I was driving home with my wife last Sunday night after spending the week visiting family.
I think a lot of people, like me and my wife, have an unspoken agreement/acknowledgement to not pick up hitchhikers. We were taught growing up that anyone on the side of the road was probably some sort of serial killer or kidnapper wanting to catch anyone kind enough to pull over for them, so we just drive on by pretending we don’t see them.
When I was driving that night, I saw an elderly woman standing beside the road with her thumb out. I almost didn’t see her since she was hunched over in a black coat that blended into the dark, but the wrinkled skin of her hand was so white and pale that it was practically blinding.
Like I said before, I don’t pick up hitchhikers. I never pick up hitchhikers. However, for some reason, I locked eyes with the poor woman and my body just worked on its own to pull over and let her in. I didn’t think about it, really, but I could tell from my wife’s side glance that I f-ed up.
The car ride itself was fine, I think. At one point my wife accepted some homemade peanut brittle from the older woman, which was surprising to say the least. I took it as a sign that she was starting to see that the woman wasn’t going to hurt us and that I made the right decision, but as you’ll read soon, I was definitely wrong.
When we finally dropped the woman off, me and my wife sat together in the car to talk for a bit. It started off with a light conversation about how she wished that I had asked her first before making that decision and whatnot, but in the middle of talking she just kinda… zoned out? I kept trying to explain to her that I wasn’t thinking about my actions and that I was sorry, but she just started telling me to drive. She was getting more and more urgent about it, which I didn’t understand until I looked out the rearview mirror. The elderly woman that we had just dropped off was sprinting, not running, sprinting towards our car at full speed, sobbing and screaming random nonsense like “she’s not me” and “I’m not her.” Needless to say, I put the pedal to the metal and drove the hell outta dodge.
We haven’t talked since that night. If we dropped that woman off about 5 minutes too late, she probably would have acted crazy in the car and gotten at least one of us hurt. I feel horrible about my actions that night, and my wife’s silence is only making me feel worse. I understand that she is mad, but instead of trying to talk it out, she just stares at me. It always happens when my back is turned or when I think I’m alone, and I think she does it to freak me out to make me feel the same way she felt that night in the car, or something. There’s been nights where I accidentally wake up too early from a deep sleep, and I can just feel her eyes staring at me from behind my back.
There was even a time recently when I was doing work on my computer and that feeling of being watched came back, but after turning around and seeing that no one was in the room, I just ignored it and went back to typing. After a little bit, I finished up what I was doing and got up from my chair to stretch when I saw her peering out of the closet. Her eyes were so wide that it almost looked like she didn’t even have eyelids, and her fingers that were holding the edge of the sliding door were long and spindly like spider legs. It scared the shit out of me, and when I confronted her about it she just slinked out of the room and into the kitchen.
It took a little while for me to collect my thoughts before following her lead and heading to the kitchen, not necessarily because I wanted to be around her at that moment, but so I could check on her and be there if she decided to talk. I vividly remember seeing my lover hunched over a fresh pan of peanut brittle, steaming as its heat fought against the cold air that hung around her presence. She wouldn’t have noticed me if I hadn’t gasped in shock at her appearance, which I feel terrible saying about my wife, but she had those same lidless eyes that looked like they were about to roll right out of their sockets. Her head snapped in my direction, her joints popping into place as she started to slither towards me.
“I need to go to bed,” I told her while backing myself against the bedroom door, “I’m not hungry right now, but thank you.”
She kept moving towards me like I hadn’t said anything at all. Her teeth chattered and her long nails clicked against the hardwood floor when she decided it would be better to crawl towards me on all fours, limbs overlapping each other like some fucked up game of twister. I was terrified at this point, but my words came out of me as if they were brewed from anger.
“Screw this. You may not be ready to talk to me yet, but I will never be ready to deal with this bullshit. I’m going to bed. Feel free to sleep on the couch if you’re going to act like this.” I went into our room and locked the door before hiding under the blanket, like a kid afraid of what could be lurking in the darkness of his room. I was too scared to feel sorry for her at this point, because this was the point I began realizing that this was not the woman I married.
The last straw was when I woke up today to the smell of peanuts. When I was slowly opening my eyes and adjusting to the light, there was a blurred image of my wife sitting on top of my chest holding a broken piece of brittle to my mouth.
“Eat,” she growled at me in a weathered voice while the peanut brittle kissed my bottom lip. This was the first time she had spoken to me since that night with the hitchhiker. This one word stuck to me like glitter on my scalp, and up until now I had no clue the impact a single word could have on a human being. I inched myself up from the bed and took the brittle in my hand, my eyes locked with hers in a stare.
“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll eat this while I’m on my way to work.” I needed some sort of excuse to leave the house, and I prayed that the woman I had previously believed to be my wife didn’t know that I worked from home. She screamed at me in response, a loud wordless shriek that rattled my eardrums, before coiling her hands around my throat like a python to its prey. I was trying to tell her to stop, I really was, but the sentences only bubbled out as wasted oxygen as I struggled to get myself free. I was clawing and digging my fingers into whatever cracks and crevices I could find between my neck and her hands, thrashing and pulling myself away from the impossible strength my wife possessed as if I were an animal trying to escape a bear trap, but she only squeezed harder and screamed louder.
Then, she let go.
The hands that had been cupped around my throat went limp and fell to my shoulders before sliding down my chest and resting by her sides. I looked up to see half of her face gone, replaced by what looked like a dropped bowl of spaghetti, before her body collapsed to its side and rolled onto the bedroom floor. The room was strangely quiet while I watched the blood pool around her head and sink through the cracks of the hardwood floor, but eventually a familiar voice snapped me free from the shock.
“I… I didn’t know… didn’t know what to do, I…” The words slurred together, somehow both sounding calm and panicked. I looked up to see the hitch hiker from the other night, standing and shaking in the doorway while using all of her strength left to lift a shotgun to her chest while the barrel pointed at my dead wife on the floor. I could feel my stomach flip and knot itself so tight that I almost threw up.
“Baby,” I murmured, both as a statement and a question? The woman didn’t stray from where she stood, but she acknowledged my voice with a whimper.
“Oh God, oh Jesus, what have I done? What have I done?” She dropped the gun and slipped to her knees, running her fingers through the thin strands of grey hair that clung to her head. I ran to her without any questions or second thoughts. I held her tight in my arms and rubbed her back, comforting her while we both sobbed in each other’s arms.
It’s been a few hours since all of this happened. We have both calmed down, mostly. It didn’t take too long for my wife to begin looking like her original self, but the tightening of her skin and shifting of her bone structure was not the most comfortable experience for her.
Being questioned by the police was relatively straightforward; both my wife and I stood by the same story that an elderly woman entered our home after offering her homemade goods before attempting to kill us both. My wife had shot her out of self defense, and we are both in shock from the horrors of the situation. The policeman nodded while jotting something down in a tiny spiral notepad, acting like there wasn’t an elderly woman with only half a face right in the other room.
It’s over now. We were thanked for our time before getting kicked out of our own house so they could clean up the leftover death. I am sitting in the car typing this with my wife in the passenger’s seat and two suitcases in the trunk, ready to head over to a nice little motel nearby to stay a few nights. The engine is running, the radio is playing music that is drowned in static, and I take one last look out the window to watch the cops pop pieces of peanut brittle into their mouths before driving off.