Amid the Recesses: A Short Story Collection of Fear (7 page)

“
The bus caught fire and
was consumed.” She whispered to Ian as his ear fell from his skull
and his eyes burst in their sockets.

Hey hey hey hey! My
company.

RETURN TO THE TABLE OF
CONTENTS

The Horse, the Elephant and the
Lion

It took Irene Bright two
days. Despite the protest of pouring rain—tears cast from the
objecting heavens—nothing would stop her.

Irene used a plastic trash
bag. It was the simplest tool for the task. It was solid black—the
kind of bag designed for the fall leaves that no one wanted. She
couldn't bear to see inside of it. She couldn’t bring herself to
tie the bag closed.

Let it
breathe
,
she
thought.

She neared the end of the
alley. The rain poured in fierce revolt.

Only God will judge
me
, she thought.

Nothing lived in the alley.
There wasn’t a scurry of rats or a squirm of maggots. There wasn’t
the shuffle or diseased cough of homeless vagabonds. Light shunned
the space. Pavement cracked and lifted from the ground around her
feet. A river of rain water ran through the middle of the alley to
vomit sedimentary pebbles into the street.

It was the hour when demons
and devils enjoyed free reign. It was the time when most of the
passing cars were piloted by inebriated
kamikazes
. Everything was closed
except 24-hour convenience stores, manned by exhausted foreign
attendants with dead eyes and others with guns in their
faces.

Each step Irene took felt
like quicksand. Her heart sunk. There was no stopping her after two
days of consideration. She felt a shift in the bag and stopped. Its
movement sucked the air out of her lungs. She squeezed the untied
end of the bag. Her fingers paled with the tightness of her grip.
She felt like crying, but ran out of tears on day one. She stopped
in front of the dumpster. The unsanitary box waited with an open
and hungry mouth. The bags inside of the dumpster were torn and
chewed through as if by the shadows themselves.

Irene stood in the water.
The water broke into small tributaries around her dirty sneakers.
The stream of rain felt like a surging rapid. Her knees were weak.
The world was wet and her eyes were dry. She exhaled.

“
Fuck you.” She said to the
dumpster.

The dumpster stood with a
slack mouth and it must have been offended.

Irene lifted the bag and
placed it into the dumpster. She’d never been gentle with trash.
She held on to the twisted end of the bag. Her clenched fist
rebelled and prevented her from letting go.

“
I can’t. I’m sorry. I just
can’t.”

She let go.

Irene reached up and closed
the plastic lid of the dumpster. She thought of the holes in the
other bags. She wondered if the dumpster was satisfied or
disgusted.

She ran. Water blasted from
the stream below her. Rain rushed against her. A late night bus
emerged from the eastern tunnel and shot past her near the street
and drew her to a halt. She considered if she hadn’t stopped. The
blues played in the old bus as it passed. She followed the bus’s
lead. It was three miles to her fourth story apartment.

Her walk home was plagued with fear
and reflection.

“
I guess this is it between
us, huh?” She whispered to the sky. Her baby blue eyes searched for
her maker. The sky threw rain at her.

Irene stood at the bottom
of her apartment stairwell. She examined the twisted staircase that
rose above her. Each step felt like a mile. Each floor felt like
Everest. The air thinned the higher she rose. The door that led
into the fourth floor hallway had a lighted exit sign that pointed
to the stairs. She looked back down the stairs that spiraled down
as they had once spiraled up. She considered the distance between
herself and the first floor. She imagined how many times she would
repel from metal handrail to metal handrail before she kissed the
tacky green carpet at the bottom.

Irene stepped inside of the
hallway and stopped next to an open trash chute. Brown and grey
streaks stained the dull metal inside of the chute. Pieces of human
excess clung to the interior walls. She stepped in front of the
open chute and put her hand on the metal handle. She stared into
the black abyss as she closed the door. A child’s crying rose from
the darkness and she froze. The echo of the sound caused it to come
from all directions around her. She looked from the left to the
right to survey the empty halls. She leaned closer to the opening.
She listened.

“
Let me hear
you.”

A black trash bag fell from
the chute above and became lodged in the opening in front of Irene.
Her jaw locked and her heart rammed against her ribcage. She stared
through moistened eyes at the oily bag and saw her tarred
reflection in the glossy sheen. A featureless face print jutted
from the bag.

“
Ma-ma. Ma-ma” A robotic
voice cried. Mechanical gears buzzed.

The bag shifted and fell down the
remainder of the chute. Irene released the metal handle of the
chute’s door and fell back against the opposing wall.

Irene dug into her soaked,
matted pocket. She latched onto a metal key ring and pulled her
apartment keys from her pocket. The white innards of her pocket
turned inside out with the keys and a red twist tie dropped to the
ground. She put her foot over it and shoved the apartment key into
the lock.

Her steps squished through
the living room and into the kitchen. The twist tie was stuck on
her shoe. She felt it catch on the carpet fabric then scrape on the
kitchen tile. She placed both shaking hands down on the counter.
Bloody paper towels littered the counter. Blood was smeared across
the white surface. Every cabinet door was open and bloody
handprints stamped the handles.

She pulled bottles of
prescriptions from the cabinets and flung them behind her. As they
rolled along the ground, the pills spun and rattled in their
plastic containers. The rattling made her sick. She pulled a bottle
of sleeping pills from a shelf and put it down into a streak of
tacky blood on the countertop. She vomited into the sink, but
couldn’t spit up her regret no matter how many times she heaved.
She spit bile from her mouth before swallowing three pills, each
left to dissolve in the rancidity of her mouth.

She stumbled toward her
room in disarray. Her head spun with images of black plastic bags
and hungry dumpsters. Irene followed the trail of blood from where
it originated: the bedroom, but stopped as she passed the vacant
room in the middle of the hallway. A cradle was the centerpiece. A
mobile swung back and forth over the bed, moved by some impossible
breeze. A horse, an elephant, and a lion swayed, one behind another
on the mobile, to and fro over the cradle below it. She felt sick
again but had nothing left to expel. She pushed away from the room
in the middle of the hall and went into her bedroom. The white bed
sheets were stained with blood. She fell into the mess face first.
She felt the wetness against her cheek but didn’t care. The sheets
smelled like an old penny. She was done. The world shifted around
her as a haze infected her mind. Her eyelids became heavy and
drooped. She stared at the blood on the sheets until she was taken
by the induced fatigue. She slept.

She awoke glued to the bed.
She arched her back and peeled herself from the bloody sheets. Her
belly rolled and grumbled. Her body demanded food but she was
plagued by images of the dumpster. She fell limp to the bed. She
slept.

“
Waaah-waaaah-w-waaaah!” A
cry seemed to rise from inside of the apartment.

Irene’s eyes shot open. Red veins
ached in her eyes as the sound pervaded her ears.

“
W-Waaaaaah!”

She planted a hand down
into the bed and the mattress sunk under her weight as she pushed
herself up. She looked back toward the door of the room and waited.
The crying stopped.

“
A dream. It was a dream.”
She said to herself.

Irene rolled onto her back.
The sheets stuck to her as she shifted and she tugged the cemented
bits from her skin. She stared at the ceiling. It looked like a
Mars landscape. She wished she was on another planet.

“
Waaah! W-Waaaah!
Waaaah!”

Irene rocketed up and her
heart drummed against her chest so hard it didn’t know which pace
to maintain.

“
W-Who’s there?” She
stuttered in a cracking voice. “I have a gun!” She bluffed and
scrambled farther from the bedroom door. “The police are on their
way!” She shouted.

The crying became louder.
It was deafening. The cry crawled along the walls and belched from
the hallway outside of the room. She pulled a pillow over her head
and laid down on the ground beside the bed. The sound was muffled
at first, but intensified.

“
I can’t! I can’t do this!
Stop it! Stop it!” She screamed from within prison of her
pillow.

The sound dissipated. A
crackling sound like that of a dying fire or intermittent static of
a radio replaced the crying. She lifted a hand that bent the pillow
over her ear and it sprung back into its flat shape. Irene rolled
onto her knees and crawled to peek around the corner of the bed
toward the bedroom door. Silence befell the apartment.

Irene snuck through the
apartment. Each step teemed with caution. She closed the door to
the room with the cradle without inspecting it. She peeked around
furniture and inside of closets. There was nothing.

She did not sleep that
night. The time was spent scouring the filth that was spread
through the apartment. The bloody blankets and sheets of the bed
were balled up and thrown into clean pillow cases. She didn’t
consider using a trash bag for anything. She used the brush end of
the carpet steam cleaner on the mattress. The stains lightened from
the blackish tone to pink, but never neared the original white.
Round after round, bloody water was dumped into the sink and
refilled with fresh water and a bleach solution and
tears.

When her muscles ached and
she could stomach no more she took a shower. The water was set just
below a scalding hot.

“
Wash it away.” She sighed
out.

It did nothing. She wept
against unsympathetic blue tile walls. She sat under the hot water
until its heat depleted and then she sat under the cold. She looked
down to her feet and saw blood swirling into the drain. She backed
out of the water and assessed herself. Blood trickled from between
her thighs, down her legs, and diluted in the cold water before it
disappeared forever. It had been more than three days and she still
bled. Weakened, emotionally and physically, she waited to see if
this was the time that the bleeding didn’t stop—the time that every
vein in her body was drained and deflated. She thought she
deserved to die
. She sat
down in the tub as her strength faded. She waited for death if it
would come. She drifted into unconsciousness while the falling
water beat against the tub.

She woke after an
indeterminable amount of time. Cold spittle shot at her as the
running water deflected from the tub’s surface. She examined
herself. The tips of her fingers were blue and her skin was pale.
She couldn’t remember the last time she ate and wondered if her
body was eating at itself. She wondered if there would be anything
left when it was done. She turned off the water and stepped from
the shower. Her legs shook beneath her. She wrapped herself in a
towel and stepped into the hallway. She paused.

The carpets were bloodied. The walls
were streaked with red. Everything she had cleaned was soiled
again. Her mouth fell open and her lips quivered toward a scream,
but she could not. A trembling hand shot over her mouth.

“
How? How is this
possib—“

She heard a metallic
lullaby. The sound chimed through the hallway and came from the
room in the middle of the hall. She recognized that it was the song
from the mobile over the cradle. Her legs weakened and sweat sprung
at her forehead. She stepped toward the door of the middle room.
The sound became louder. She braced herself against the wall. Hand
over hand, she scaled along the flat surface. She depended on the
wall for support. She depended on the wall to remind her of
reality.

“
This isn’t real. This
isn’t real.” She said over and over again.

The door to the room was
cracked. She reminded herself that she had closed it. She
considered a weapon—a lamp or a knife. She took a broad step toward
the end of the hall before the door of the middle room opened fully
by itself. She froze.

Patterns of light projected
from the room onto the hallway wall. Irene pressed her back against
the wall and watched the ghostly shapes float by. The light
projected a horse, an elephant, and then a lion. One appeared after
the next in their endless circus march. She wanted to hide inside
of the wall. When nothing came from the door, she slid closer to
it.