(It's Hard to See) Beyond the Rain

tw: violent and graphic imagery

He thinks I’m asleep as he sneaks about the house. He forgets I can’t sleep through storms. I imagine the sky yelling at me over something I didn’t know I did. I never learned the sky’s language no matter how much weather channel I watch, but if I did I’d apologize to it for whatever I’ve done to make it rage.

I stopped apologizing to him, however. A long time ago. He doesn’t care. I can hear the thumps from his footsteps and the snickers overflowing from his throat. I imagine his wide eyes and Cheshire smile and his wormy hands crawling everywhere. It’s January 7^th. He circled the date, his special date, the date of his plan.

My heart goes ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. 

When I finally decide to leave the bedroom, I’m greeted by the barrel of a Colt .45 staring at me.

*CLICK*

When my breath comes back to me, I find in his place another Colt .45 dangling from a string attached to the ceiling. There is a note taped to it. There are 10 guns in the house. One of them is loaded and I forgot which one it is. The first one to find the loaded gun and shoot the other wins. Tee-hee, good luck!

I hate him. 

I take the gun, sure of it being empty—he likes his games to last a while. I move cautiously down the corridor, partly because my legs feel weak. “This is just a game,” I tell myself. “None of the guns are loaded. He doesn’t want either of us to die.” 

I turn gun-first into the living room, furnished for a family of five, but I refuse to bare children for or around him. A gun is duct taped to the TV screen. It plays the weather channel. The sky will be angry all day, according to the weather lady. (I must have done something really inconsiderate.) 

I hear his giggle behind me. Quickly I turn around. I imagine catching him with a bullet to his ribs, him collapsing, gasping. If I kill him, I will feel safe for the first time in three years.

Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.

*CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*

Empty.

He’s not there. He cackles at me, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from anymore. I hurry and retrieve the gun taped to the TV. When I turn, he’s poking his head out the kitchen to see me. He points a gun at me. His grin is so mischievous and bright—he’s having the time of his life. He’s reacting to the look on my face. I’m not annoyed or angry like he usually makes me. My body screams “I’m terrified”. I imagine the feeling my breastbone disintegrating from his bullet. 

If he kills me, he’ll have no one to play with. 

*CLICK*

Nothing.

His smile falters for half a second.  He retreats deeper into the kitchen. With a .45 in my hand I chase after him, indulging him when I should hide and call the police.

I scan the kitchen for anything gun shaped. I see nothing but the oven and microwave against the far wall, both covered in crumbs and grease. To my left, the sink is full of sticky dishes where ants work to excavate gold and oil and other precious materials. To my right, a lone bowl of half-eaten cereal sits as our round, wooden table’s only piece of decoration. Splashes of spilt milk sits behind it. I can clean it all—I have the time—but I’ve let things go as of late. Like the cleanliness of the kitchen. Like this game. Like my mind, so I’ve been told.

He appears into my field of vision. He slides penguinesque from one end of the kitchen floor to the other,

*CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*

only stopping to smash a hammer on my foot.

I miss him when I throw the empty revolver at him. He stops by the fridge, opens it. In the glass pitcher of fruit punch, he fishes out another .45 that floats inside. The barrel stares at the space between my eyes. With his other hand he tips the pitcher downward, and the contents of our fruit punch quench his thirst and stain his shirt. This is what he wants: the suspense, the delay that makes me think how casually it would be for him to pull the trigger. 

I’m hoping on one foot. The pain from the other doesn’t subside fast enough.

If he kills me, how will he figure out how the stove works?

*CLICK*

He scowls. I don’t understand why. In my dreams, he’s always smiling, while I’m running away from him. In my nightmares, the sky is furious and I can’t escape him. Why is this game of his accented with such finality?

He drops the unloaded gun. He drops the pitcher. It shatters into millions of shards, and I’m acutely aware that I’m barefoot. He seems pouty when he walks out of view, yet he has nowhere else to go besides the location of the next revolver. I manage to limp around the scattered shards out the kitchen—I fear my right foot might be broken.

I hop step by step until I reach the upstairs bathroom. I want to be alone. What I see in the mirror doesn’t surprise me. My bitter expression, my horrendous acne, my brittle, disheveled hair, all brought about by a combination of stress and lack of sleep. My teeth are yellowish—I forget to brush them sometimes.

The bathtub greets me after the minutes go by. It remembers when I lied inside it when he tried to surgically remove one of my kidneys. I’m rude and don’t greet it back. I lift Sir Toilet Seat and recall all the times he’s hid gifts in here for me after placing fake gifts under the Christmas tree or in my room. Sure enough, hidden under the surface of the toilet water is a Colt .45, just for me.

I know it’s empty. He lied on his note; he knows where the loaded revolver is, and he sure wouldn’t have put it in myhiding spot. My hand that holds the gun drips. I turn to squat and pee, and long after I’m done I rock myself back and forth, the weapon cradled in my bosom.

Footsteps. Sliding. A thump. All outside the door. Silence. I hold my breath to be sure.

Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.

The bathroom doorknob jiggles. It’s locked, of course. I imagine it falling off, the door granting him permission to enter. Slowly I slide my pajama bottoms up my thighs, to not make a sound.

I stare at the doorknob too intensely. It appears larger than before. My skin turns blue from how long I’ve held my breath.

My heartbeat is ubiquitous. 

BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM.

He lets go. Then nothing. More suspense. I bite down so hard my molars might crack.

There is a sudden crash of a hatchet breaking through the middle of the bathroom door. I’m screaming—I didn’t know I could scream this loud. More hatchet swings make the hole in the door larger. On instinct I point the empty revolver at him. 

*CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*

He breaks through with the hatchet firmly in his grasp. His smile returns when he sees me cornered. So easily can he swing his hatchet at me, its blade lodging into my skull, or my jaw so I can’t scream anymore, blood pouring from me like a faucet when he pulls it out to plunge it into me again. 

Instead, he places the hatchet near the sink and pulls from his back pocket another revolver. The game always comes first. When the game ends, we end. This is by design. I should know this. 

If he kills me, he’ll lose his sense of identity and devolve into barbarism.

*CLICK*

I feel his disappointment, like a shift in temperature. He slams the gun on the floor, takes the hatchet, and starts swinging. Not at me, but at the sink, at the mirror, at the shower curtain. 

I manage to crawl from out the bathroom. I run to his bedroom, the master bedroom. I sleep downstairs, in the guest bedroom, because I trust him less when I’m asleep. His room is a mess of discarded clothes and pizza boxes and miscellaneous things, like WWE action figures and playing cards and plastic bags with drugs inside and screwdrivers. The mess that litters the bed and the floor makes the room unlivable. I don’t think he even sleeps. I wanted this bedroom for myself once upon a time, before I wished this house would burn to the ground.

I dive into the clutter, hoping to find a hidden .45. I’m desperate. I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t want to die. 

The junk in the room quantifies the more I search, or am I falling deeper into the underneath like quicksand? I find a box with a mesh of wires from when he tried to make a bomb. A tooth coated in blood, the one he asked me to yank out with pliers just to see if I’d do it. A trench coat that belonged to a man we met at the bar. I don’t know how he obtained the trench coat or what happened to the man who owned it. He dances with the trench coat sometimes. Other times, he’d weaken me, through drugs or violence, and waltz with my limp body. Bad memories. If I find the loaded gun, I’ll make new memories. I’ll visit my parents. Get a gym membership. Join a book club. Learn the sky’s language. Find someone with a gentler touch. 

“Ahem!”

I climb out the pit to find him entering the room. For one ba-dum he stands at the doorway until he knows he has my attention. His hands are empty. No bulge of a revolver in his pants. He walks around the bed, stepping on his own things like they aren’t there, until he reaches the opposite wall. He yells at the wall, like how they yell in karate movies. He jams his fist through the wall. When he pulls it out, he spills a puddle of drywall dust on his feet. He pulls out a gun hidden behind the wall of all places. Excitement lights up his eyes. I roll out of his bed to run for my life, for I am positive the one loaded gun is the one only he could find.

If he kills me, he himself will expire from loneliness. There is no one in existence that can handle his mania for as long as I have. 

I step with my right foot, and the pain it causes slows me down. I trudge on, still with fight in me, even if it’s too late.

*CLICK*

I almost want to stop, take a moment to laugh at him for burying an empty .45 in the wall. All that effort for nothing. But I know better than to stop. That’s gun number eight of ten. The game is almost over.

Turning my head back I notice the wooden ladder leading to the attic pulled down. This must have been where he retrieved a revolver before finding me in the bathroom. The attic is not a good place to hide; I’d be cornered if I’m found. I can’t think of any good hiding spot, although my panic doesn’t help my problem-solving skills. 

I imagine myself cramped in the pantry or in a closet, and when he finds me, gun in his hand, he taunts me, really makes me think about what’s going to happen in the next five seconds, then pulls the trigger. I imagine the gun, the last gun, empty, and him laughing at me, at his elaborate joke, while I shake and cry from everything. I then realize how little I believe in the idea of this whole thing being a ruse, simply because he’s always needed a sense of inherent danger to be this engaged in an act. So now I imagine him finding me in a closet or pantry and pulling the trigger with the barrel of the gun pressed to my forehead. And I wonder if I’d feel the bullet dig into my brain or if I’d be dead before the pain registers. 

Then I see it, like the twinkle of a star: the ninth Colt .45. It sits uncreatively in the corner of the wall right before the descent downstairs. I turn my head once more to make sure he’s not behind me before I limp over to it. 

Now armed, I return to his room in hopes that he’s still there having a tantrum. He’s not. As hard as it is to climb into the attic with one bad foot, I do so. He’s not there, either. He’s not in the bathroom where he left the hatchet. He’s not any of the other dusty, untouched bedrooms. He’s not in the living room, nor the guest bathroom, nor the kitchen, nor the dining room, nor my room. He’s not even in the garage.

Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.

The last place to check is the basement. I have mixed feelings about the basement. It’s tricked out to look like a bar, with a stone LED-lit counter, stools, shelves that display various bottles of hard liquor, chandelier lighting, a TV installed in the upper corner, and a little radio that’s constantly playing soft jazz.

Before he unlocked a cage full of rats, or locked me in a cage of my own, or perform any other horrors he concocted, he served me a drink of my choice, as if he were a bartender—on milder days he’d even dress the part. We’d be strangers for a few minutes. He flirted with me; he’s surprisingly good at it. I smiled. I laughed. It was genuine, even when I knew he was setting me up for disappointment.

Now’s not the time to hold onto happy memories. Perhaps I never should have with him.

I balance myself on the metal railing and I take one labored step at a time down to find him standing behind the counter, solemn, sipping from a glass. Sitting on the counter, fingertips away, is the tenth revolver. He sees me, sees the gun in my hand. Fifty-fifty. A coin toss. I should be more tense, but because it’s the basement bar, I know this is the part where pleasantries are to be exchanged first. I’m calm when I slip onto a stool. 

He pours me a glass of cognac. I pick it up, examine it. He gives a subtle shake of his head—it’s not drugged. I take a sip. It goes down smooth and sweet.

“Is it true that one of these guns is loaded?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Is it true that you don’t know which gun it is?”

“It wouldn’t be fun if I did.”

“…Why, though? After all the stunts you’ve pulled, why does one of us have to die now?”

“I don’t want to die. I want to know what it’s like to lose you unexpectedly. I want to know if I’m strong enough to handle the sudden loss of the best think that’s ever happened to me.” He chugs the cognac straight from the bottle, then smiles that smile I detest. He points his gun at me.

BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM BA-DUM.

“Well,” he says, “if there is a heaven, I hope you end up there.”

*CLICK*

…

*CLICK* *CLICK*

Nothing.

*CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*

And the clicking goes on in the eternity between this moment and the next. His revolver slips from his fingers, and the hand that held it shivers. Mr. Colt looks back at me with a wink, then I stand up to point it at him. Forcing his smile, he shrugs his shoulders and says “You got me good this time, huh?”

If I kill him, I will never sleep again. If I kill him, he haunts me forever. If I kill him, I take his place. I infect someone else. I won’t get the taste out of my mouth. Life shouldn’t be contested in a game. Death shouldn’t be arbitrary. 

As hard as I can, I smack him with the butt of the revolver, knocking him out. Then I hurry out the basement. 

“Stupid bitch you fucking pussy he’s going to kill you now dumb half-measure pussy fuck shit!”

I open the front door and step outside. The sky is still livid with me, and despite all my courage and all my adrenaline, I cannot escape this house where my trauma lives. The neighborhood is flooded with rain water. The winds are too intense to traverse safely. Mr. Tree, who guards the house, doesn’t want to be blown away, but it just might. 

“What do you want from me?!” I yell at the sky. “I won’t do it! I’m not a killer. Let me no! I promise I won’t come back!”

Lightning whips across the sky’s face and deafens me.

I snap back with a roar of my own and a Colt .45 pointed above my head.

*BANG* BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*

The storm persists. I’m cold and I’m drenched. I make whooshing sounds with my mouth to mimic the wind, the sky’s language. I want to apologize for my outburst, but I fear I’m saying the wrong things.