Warnings
10 Aug 2019Today’s prompt: “Study a stranger. Go home and write a tragedy about his or her mother.” [Ignoring gender again.]
The alarm goes off for the third time. Dylan hits the snooze button again. You stretch the stiffness out of your neck – it feels like you slept with it crooked most of the night – and pull yourself to a sitting position, smiling at Dylan.
“Rise and shine.”
“Mmmmph,” Dylan says into the pillow.
You pull open the blinds and scream as the sunlight filters through dried blood letters spelling out the word “Die.”
“You didn’t catch a glimpse of the perpetrators?” Officer Graney asks as you sip bad coffee out of a paper cup from the chair in front of his desk.
“We were asleep when it happened,” Dylan said. You nod.
“Neither of you woke up? Heard anything at all?”
You shake your head.
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary last night, this morning?”
“No,” Dylan says.
“No,” you echo.
“Anything unusual the last few weeks in the neighborhood? Any other grafitti, any neighborhood pranks?”
“Excuse me, but this feels like more than a prank,” you say.
“Or break-ins, unusual traffic patterns. Anything out of the ordinary, trivial or serious.”
“I can’t think of anything,” Dylan says. You shake your head.
“Well, we’ll talk to your neighbors, see if anyone else heard or saw anything. And we’ll take some photos. You haven’t washed it off yet, have you?”
“Not yet, no,” you say.
“We’ll let you know if we find anything out.”
You nod numbly.
“One last thing,” Officer Graney says. “Do either of you have any enemies?”
You shake your head and look over at Dylan. Dylan gives a slight pause, then answers, “No.”
“They’re not going to do anything,” you say in the car with Dylan.
“Hey. He said they’d talk to the neighbors.”
“Who probably won’t have seen anything either.”
“You never know.”
You drive in silence for a few blocks.
“At least Rachel’s at sleepaway camp,” Dylan says.
“Thank God for small miracles,” you agree.
A few days later, the police called back to say they were sorry, but there were no leads. You hosed off the window with a power nozzle.
“Honey? Did you leave the back door open?” Dylan calls to you from downstairs the next morning as you’re getting out of the shower.
“I don’t think so,” you said.
“I’m calling an exterminator,” Dylan says. “Don’t go downstairs without shoes.”
That doesn’t sound good.
You’re too curious to get completely dressed, so you put on socks and shoes and go downstairs in your towel.
On the stairs, midway down, there’s a cockroach. Ew ew ew ew ew! It darts to the left and you manage to crush it with your shoe.
At the bottom of the stairs your orange tabby, Floyd, appears to be eating another cockroach. Your gaze drifts out across the floor toward the back door where Dylan is trying to sweep a living carpet of roaches outside.
Fumigation didn’t take long, but the exterminators told you it would be a few days before it would be safe for Floyd. You found a pet-friendly hotel and stayed there with Floyd. You didn’t feel particularly safe at home anyway.
You and Dylan debated about whether to talk to the police about it, and ultimately decided against it. You were pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to do anything, if they even took you seriously.
It’s been another several days and you’ve moved back in. You’re going over the mail. Rachel sent a letter. It’ll be a few more weeks until she’s back. Things seem to be going well. She’s bored with making lanyards, but she likes canoeing.
As you finish rereading the letter, you look up to see Dylan staring into the fridge. Dylan opens the milk, sniffs it, makes a face, and pours it into the sink. Next they begin inspecting Tupperware containers for moldy food.
“Hey,” you say. “Let’s go out to eat tonight. Someplace nice.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. We deserve it.”
“Okay, but we have to go grocery shopping soon.”
“How’s everything tasting?” your waiter asks.
“Mmmmmm,” Dylan says, mouth full of rigatoni with short rib ragu, expression full of bliss.
“Wonderful,” you say, and take another bite of your butternut squash ravioli. Your teeth hit something hard. Metallic. You fish it out of your mouth.
It’s a pet tag.
It says, “Floyd.”
Officer Meadows kneels on the grass next to Floyd’s body and takes another photo. Floyd’s body is intact, but lifeless, bloody, and lying in the middle of your front lawn.
“Was he an indoor cat or an outdoor cat?” she asks.
“Indoor,” you say.
“Normally I’d be suggesting the possibility that he just got out and ran into another animal. But these are pretty clean cuts, and then there’s the matter of the tag.”
You nod.
“May I see it?” she asks.
You hand it to her. She drops it into an evidence bag and labels it.
“You said this was in your ravioli?”
“Yes,” you say. Dylan tells her the name of the restaurant, and she makes a note.
“We’ll be talking to the restaurant staff,” she says. “Now dispatch mentioned you told them you’d filed another report recently? Some grafitti, but written in blood?”
“Yes,” you say, still unable to get past single-word answers.
“I’ll look the report up at the precinct,” she says. “Has anything else out of the ordinary happened lately?”
You look at Dylan. “The roaches.”
“Last week we discovered that our back door was left open overnight, and there was a massive swarm of cockroaches going in and out of it,” Dylan explains.
“I don’t suppose you filed a report about that?”
“No,” Dylan says.
Officer Meadows asks Dylan a few more questions about the roaches and asks you more about the “Die” message. She asks you both if anyone has made threats against you other than the incidents you’ve already talked about. And she asks once again if either of you has any enemies.
“No,” you say.
“Well,” Dylan says. “There is the Brotherhood.”
“The Black Brotherhood.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? When were you going to tell me? I have a right to know this!”
“I had things all planned out when I left them! I changed my identity, went into hiding. I was sure I’d lost them. I was outside for years before I met you. I didn’t think you had anything to worry about. And I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Oh God. What about Rachel? Is she safe?”
“She is. This particular faction, they’d consider me a traitor, and they’ll kill me for that. But they don’t go after the children of their enemies.” Dylan pauses, gathering the words.
“But?”
“But they do go after spouses.”
At Camp Breckenwood, your daughter Rachel has just been sent to head counselor Mary Whitford’s office. This is Whitford’s first time meeting Rachel, but she’s seen her at the camp, growing more tan and more adventurous by the day.
“Please sit down, Rachel,” Whitford says. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”