I don’t remember the first time I found you. Probably looking regal in some ballroom yet still you managed to captivate me so. It is quite sad really, that I do remember the first time I lost you.
It had been a busy week. The end-product of a good time of courting, we’d been married a few months at this point. I thought we were happy. I thought you were happy.
It rained a lot that night, I got home late, hung my coat by the door and left my tools on the table. I called out, even though you were most likely asleep.
I went up the stairs, heard water trickle down in the bathroom, a strange time of night to run yourself a bath, I should’ve known. Thirty minutes passed, an hour maybe I can’t remember how long I spent sitting at the edge of our bed, staring at the bathroom door.
Then I saw it, water making its way under the door, seeping into the wooden floor. Red stained water.
I yelled your name; I must have screamed so loudly if we had had any neighbors it would have gotten them busting down our doors. But you picked this house, lonely as it was, and I wished for nothing but to make you happy.
Bled my knuckles red banging on that door I did, kicked at the hinges and it wouldn’t budge. Took a few steps back and with all the strength I could muster, finally brought it down.
Water made its way into my shoes, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even scream, horrified as I was. Your naked body lying in the bathtub, surrounded by blood and water, the bath still running and obscured by the steam in my glasses. One of your harms hung at the side, slit open from elbow to wrist, still bleeding.
Some part of me must not have been at all surprised, some primal pattern-seeking part that knew this was coming. Whatever it was, it took over.
I felt I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t lose you. I had to try. Calmly, I made my way downstairs, leaving bloody footprints in the master staircase, and took a pair of working gloves from my satchel, and donned my blood-stained apron.
I lifted you up, as gently as I had the first night, we came to this house together. How times had changed. You felt a bit lighter, you were alabaster pail, but that was to be expected.
I needed time, time before the grime of this world corrupted you. The freezer would do well as a lab…. And as a morgue.
It was huge, you wanted to match the great chefs and I wished nothing more than for you to do as you dreamed. In a fit of rage, I shoved whatever pork, beef and venison laid frozen on the central table and then I placed you on the cold, hard piece of metal.
But then I began my most flawless work. Both the radial and ulnar arteries were nothing short of severed, and you had made a butchery of your veins and flesh, yet there was still a cold and calculating air to the incisions in the left arm, the right was sloppier, you did that one second. Even so it was still a mess, you were determined to die. But there is no way I would let you.
After what must have taken hours if not days. My fingers turning purple under the cold of the freezer, I had managed it. I had sewn you back together like a ragdoll. But you were still empty. I had to make a sacrifice, a pound of flesh, or rather, a few pints of blood. I must have blacked out so many times, but after every spell I woke up determined, determined to bring you back to me.
Yet, fixed, sewn up, and filled again with life you were not back. That moment the primal instinct stopped and I was back. Tears in my eyes banging my knuckles bloody again only this time against the table. Holding your cold hand with such force I feared I might break it.
I don’t know what took longer, my work on you or my begging for it to be enough, my begging for me to be enough. I prayed, I prayed to whatever god would listen and bring you back. And as I would have it, one did. You asked what was wrong, where you were, you stroked my face and I didn’t answer, how could I. You fell back into sleep and as if nothing had happened, I carried you to our room, dressed you and your wounds and laid you to rest. I cleaned the bathroom and fixed my mess in the kitchen while you dreamt.
The next morning, I told you you had an accident in the kitchen and lost a lot of blood, and that was that. Work was killer after that, I had missed a number of days but I managed, and in a week or two you were back on your feet, and I had almost forgotten about the whole thing, until, I realized, you still wanted to get away.
Turns out, I had gotten us a few more years of reluctant happiness. Until months ago I found you laying, broken and battered, at the bottom of the stairs. I wanted to believe it had just been an accident, but I knew better, I knew what you wanted.
I did the same thing as before, only this time I had a room converted into a proper operating room. You never questioned it, why would you care, you had everything.
Righting your limbs was almost therapeutic, war had brought to us a way to look into our very bones, and as such it was a matter of checking everything was aligned correctly, and of course, praying.
If there is one thing, I regret is that this time you woke up in agony, not only mere pain at slashes on your perfect skin, but the pain of your bones growing together. Never had I reached for the morphine quicker, and frail as you were, that put you under.
So potent must your dream have been than in time you didn’t remember anything again. It took you a bit longer to walk and use your arms again. But under my care and the watchful eye of whatever had brought you back again you managed to make a full recovery. Miraculous, if there ever was a better use for such a word.
But again, it was useless.
You couldn’t be satisfied no, no matter what I did, how many hours I spent in our beautiful home it just wasn’t enough. You always wanted to leave. You proved it to me again two weeks ago. Where I found you hanging from a beam in our attic, you even left a note on the chair, not that I read it I was too busy standing on it cutting the rope.
I can’t get it, why did you always leave me, what made your existence with me so hellish you wanted to escape it so. I begged harder this time, not only to bring you back yet again but to you, begged you to stay, begged you to listen.
But you wouldn’t have it, I felt it as I righted your neck then and I felt it yesterday when I pumped your stomach after finding you in our bed with a bottle of arsenic on the nightstand.
I don’t know… how much longer my prayers will be answered…. I don’t know if I can bring you back again.
But now, now I am at a loss. It seems whatever listened had enough of me. Enough of you.
I don’t know where you got that… thing from. If you went to town sometime while I was at work of if some army brass had given it to me as a gift. It was clear what you had done.
I heard the bang while I was writing and I just knew what you had done. Knew what I had to do.
Entering the room to find you missing half a temple, blood and grey matter splattered on the mahogany headboard and a 6-shot revolver resting on the floor. If the scene were to be any more perfect it would have been still smoking from the shot.
I’ve spent… however many days or weeks it has been, with you on our morgue, searching every single inch of that wall, of that room! For any piece of brain or skull I might have missed. Anything to make you complete again.
I’ve prayed, oh how I’ve prayed. But it doesn’t work, it won’t listen to me anymore, because you’re not complete. I haven’t done a good enough work to warrant you coming back into my embrace. There are still pieces of you missing, somewhere in the roof or maybe on our bed or maybe they’re food for mice already. But I’m tired. I’m not tired of you, I’m tired of everything. I can’t bear to walk again and smell the rot and the blood. I can taste relief, and it tastes of iron, gunpowder and lead.
I kept bringing you back but why did you never want to stay, why did you always try to get away? Why not me? What is it that I couldn’t fulfill? I brought you back once, twice, and I would’ve done it countless times if I COULD. But still, again and again, you always want to leave, I always brought you back, but maybe, just maybe, now it’s time I followed.