The Devil Take Her -- Part I

Gloria woke up in a cold sweat. She didn't often have nightmares, but when she did they left her feeling jittery and confused. She was disoriented, and her hands went out unsteadily in search of something familiar to anchor her. They tangled in covers damp with her own cold perspiration before brushing the wallpaper over the chipped, pressed wood headboard. It was peeling a little. She hoped the landlady wouldn't blame her for it; it had begun peeling of its own accord. In any case, the thought of her angry landlady grounded her, and was as reassuring as it was daunting. She knew where she was. She closed her eyes for a moment as if lamenting for something she didn't know she had lost. She knew exactly where she was.

Shivering, she rolled over and read her clock. It was five thirty, a long time before her alarm clock was set to go off, but the bed afforded her no comfort, so she pushed the blankets away and slipped out from in between the sheets. Her nightmare had left them sweaty and unpleasant to the touch, so she stripped them off of the bed and left them in the floor of her laundry room as she made her way to her tiny bathroom. The apartment was too small to have a full bath, so she didn't have a bathtub to soak in, although in her current state she didn't feel like soaking.

She shed her clothes, stepped into the shower, and turned it on without testing it first.  Time seemed to gel for her as she stood, entrapped by the lassitude that the lukewarm water produced.  After some indeterminate period of time that might have been an hour or only a few minutes, she bent to get the soap, which was stuck to the floor again. Her wet hair fell into her eyes and she blinked several times trying to clear the water from them. She rubbed the back of her wet hand across her face, but that just made the situation worse. She forced herself to breathe slowly and reached up for the towel she always kept hanging over the bar. When it wasn't there, she panicked and her nails scrabbled along the cheap tile until she realized that she had forgotten to put a towel over the bar.

She stepped out of the shower, leaving a damp puddle on the matted carpet, and felt along the wall until she found the rack, which thankfully held one clean towel. She dried her face and finally relaxed as she opened her eyes. She hung the towel on the rack in the shower, careful not to get it wet, and then stepped back into the indolent flow of water.

She washed her hair quickly this time because the warm water was already running out. When the water grew too cold for her to stand, she turned it off and stepped out of the shower. She dried her hair with the towel and pulled her old terry cloth robe around her, belting it at the waist.

The air in the apartment was chill, and she shivered as she made a cheese sandwich in the tiny kitchenette. It was just two pieces of white bread and then a slice of preprocessed cheesefood.  She ate them for breakfast; she ate them for lunch; she even found herself eating them for dinner on a more than intermittent basis.  They didn't provide a lot of variety, but at least they were cheap and relatively nourishing.  She made two sandwiches and tucked one into a baggie for work.  An anemic looking apple and a can of coca cola went with the sandwich into another larger baggie that she left by the door in hopes she wouldn't walk off without it.

Back in the kitchen, she put the other sandwich on a napkin and warmed it up in her dented toaster oven.  When the cheese got bubbly she unplugged the oven and waited for it to cool somewhat.  The 'off' button on the unit had ceased to be effective some time ago but the oven itself toasted well enough that she couldn't justify buying a new one.  When she judged that it was finally cool enough to chance touching it she gingerly flipped open the glass door and dragged the sandwich out of its rusty prison of heated metal coils by the napkin.  She cut it into four pieces and then went to search for the little cup of caffeinated bliss that really got her started every morning. She didn't drink coffee; she found it bitter and unappetizing.  Truth be told, she still thought of it as something that grown-ups drank.  Her tiny little world was even without a coffee pot, as she had considered it an unnecessary cost when she had marshaled her other appliances.  No, her cup of caffeine came in the same form that it had when she had been just a little girl, sitting on the porch swing on a warm summer evening and sharing a bottle of coke with her father.  She ate her sandwich in relative silence, listening to the clock tick and trying not to reflect too deeply on those lost Sunday afternoons.

She dressed for work uneventfully, in a pair of khaki pants and a bleached white oxford shirt she had inherited from her father.  They were good clothes, warm and comfortable, and the shirt made her feel safe.  It was a security blanket of sorts; she had seen him wear it too many times for her to count.  Whether or not she admitted it to herself, she clung to the stitched block of memory as if it sustained her very being.  There were more reasons than one that she didn't buy new clothes.

After dressing she gathered her lunch and a few other things into a scruffy backpack that was left over from when she had spent her days in a laborious attempt to get a degree that she didn't really want at a college that she didn't really like.  She turned off all the lights in the apartment compulsively, making one last round of the house before she was satisfied that she had left nothing on.  The utilities were included in the meager rent she paid for the apartment, but she never left it without making sure that every light in the house was off.

She locked the door carefully and took the creaking, rusted iron stairs a little faster than she should have. The day was balmy and the breeze was light, but she paid no attention to the weather. She drew into herself, as she had a habit of doing, and hurried along the sidewalk. The panorama of the indigent she passed on her way to the subway entrance was not particularly pleasant, and the sight of real poverty itself had long ago lost its neoteric charm.  It was no longer something she had to turn away from; it was just there.

The subway entrance itself was dirty and unkempt. She fished out her pass and pushed through the turnstile, losing herself in the crowd. Ignoring all the vendors and vagrants, she bee-lined straight to her platform and arrived just in time to catch a departing train.

The car was crowded, but remarkably, there was one seat open, next to a gentleman in a dark green suit. She wriggled through the standing people and settled into the small place. The ride was a long one, and she did not often get a seat, so she marveled at her luck.

Conscious of the fullness of the car and the threat of theft, she pulled her backpack onto her lap and hugged it to her chest, as she leaned up against the wall. To pass the time, she studied the people around her.

The man directly next to her was reading the Wall Street Journal. He had silvery black hair and a young handsome face. Gloria was sure he could be no older than twenty-five, and his hair was not silver with the grayness of age. He had carelessly leaned his fine leather briefcase against his leg, and his expensive looking umbrella was absently laid across his lap, as if he had forgotten it there. She decided that the man was either an idiot, or he had never ridden the subway before, because he seemed very unconcerned with his belongings. He didn't seem to be paying attention to anyone in the car. In fact, despite the fact that there was a screaming three-year-old about two feet away from him and a guy with a stereo near the back of the car who was blasting rap so loud it made her head hurt, he just sat calmly reading his newspaper and ignoring the bustle of life.

She hugged her book-bag a little closer to her chest was about to turn her attention to the other denizens of the car when a sharp report halted all action in her mind. She hated loud noises. They terrified her and the ringing in her ears often gave her migraines, so it was a natural reaction when, squeezing her eyes shut, she ducked her head down against the arm of the man next to her.

The first report was followed by a series of loud cracks that split the air around her.  She didn't move for the duration of the outburst, except to bury her face deeper into the man's shoulder, and her eyes were shut tightly, so it would have been impossible for her to see the scene as it unfolded. At some point in the concussive eruption, she felt a strong, soothing arm go round her shoulders and pull her into a safe and natural embrace. Still, she didn't hazard opening her eyes until the upsurge of terrifying noise had ended.

She choked on her breath when she finally opened them.   It was a mess of colors that shouldn't have been, red and pink and black, smeared together, against each other.  The people were all still basically upright, as if denying the blood that was already beginning to color the floor -- the seats, the walls, the ceiling, the windows -- a clammy maroon. The car was too tightly packed to afford them each a chalk outline on the sticky metal baseboard, so they slumped against each other. Strangely, none of them had fallen forward onto her, although the brush of a still warm arm against her leg made her shudder and draw up into the seat. She squeezed her eyes shut, but only for a moment, as they flashed open at the distinctive click of a gun being cocked. A soft and hopeless sort of sob drew her eyes to the one sallow man who was still standing under his own power. He looked past her, through her, as if he didn't see her at all, and then put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth.

Like the pop of a party favor. That's what it was like, then the back half of the man's head wasn't there. She whimpered as the sharp noise sliced into her mind again, and she huddled back against the man in the green suit who calmly stroked her hair. She stayed against him, quivering, afraid to open her eyes again, but still reeling from the sight of the man's brain's splattered on the back wall, which was plastered on the back wall of her own eyelids.

Her mind deserted her entirely, so she did not resist when he gently pulled her into a standing position and led her out the double doors when they opened. She clung to him, still whimpering, as he guided her along. The policemen who arrived on the scene ignored them completely, concentrating on the hunt for any still left alive after the blood bath. Eye witnesses who had seen the train arrive would report that they had seen no one exit the car, and police reports would list no survivors.

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