Cara

 

Cara watched as the color drained from her husband’s usually flushed face. He glowed neon red whenever he drank, and he always drank. Now, however, his skin looked translucent, like a fish she’d seen once at an aquarium, bones showing through its milky scales.

 

It had scared her at the time, sending goosebumps up and down her arms until she had to walk away and go back to the penguin exhibit to purge the thought from her mind. She’d had the irrational fear that the fish would float through the thick glass like a ghost. But looking down at her husband now, she wasn’t afraid. In fact, it was the first time in a long time she hadn’t been afraid of him.

 

Despite the ripping wounds in his chest, the blood pulsing from them like small, rhythmic geysers, she thought he could still be saved if she called an ambulance. Perhaps she could use the flannel throw blanket from the couch and staunch his bleeding until the EMTs arrived. Though, he’d surely tell them what happened.

 

The moment he had regained enough strength in his body to lift his arm, he’d point his thick, calloused finger in her direction.

 

Her. She did it. She stabbed me.

 

And to be fair, he would be telling the truth, in part. The real story went back much further and was impossibly more complex.

 

Cara had met Daniel Williams, or Danny as he was called by his friends, the summer after she graduated college. Back then he was lean and tan, his doughy jawline disguised by a thick beard that Cara liked to tug on while they had sex. And they had a lot of sex.

 

So much sex that, despite his clear penchant for drinking and gambling and women, Cara got the idea in her head that she loved him. So, when he asked her to marry him, she said yes without a moment’s hesitation. They married three months later.

 

For the wedding, Danny shaved his beard. It was the first time Cara had seen him without it, and many times throughout their marriage she would think back to the moment the church doors had opened, and she’d seen him standing next to the pastor, an archway of baby’s breath and roses behind him. His face was as bald as the day he was born, his soft chin melting into his neck as if there was no separation between the two.

 

She’d had the immediate thought that she barely knew this man. She was about to vow her life to him, yet she was only now seeing his chin. What else didn’t she know? At the time, she’d pushed the thoughts away, dismissed them as wedding jitters and walked forward to vow herself to Daniel Williams forever, trying hard to focus on the familiar shape of his brown eyes, ignoring the alienlike quality of the lower half of his face.

 

Now, though, as she stood over him, watching as his muscles fatigued, as he could no longer hold his head up and his chin once again melted into the bubbling flesh of his neck, she knew that the feeling she’d had walking down the aisle towards him, all those years ago, had been a premonition. A gut feeling she wished more than anything she’d listened to.

 

Within a day of the wedding, he hit her. Not hard. Not hard enough to leave a bruise or even hard enough for Cara to find it alarming. They’d been bickering—over what she could no longer remember—and he’d reached out his hand and slapped her face. Just hard enough that the skin on skin contact made a wet noise like a seal clapping its fins. It didn’t hurt, but still, Cara had pulled away, a question in her eyes.

 

Danny had laughed. Smiled at her as if it were a joke. Naively, Cara laughed too. The next time he hit her, she didn’t laugh. She bruised. A fist-sized circle sprung to life on her shoulder, and she stared at it in the mirror day after day as it faded to purple and green and yellow.

 

Before it had fully disappeared, he hit her again. This time while they were having sex. He was pumping away, going so hard and for so long that Cara felt sore and raw. She tried to push him off, but he slapped her cheek, sending her face careening to the side. She stayed still after that, waiting for him to finish despite the pain.

 

It happened like that. Again and again. Sometimes because she said something he didn’t like, other times because he was drunk and needed someone to hit. Sometimes because it turned him on. Cara could see the truth of it in his eyes. The way they’d spark as he hit her; the same way they did when he climaxed. He’d hit her and then bend her over whatever was nearest, hold her steady as he had his way with her. Eventually, Cara didn’t know what it was like to go a full day without physical pain.

 

When she became pregnant, she thought it would all stop. She showed him the pregnancy test when he came home from work, the small pink plus sign saying everything she didn’t know how to say. Please stop hitting me. Please be a good father. Please love me now. He’d hugged her, joy clearly written on his face, and Cara thought that perhaps he had heard her unspoken pleas.

 

Later, he rolled her over while she was sleeping, climbed on top of her, and punched her once in the stomach as he came, his face contorted with both pleasure and pain. When she miscarried a week later, Cara had her first thought of killing him. There was no way to know for sure whether he had caused the miscarriage, but that didn’t matter to Cara. She knew it was his fault.

 

Over the years, thoughts of murder grew louder and louder, but Cara kept waiting for him to change. Then, she kept waiting until she could save enough money to hire a hit man. Then, she couldn’t wait anymore.

 

He came home later than usual that night, and Cara could smell the alcohol on him the moment the door opened. He’d been at the casino, and from the look of it, he’d lost money. His mouth was pulled down at the corners in a permascowl, and he slammed the door behind him.

 

Cara was sitting in the living room like she had been for hours. She wanted to be visible when he got home, wanted him to see her sitting there. So even as evening turned to night and the room went dark, she stayed resolutely on the couch, not even bothering to turn on the television.

 

“What are you doing?” he asked. The simple question sounded like a criticism coming out of his mouth, his voice snarling around every word.

 

Cara smiled, the knife blade held between the waistband of her jeans and the flesh of her hip, and stood to greet him. “Waiting for you.”

 

She walked towards him, her hips swaying with every step, her eyes daring him to take her. As she grew closer to him, she reached out to him, ran her fingernail down the pulsating vein in his neck, down his soft midsection, until she was unbuttoning his pants. He grunted, trying to pretend he didn’t care, not wanting to let her have even a modicum of power over him, but Cara could feel him hardening against her palm.

 

As her hand slipped inside the waistband of his boxers, he tipped his head back and closed his eyes. She pulled the sharpest kitchen knife she could find from the waistband of her jeans and, taking one small, steadying breath, plunged it into the left side of his chest. Danny had stumbled backward, tried to push her away, but blood was already pulsing out of him in a steady rhythm.

 

Bum bum. Bum bum.

 

She’d hit his heart. Or, at the very least, a major artery.

 

Within seconds, he was on his knees. Seconds after that, he was on his back.

 

Cara walked towards him slowly, her own heart threatening to beat out of her chest, adrenaline making her arms and legs tremble, and pulled the blade out of him.

 

Standing over him, watching him die, Cara wondered why it had taken her so long to work up the nerve. Why had she been so afraid of killing him? It had been easy. Easier than spending another night with him, fending off his attacks and trying to hold herself together.

 

Not only had it been easy, but it had also felt almost therapeutic. Like she’d unburdened herself of some deep, dark secret and was finally free. For the first time in years, she felt like she could breathe.

 

Then, she heard the doorknob rattle.

 

No, she thought. No. The word resounding in her head over and over again. She had trash bags and a metal chest in the other room where she planned to store his body.

 

Danny had started finishing their basement years ago, but never completed it, and Cara had found the perfect spot to bury the chest. She had enough money in savings to hire someone to come in—not a professional, just a friend of a friend who would do it for cheap—and pour new concrete and lay carpet. Then, she’d move out, and let a nice family buy the place and have movie nights over his corpse. No one was supposed to show up yet.

 

The doorknob rattled again, and this time she heard the tumblers in the lock clicking into place. Cara tiptoed into the kitchen, the knife clutched in both hands and held it to her chest, as the door slowly creaked open. She didn’t know who it was, but she knew that if she wanted to avoid prison, she’d have to kill them, too.