My spine tingles at each impact. My skull rattles beneath my skin. My eyes are closed. I can’t watch. Though my son lies dead nearby. Bursts of strength surge through my arms. But she doesn’t relent. So I can’t. I can’t. Every time I swear I can’t. My love. My heart.
She bites me and claws at me and pushes down on me, pushes her bared jaws towards my stomach, my chest, my throat. As though she would chew straight through me. I try to push against her but I can’t; I can’t hold her back any longer. Her teeth gnash at my shirt. I shove her head against the thick dresser leg, quickly, quickly again. Her grip loosens each time but not enough to get free and I put more force into the next and I am sure I scream on the last at least. I scream again. I say her name. Again and again.
I free myself.
She charges before I can pick up my son. Bangs against the other side of the door as I slam it shut. She doesn’t bother banging again, but after a moment the doorknob moves a little in my clenched hand and I clench tighter and I press my shoulder against the door. She doesn’t fight for long. Doesn’t bother. Just turns the knob once or twice. After a while I can hear her making that sound again and I swear and swear at myself for not having the courage to go back in. With a shudder I suffer the brief wish that she still fought. If only for a still clear purpose.
My hand snaps away from the doorknob with unsettling violence. I can’t think. I am abandoned of reason. I even, if only for a brief moment, place my hand again on the doorknob.
I look around. Look at my house and the walls of which it is made. See what I have hung from them.
The window in the front. Brushing aside the curtain clears the suffocation of standing outside that door and listening to her make that noise, holding my breath until my vision became spotted with bloody blots. The walls of my house have become only architecture. Function. Mere constraints against some larger wildness which crept in despite them. They no longer offer comfort. Only the large window set in the front of the house. The curtain, the easy exhale.
I haven’t looked outside all day. I’d drawn the curtains early, when she complained about pain from the light, and forgotten the world outside since. I was merely up and down those stairs. My wife to my son. My wife to my son.
The sun has fallen and the light is almost suppressed by the immediate horizon of homes. Perhaps a faint blueness remains. There are no lights in any of the houses. The streetlights are off despite the dusk. A car sits in the front yard of the house across the street, driven through the low fence around the yard. Doors opened. Abandoned.
I look outside, I look inside. My jaw hangs loose. I waver in incomprehension, only able to wonder how I did not notice the lights of my own house go out. Movement at the car. A small man slides from the driver’s seat and falls to his knees on my neighbour’s lawn. He pushes himself up, to his hands and knees, but rises no further. He waits for a moment, then raises his head to the scent in the air. He starts forward in the deliberate crawl of a predator.
I follow his eyes to my side of the street. I open my mouth and I close it. I raise one of my hands and place it against the pane. Casey, the little girl who lives next door, wanders across the lawn in a dazed way.
Claire combed her hair once, painted her nails. Was proud of that for days. Told me with such warmth in her voice how well Casey sat, how they talked and talked. Said, wasn’t that such a nice name? Casey?
Casey turns her back to the car and the man in the street, turns towards my house. Perhaps she sees me standing behind the pane, perhaps only my shape. I raise my hand, to comfort her, to show her that I am unchanged. My hand shakes, but I doubt she notices. After a moment she raises her hand in kind. I can see the shake from here.
I try to yell, but my voice will not come. She must see me open my mouth because she steps forward, leans her head more my way, as if she simply did not hear. I try again, but cannot dredge my voice free from the silence in here. The small man is almost directly behind her, but my pointing only makes her take another step forward and focus her attention on me. Behind you, I try mouthing, only once, because I’m sure it makes me look like a suffocating fish. She raises her hand again in another weak wave.
Her hand in the air tips over my heart. I slip on the heavy boots I wear to my wife’s family farm and tighten the laces with a vigorous pull. I think of the walls in the house, the far wall of the living room, decorated with the spoils of our loved one’s travels.
When I enter the room, my eyes light on the axe. Ceremonial, her uncle swore, bronze and tempered wood, blessed and hafted in the same manner of some ancient culture. Celtic, or maybe South American. Just longer than my forearm and open stretching hand. Her uncle raved of the temples, but I suspected he merely had an afterthought at the airport. I lift it from the wall and turn back towards the door, but the weight slows me, forces consideration. The axe in my hand makes wild
