by Claire L. Smith
Mary felt as if the hammer had struck her once again as she awoke, her dented skull dipping into her pulsing brain. She lay where she’d fallen, horizontal across the bed with her feet and hands dangling over each end. With a throaty groan, Mary pushed herself up into a sitting position, blood slipping from her hair and slapping the bed sheets like a broken water balloon. She stumbled about the bedroom like a morning drunk, travelling via the wall until she found her dresser. She found her most modest of dresses, knowing that her husband was already mad at yesterday’s choice of a summer dress. The dress hung loosely on her nimble body, the back tag sticking out from her cleavage. Still innocently oblivious of her injury, Mary pushed open the bedroom door and began to descend the stairs, her blood falling like light rain on each step. Her body grew heavy on her wobbling legs, the wooden floor at the bottom of the stairs swaying like a ship deck. She neglected to notice the front door wide open with a night’s worth of snow clogging the entrance way and the handle of the hammer sticking out of the field of snow. Like every morning, she was desperate to have a warm breakfast on
the table by seven thirty. Shuffling over to the kitchen stove, Mary reached up towards the dangling saucepans on the rack above. The heaviness of the pan and the numbness of her fingers caused the pot to fall from her weak grip, denting the kitchen tiles like the hammer had her skull. Mary froze as a sharp clang echoed through the house, under the impression that her husband would awake and ‘complain’ about the wake-up call. She waited, greeted by only the whistling silence of the snow fall outside. Her sigh of relief was followed by a dizziness as the last of her drained clean of vital red fuel. Mary fell to the floor like a flower bending in the wind, her pupils sinking back into her battered skull as her body finally shut down, finally free of her duties and abuse. Yet all she could think of is what he would do.
Ref: Death and The Maiden
January 16, 2018 at 4:26 am
Very scary..
LikeLike
February 26, 2018 at 5:32 pm
Some lovely phrases here like ‘fell to the floor like a flower’, / ‘like a morning drunk’ a acutely written piece highlighting the tragedy of abuse and the terminal consequences of it- thought provoking.
LikeLike
February 27, 2018 at 5:38 pm
Very chilling! Well done.
LikeLike
March 11, 2018 at 12:17 am
Very scary, not just because of what happened to Mary but because of the psychological abuse she has suffered
LikeLike
March 14, 2018 at 4:15 pm
Chilling, tragic. And all the more so due to the sadly believable last line!
LikeLike
March 21, 2018 at 2:13 pm
Ah, the unhappy routine of women the world over. Poor dear.
LikeLike
March 28, 2018 at 1:42 pm
Pleasingly vivid.
LikeLike
March 31, 2018 at 10:26 am
Enjoyed it. Felt for her, knowing she was to die very soon. You depicted the level of abuse and how she still behaved on her auto-pilot, fear-driven motivation even after her final ‘beating’, which it made it all the upsetting and horrifying.
Great work.
LikeLike
May 7, 2018 at 5:57 am
This is so sad. The horror is vivid and strongly evoked but the lingering feeling this story leaves me with is sadness and an unsettling feeling that it’s probably contains more than a kernel of figurative truth.
LikeLike