Incubo

A wise card once said, "sometimes I want to hug you until you pop, other times I just want to pop you." Mixed up feelings about a mixed up man, in a mixed up relationship, in a mixed up world, that's what I have on my hands. What I didn't want on my hands was the blood from another person's life. If my mind was permeable, questions and answers could flow freely back and forth across a transparent membrane so that not only could everyone know what I was feeling or thinking, they could actually see my brain functioning to process thoughts. Thank God we have skulls.I was at home with my two beautiful, young children waiting for my husband to come home from work.

The children were each tucked away in their cozy, warm beds and I was sitting next to a roaring fire in our fire place reading the literature that I had chosen for the Non-Traditional Fiction class that I was teaching the next day. All of a sudden, there was a loud crash and the sound of glass hitting the floor in the kitchen, followed by footsteps in the hall coming toward me.The children were both screaming as I dragged them from their beds and stuffed them into their bedroom closet for safekeeping. The two unidentifiable men made it from the kitchen at the back of the house to the front door in no time at all. I dashed down the stairs not noticing that they were closer to me than I thought they were. As if he sensed danger from miles away, my husband burst through the door and lunged for the men in what seemed like slow motion. I hid on the floor of a coat closet in the hall between the front door and the kitchen until things had quieted down.

As I emerged from the closet, I saw my husband coming toward me covered in blood and holding a large knife that was almost as bloody as he was. I really don?t remember escaping him, but I do recall seeing the mangled bodies of the two now lifeless intruders heaped in the foyer of our house. All I could do was run, but try as I did to run as fast as I could, I barely felt like I was moving and the only thing that I thought about was getting away from my crazed, murderous husband. I ran out of the house, into the front yard, and was passing the mailbox at the junction between our gated yard and the street when I faintly heard my husband yell to me that the men who broke in were really just trying to warn me about him. I looked back long enough to see my two children standing in the doorway, yelling for me and staring at their father as he came toward them with the knife, slit their tiny throats and left them for dead on the front porch.

Something, I can't say quite what, pushed me forward and kept me running in the opposite direction of them, even though I wanted desperately to save them from harm. I jumped backyard fences in a single bound, as though I was flying right over them. At some points, I actually had to grab the top of the fence with my fingertips to avoid sailing off into the sky. All the while, I was hoping that someone would be sitting out in his or her yard on such a warm summer evening and they would help me. Birds looked at me with wonder and confusion as I went.

Before I knew it, I was approaching the back door of a familiar house; it was my Great-Aunt Maggie's who had not been there in years. The sun was setting I think, because it was getting dark outside and yet she hardly had any lights on in her house. She was cooking at the stove, but I couldn't smell her usually odorous cuisine. She put down the wooden spoon and stood at the top of the back stairs that lead the screen door that I was peering through. Aunt Maggie gave me a look that resembled the one that the birds I passed on my way to her house had given me; she never uttered a word. Just as I entered, the phone rang and I told her not to answer it because it was my husband trying to find me so he could kill me, but Aunt Maggie answered it anyway and, without saying a word, she handed me the phone. Of course, it was my husband and all he had to say was, "I know where you are," to send a chill up my spine. I ran from the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room at the front of the house where I saw my grandfather sitting on the couch. I begged for him to help me but all he did was look at me with the same wide, bright eyes that I look into the mirror with as I told my tale. He then sat me down on the couch next to him to silently convince me that I was overreacting.

My husband walked into the room from nowhere and shook hands with my grandfather. He continued walking toward the couch where I was sitting, but I couldn't move. My grandfather led him to sit in the chair near the couch and then exited the room. He no longer had bloodstains on his clothes and the knife he had been wielding was missing from his grasp. He took my hands, instead, in his and explained that he would never try to kill me because he loved me too much to ever do anything like that. We were alone to talk in that safe place, but I still wasn't comfortable enough to sit and talk to this thief of life. I leaped to the front door as if some unknown force was sucking me out, trying to take me back to my children to mourn their deaths now that my house was safe from my husband. Although the initial jolt from the unseen force that yanked me from the couch was swift, the unfamiliar path back to my house lingered on behind me as I flew feet first through the stagnant air. I would never made it home to clean up the mess my husband left behind. My two children and the two men who tried to warn me about my husband lay dead at my house, their bodies spilling blood all over my once pristine floors.

The yards I sailed over were vacant for some reason on this particular evening, leading me to believe that everyone was hiding inside their homes just so they wouldn't have to help me. At home with my children and with no one to assist me in protecting them; at the blood drenched hands of my husband, the madman; walking and talking with my loved ones in spite of their silence towards me; flying through the air, having no real sense of time yet having enough time to be tortured by my thoughts of being helpless. Misery! Misery! Alone in the night with my mind. What has been done can never be undone and I am therefore doomed to wander forever through the night, to nowhere.