The Felled Power Line

Freddie Roft stared out the glass doors, the kind that parted eerily whenever you drew near, almost as though something invisible was pulling it open for you. Freddie was a paranoid man who was rarely at ease. His mind raced and his brow remained in a constant furrowed state. His grey-blue eyes always appeared distant, lost in thought or memory or both. His head was small and his chin angular. He was a skinny little man, used to being walked on and having the feet of life dragged across him like a pitiful welcome mat. Something about him just screamed Come on over and stomp on me! Right in the face, if you don’t mind, others have been avoiding it! Perhaps it was his size, the way his fingers kind of twitched when he held them at his side, his past.

No matter the cause, it kept happening. People saw him and had control. He had gone from an abusive mother to an abusive wife and now? Now, he found himself in the supermarket in the midst of a dangerous blizzard. His wife had sent him for a bag of dog food, which he had opened his mouth to argue about before bowing his head in submission. If he had protested in the slightest she would’ve let him have it. She would start to scream. She would start to hurl insults. She would start to curse like a sailor. She would slap him. He found it best not to argue.

Freddie has clambered into his car - a sedan which, despite wanting a pickup truck, had been the only car his wife would allow - and blasted the heater, desperate to keep warm. He had bundled up in three coats and two hats, but if he lost any more weight, things would be bad. His rib cage was visibly pressing up against his skin like in that movie, Alien. Just pushing against the skin, awaiting escape with an eager malice. He shuddered at the thought and started down the road. The car’s tires had struggled through some patches of snow (A problem he wouldn’t have encountered in the nice Ford pickup truck he had in mind) but otherwise it had been a relatively smooth ride. Soon, he would be in the empty supermarket, completely devoid of any human life as well as supplies. In his dying breaths, he would wonder where the cashier and the food had been.

            Visibility was horrible. The tiny headlights on his car served essentially no purpose aside from looking like the car’s squinting eyes. He went easy on the gas and kept a speed of about thirty, although realizing what his wife would do if he took too long, he pushed it up to forty. He was a skinny little doormat, covered in mud and spit from hundreds of people stepping all over him. Why would he stand up for himself now, of all times? At one point, the summer tires of the sedan slid against ice, making only a revving sound and accelerating at a startling rate. Thankfully he came onto the road once again after nearly skidding into the thick tree cover to the right of him. A truck was spilled in the ditch, and Freddie couldn’t help but think about the person who had been driving. Maybe a trucker with four kids at home, dependent on whether or not he made his shipments. Looks like they would be going without food for a couple days. Freddie shuddered at the thought. He was empathetic to suffering. God had certainly blessed him with plenty of it.

            About fifteen minutes later, he came gliding into a parking spot just outside the supermarket. The cold was making him shiver, the shivering would make him lose calories, less calories meant less weight. If he dropped below a hundred pounds . . . his wife would surely be able to break his bones; that was a situation he could vomit at the thought of. If his wife was given the same power his mother had? He would probably be dead and buried in the backyard by this time tomorrow. He nearly gagged, then got out of the car and jogged towards the store, whose doors slid open without sound. He shivered a little at the doors (An unusual phobia of his), then remembered his weight problem. He stopped shivering. Once the doors cruised back to their original position, he realized just how strange things were in that supermarket.

            Not a single other soul was idly wandering among the deserted lanes with Freddie. No music played over the intercom, no voices spoke. There was nothing to cut through the thick shawl of silence in that store, and the man was on edge. His eyes darted around, searching for any reason, any reason at all, for the supermarket to be completely . . . dead. He sought out an employee; no cashiers, no shelf stockers, no one behind the deli counter or the bakery counter, no one in the pharmacy, no baggers, no cart boys dashing through traffic with trains of shopping carts. Freddie swallowed. Hard. He envisioned himself being tied down and decapitated in a place like this. It was terrifying. He hadn’t been engulfed in fear like this since, well since childhood. His eyes faded off to the glass doors and the slurries of snow pouring down through the winter evening, his mind was a hundred miles away and some thirty years in the past.

            He had flown up the stairs, his muddy-bottomed shoes ditched on the second floor of the house. He sprinted up into the attic and hid in the place that had come to be known, in his head of course, as His Place. It was located within the depths of the attic, as far from the stairs as possible. Darkness scared many children his age, but not Freddie. He had always seen it as a refuge, a break, even, from the light. The light being, of course, the horrors of the outside world. Of his mother. Over the years he had stacked up boxes of clothing and trunks of, probably, the same thing. They were heavy brown and black trunks, each with sets of brass latches and locks. He had mentioned in his thoughts one time that they might’ve held severed heads or some other horrible secret; he had dismissed the thought at once, although those creepy thoughts always had a way of coming back to him. They would fade into his dreams and drawings at school. He would find himself sketching one of those trunks, the top flung open and coiling out was . . . well, what was it? In his dreams it had always been some unknown evil, but what, really, was worse than his mother’s wrath? He scurried through the opening and, like being swallowed up in a cave, everything was that same black void; calm and serene darkness. He rotated immediately, his frightened eyes staring out towards the tightly-wound spiral staircase that led up to the attic. It was carpeted and terribly filthy, but he didn’t mind it. All of a sudden, His Place was shuddering in fear as well, as his mother’s footsteps came booming up the steps. She called out in a ferocious roar, one that Freddie would always equate to that of a lion or tiger on the nature channel.

    “FREDDIE! YOU WALKED IN THE HOUSE WITH YOUR SHOES! YOU WALKED, IN THE HOUSE, WITH YOUR SHOES!”

    He quivered in terror, backing up until his entire body was pressed up against the back of His Place. The foundation of the house seemed to shake as well, as her body came into view. Her face was puffy and flushed red with hot rage. Her usual frown was curled into a grimace of pure hatred. She had glasses against her face, the body a metal so thin that they seemed to grow straight out of her head. She had a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, an upside-down grin, and was letting her feet down in great big stomps. At last, her entire body was in view: her legs were as thick as tree trunks and her torso, which appeared as just a bosom and a behind, was just one lumpy sack of potatoes. And that was the best way to describe her, like a sack of potatoes morphed into a half-woman, half-horrible beast. Her hand was giving off great torrents of steam, but Freddie knew that wasn’t the truth. He had worn his shoes in the house, sludged mud across the floors; her hand was wrapped around an iron, steaming and red hot. He lay there in complete silence, his eyes closed, his heart racing. Please God oh please oh please don’t let her find me oh please God, he prayed in a steady stream of thought. He just wanted to be gone from here. He wanted to get on his bike and fly down the roads and the highways and - 

    A trunk was thrown off His Place, tearing the roof apart and leaving Freddie there in the open. There in the light. There with his mother . . . 

    Here he was in the supermarket, whose shelves were all completely empty, devoid of any supplies whatsoever while a blizzard raged on outside, his back tingling and buzzing. The scar was hurting, just thinking about what had happened that day. It was shaped like a rectangle had a triangle added onto its end, only every corner was slightly rounded. The mark of an iron, which had been burned into the pale white flesh of his back on that afternoon. He walked up and down each aisle, finding the same thing each time: no people and no supplies, no people and no supplies. Up and down and up and down the aisles. Nothing. Quiet as a cemetery. After completing his elaborate loop, he faced the checkout area, turned towards the rest of the store, and called out a single word,

    “Hello?”

    He decided to do one better,

    “Anyone here?”

    He could hear the crickets chirping sound effect that was played in comedy movies and such, when a joke failed to land. He felt something rising in him, the same emotion that had surfaced during the day he had worn his shoes in the house. A terrible sensation of fear rose up through his body and made him shiver. He was wearing several layers of clothing, and yet he found the hairs on his arms sticking up and his flesh growing pallid. He was nervous and, quite frankly, creeped out. He decided to just turn around and head home, content with the tirade of insults that his wife would set upon him, just as long as it meant getting out of that empty supermarket as fast as possible . . . only something made his decision a whole heck of a lot more challenging. 

A baby, one in a blue shirt and beige shorts, was just sitting in a cart towards the back end of the checkout area. It had a tiny amount of brown hair on its head (Just as Freddie had) and a dumb smile on its face. He couldn’t help but find himself utterly shocked at the sight. His fear had curled into more of a curious and slightly anxious feeling. The baby looked like, well, him. The resemblance was uncanny, and dreadfully eerie. Glancing around to make sure no one was setting up some sort of trap for him, he picked up the small child. Its eyes seemed to light up as they met Freddie’s, and he found himself wanting to cry. He didn’t like to cry, and felt as though most situations didn’t call for it, but this one was special. He let a few tears glide down his face, reach the angular point of his chin, then drip-drop down onto the awful grocery store tiled flooring. He wiped his eye with a sleeve of his outermost jacket, then held the baby in a more traditional fashion: pressed up against him as though he were the boy’s mother. He had a thought that if someone caught him doing this there would be massive trouble, but he just waved it off. A baby! In the middle of the supermarket! He found his mind blissfully away from the mysterious absence of the food and the clerks, and completely focused on this lone child. 

Freddie got a hold of himself, shook his head a little, took a deep breath, and stopped to think. What was he going to do? What was his next move? He couldn’t just leave the child there. Surely not. That would be grisly, to say the least. No, he couldn’t leave him there. So what was the other option? There was really only one. He glanced over his shoulder again, the look someone gives before they break into a parked car. He scooped the baby up in his arms and gloved hands, then cradled it in a tight ball of warmth,

“Don’t worry, kid. I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna take care of you.”

The baby crooned and giggled, then relaxed in his arms, comfortable. Freddie’s mind, being lingering and rather sporadic, felt another idea climb into his head. One that was radically against everything his character had ever been. One of action. You’re a doormat, always have been. Your mother, your wife, everyone, has treated you like garbage from the moment they laid their eyes on your sorry self. But here’s something . . . you turn the tables! Aha, yes! You turn the tables and take the child! You take him and all your savings and you, well, escape. Leave your wife behind, she abuses you and you loathe her, it’s for the best! For all three of you! He stopped to consider this a moment. He didn’t know why he stopped, or so he thought, but deep down he did. He was waiting for something, anything, to change. For someone to storm in and tell him, sir, put that baby down. But he waited a minute, then two, then five, nothing. Nothing changed, and so he wrapped that baby up tight in his arms, laid a little kiss on the kid’s forehead, then ran out into the snow. He pulled out his keys and stuck them into the lock on the car door. He ever-so-carefully set down the child in the passenger seat, buckled him in, then started the car. Freddie would later regret not securing his own seatbelt. He started the car with first a rebellious roar and continued growl, but once the engine turned over the great beast was tamed. He pulled his car onto the only big road in town and continued on, the heater humming idly as he drove away from his home.

I’ve done it! I’m taking this boy and I’m gonna raise him, better than my mother or wife ever could raise a child! He laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a great hearty laugh. It was a laugh that was truly free. Once he had caught his breath and wiped the bits of tears from his eyes, he relaxed in his seat and inhaled deeply. Only the open road ahead with hundreds of miles to put in between him and the monster he had shared a bed with the past fifteen years. He shuddered at the thought of how time flies by, and focused on the road, which was invisible through the sheets of snow. He squinted and stared through the headlights of his car, but no road appeared, only falling slurries of those white specks. The windshield wipers were running at full capacity, struggling to keep up with the hefty task of combating the snow. Freddie shrugged it off, he was on the road and that was all that mattered. He felt vindicated, he felt a new weight off his chest, but most of all, he felt - 

The felled power line. It blocked the icy road that night. Freddie’s car slammed into it at seventy five miles an hour, a speed that he had recklessly allowed the vehicle to reach in his distant state of mind. As the spire of metal adjoined to wood was thrust through his brain, he wondered why there had been no one and nothing in that supermarket. The front of the car was crushed in on itself like a tin can dropped from the Empire State Building, killing Freddie Roft and the baby sitting beside him instantly.