Testimony

A woman is on the stand, she is being questioned about a murder that she committed.

Leading his attention towards her...

“This sounds more like an old pop song, something that you can’t dance to.” The city prosecutor pondered his point out loud to the audience in the courtroom, the twelve member jury and its presiding judge who seemed to agree with the prosecutor's assumption.

The voice from the witness stand irritatedly bantered under her breath, but loud enough for others to hear. “Yeah, sung by an Iranian-American singer, who Americans eroticize into being, a Native American, or an Italian woman, just to accept her.”

“No pun intended, but that wasn't the share we were expecting.”

A slight giggling emerged from various places within the forum, until the city prosecutor's stern look back at the disturbance silenced the chamber.

“Of course, Mister Prose-cutter, I get it, but even that... Nothing isn't always what you think it is. Like thinking dancing wasn’t going on. In fact the only dancing that was going on was behind my back.” The woman scornfully snipped.

The oversized attorney waved his fat finger obdurately saying, “You keep on avoiding the question! Would you please tell the people of the court why?"

The woman looked up at each of the jurors, the judge, and then the attorney, in a cold and shook way.

“I heard that she was the Queen of all queens of fortune tellers.” The woman giggled to herself as if a personal pun was made without it being noticed at first. “...As if she ever saw me coming. The woman with just one name to her. As if people were supposed to pause when they heard her name uttered... Lulu.

“From her front door window I could see cats drop like bean bags from her lap to the floor when she rose. They scattered about as she walked, except for one she held on her arm like some kind of fashion accessory. She was petting that black sleek cat when she greeted me at the door. Her cat was unconscious at first, until it smelt the air, and then gave me full attention.

“The woman I was paying for service, almost didn't speak a word, other than whispering to herself. She just stared at me, she looked away momentarily in disbelief, or disgust, and then looked back at me in astonishment and amusement. I guess she was trying to get a full image or understanding of me to do her work. Just the same, it creeped me out, and I didn’t like it.

“Nodding, she had me follow her to her work space, a dark room laced in candle light. She had me sit across from her as she chanted some made up words. After prying her purring sleek accessory off of my lap, she pulled out a regular standard deck of cards, instead of tarot cards. And the Queen of Fortune was going to give me a reading from them. As she played with the cards in her hands, she talked about me as if she had always known me and yet, I didn't know her. She didn't look at me. She acted like I wasn’t there. She talked to me about me as if I did not know who I was.”

She leaned forward to express importance.

“Lulu, the fortune teller, knew me better than I did.

“She's a first class act. She dealt out some cards with more gibberish chants overlayed with actual words.

“The last card she turned over was a one eyed Jack. It reminded me of my husband Jake for some reason, his long blonde hair, the thin mustache and soul patch, and dark eyes. Again she muttered some more words I could not understand and yet were so haunting to me by how she delivered them. She finally spoke in words I could understand but didn't want to hear.”

“The man of yours, wonderful and strong, is true, but not to you. I must say and can say it is a person who is very close to you to whom he is true for. I'm sorry. Sorry. I don't like this type..."

"I was fixated on the eye of the one eyed Jack card. A spade. And from where I was standing, it was laid upside down. One-eyed Jack is a symbol of rebirth, just like the White Rabbit, and it beckons to make the leap into Wonderland. And the flip side, in its day, symbolizes medieval weapons. Serendipity? Lulu. Lu-loonie, continued right when I had that thought."

"Of… of… this stuff... I don't like this type... energy here, here in my house. This type of energy isn’t good for my home. Leave!”

“She got up abruptly, walking away with me to follow her to the front door. Never turning to look back or talk to me. She finished what she was saying as she was shoving me out the door.”

“Leave. Leave. You must leave! Now! Leave. Never come back! It would be safer that you forgot you were ever here and never call me again. Forget me. Forget what happened here."

"Slam! Her door shut in my face.

“I couldn't stop thinking about what she said and how strange she had acted. That night when I got home, Jake wasn't there yet, as usual. Though, Jake and I have been married for thirteen years, and for the last couple of months he has been acting strange. He has come home late and missed important dates, dismissed the importance of where he's been. Typical marriage stuff... love gone possibly awry. So that evening was nothing new, except, I went to see a psychic to see what was happening with Jake. And she told me without me ever asking.

“But what she told me confirmed quietly within me what I always knew but didn't want to admit. Jake wasn’t true to me as I had been with him.

“Just being in my home, in our bedroom made me feel peculiarly uncomfortable. It wasn't just, nothing's ours, it was something else. Something smelt foul, like the same tacky perfume that the psychic, Lulu wore. I smelt my clothing thinking maybe her cats somehow got it on me. it didn't. And Lulu was never close enough to rub me down with her scent.

"It occurred to me that she had been here in my home, in my bedroom, that night! Perfumes don't lie. It was her who was very near to me, whose Jake's love was true for. All went fuzzy...

“I watched in a dream state that I could not control, how I snapped into a whole other person and didn’t realize what was going on. In a daze I made it to Lulu's house and got in without any problems and without knowing how. I did not know what I was going to say when I arrived.

“There was music but it didn't sound right. Music was echoing through her house, the echo distorted the music. Funny, I can't remember the song. It was my breath and heartbeat that stood out the loudest to me. But amongst the strange music there were voices talking and laughing. They were male voices. One was Jake's, and the other voice was very familiar, but not at all at the same time.

“I couldn't hear or find that hussy of a fortune teller in my search for Jake. Everything there seemed so unreal as I stepped in-and-out of rooms looking for him. Jake saw me first as I headed for the master bedroom. He started yelling at me immediately. I couldn't understand why he was yelling at me because I wasn't doing anything wrong. He just yelled, and yelled, and said the most awful things I never thought he could say.

“After the first shot he fell to the floor and the only sound I could hear was the gun echoing through her large house. That's when I discovered I had brought the gun with me and discharged it on him. I rushed to his side and told him how sorry I was. He just stared up at the ceiling not saying a word, ignoring me and just looking like he didn't care anymore. That was the first time when I noticed his naked body. I stood over him, that much more pissed off at him and then shot out his blank stare one eyeball at a time. I watched them explode all over his face, like when you throw a rock into a small puddle, and it explodes with a splash going all over the place.

“The sound of beeping from someone using a phone brought my attention to them. I ran in the bedroom and there was a man hiding next to the bed. The voice was familiar as they started saying hello to the police, but not coming from that thin male body. This image haunted me on who this almost familiar man was. The man backed away from me whispering for me not to shoot. That's when I realized who it was and automatically shot him. My trigger finger wouldn't stop, even well after the bullets ran out. I hated that face. Greedy deceiver. That lying face of Lulu’s. I jumped on top of him and smashed his face up with the handle of the gun.”

The district attorney started to say something but she cut him off with a wave of her hand and said, “The reason is because my man, my Jake, my husband, was messing around with a guy. With a guy! A man! And that guy was Lulu or Lou, however it was supposed to be.”

Years after her release from an insane asylum, she settled down with a new husband.

One late night she arrived home and saw her husband asleep in bed and went into the kitchen to do the dishes and make some tea. As the dishes were finally drying in the dish rack. She grabbed the french knife to cut up a lemon to go with the tea as the water was getting ready to boil. Before tending to the boiling water, she put the clean knife into the silverware rack with the knife's tip pointing up.

Simultaneously the tea kettle started to whistle as she turned on the garbage disposal to deposit the lemon skins and ends. Just then a stranger came up behind her and grabbed her hand.

They said, "Those are the hands that killed my father, and those are the hands that must go first."

The tea kettle screeched and as the garbage disposal ground her hand, her scream soared over the kettle's screech and the grinding of the garbage disposal.

Gurgling, slurps, gulps, with crackling, snapping, and crunching sounded out as her skin and bones were being pureed from inside the drain by the garbage disposal. The pitch of her screaming changed when he would let up a little pressure for a moment then repressed her hand back against the blades of the grinder. The stranger played with her jumping octaves for a while. She fought back with violent squirming regardless of the tone or pitch of her screaming.

A new sound screeching out only as metal against metal would, her wedding ring being ripped off her finger and chewed up by the teeth of the disposal. Shoving her knuckles deeper into the spinning grinders slowed down the disposal as it slowly chomped away her knuckles. As much as she'd squirmed, as much as she'd use all her power to be let go, the stranger would not.

Her one free hand, thrashing about, gouging and scratching at the attacker's face when she could. She just wasn't strong enough to fully fight them off. But that one free hand anchored itself, and threw both of them back a little in a hard shove. She landed back in the sink slumped over with her arm still in the drain. Dishes, glasses and silverware sailed and exploded onto the floor in a commotion after her attacker was knocked into the dish rack.

The french knife lodged into the stranger's shoulder. They whimpered as they spun around, like a dog chasing its tail, trying to remove the knife from the backside of their shoulder. As the stranger struggled to reach the knife, she grabbed the kettle and threw the boiling hot water on them, scolding the side of their face and shoulder, the same shoulder with the knife in it. They lunged for her but was stopped by the kettle hitting them upside their head that made them fall back into the refrigerator door, sinking the now hot knife deeper into his shoulder.

She plucked her remaining arm out of the garbage disposal, spraying blood all over the place. Wrapping the blunt end of her wrist into her shirt as she ran for her husband in the bedroom. But she slipped on the plates that were on the kitchen floor. Using the kitchen door frame and her one good arm, she pulled herself up onto her feet and continued to run.

She found her husband in bed with his eyes open. They were twisted, looking up at the ceiling. Hauntingly reminding her how Jake looked after she shot him just once. She poked and tugged at him to break his gaze and he remained dormant staring upward. In her tugging his body, he rolled over revealing a paper spindle sticking out of the back of his neck.

Getting to the bedroom was a problem with the punching sharp throbbing of the burning knife sticking in their shoulder. The stranger walked the knife out of his back by wedging the knife's handle in a closed door. A wet sloppy noise happened when the knife came out of their back. The knife dropped as the door released its hold on it. Snatching the dropped knife off of the floor helped them find her bloody trail to the bedroom that much quicker.

Standing with their back towards the closet door, the stranger could tell by her husband's turned over body she was there, somewhere in the bedroom. Not knowing the closet door was slowly opening behind them as they stood there scanning the room. Her one good hand reached out from behind the closet door to try to grab the knife away from the wounded stranger without them knowing. But what she couldn’t see that they could was her blood trail that led to the closet behind him. Immediately they reacted to the hand in their peripheral vision.

The stranger threw their body against the door, smashing her arm in it. And with the knife, that was still hot from the boiling water, they sliced off her stretching-scratching fingers. They watched one of her fingers drop like a dart, leaving the finger landing standing straight up with the long painted fingernail embedded in the carpet.

A new type of agonizing scream prevailed forth from the poor woman. Because of her screaming they wouldn't stop slamming the door on her arm. All the stranger could think of was the continuous pumping of a locomotive as they continuously smashed the door into her arm. They didn’t stop until they heard her body drop to the floor on the other side of the door, and saw her arm fall to the ground in front of them.

“There's the other hand I came to collect.” The strange attacker announces in victory as claimed they reward from the floor. The door had detached her arm.

“At first the silence was tauntingly creepy, but then I rejoiced in it, until I heard a couple of coughs from inside the closet. There was blood all over the place, I could hear her crying from the darkness of the closet. Kicking around hard in the dark closet helped feel her out. Her horrific holler of a scream, accompanied by another thud, that I could hear from her body being kicked over, meant I had found her. I dragged her out of the closet and beat her furiously with her amputated arm. I stopped after her face caved-in and stopped moving. She was unrecognizable and deserved not to be looked at anymore.

“And so, to answer your question, Mister Prosecutor, that is when I gave it to her, knowing she would never have it again. It didn't bother me, isn't that what Jake initially wanted from her. I stayed until the blood dried and hardened on both of our bodies. I couldn't see that I did anything wrong then, and still don't to this day.”

The attorney jumped up and exhaustedly said, “You told us what you did before, but you haven't said why you did this. Why? Why did you do this? What is it that you see that we don't? Why did you do this?”

“Because I loved my father. No matter what he was. He was still my father. And she took him from me. And not by just killing him. She aggressively slaughtered him out of hatred and jealousy for who he was and what he was. So I gave her back what she gave my dad, with the bonus of what she wanted and didn't expect. A daughter's love for her father.”

The end.