON THE WHEEL OF SEX.

He is still hoping Mr. King is wrong.