Betty
His eyes snapped open.
The clock on his bedside table read 3:45 AM in little red lines. He rolled on his back and pinched his temples between his thumb and index finger, trying to squeeze the hangover out of his skull, but last night’s scotch had other plans. He turned away from the clock in hope of finding his way back into the dream world. It took him a few minutes of tossing and turning to finally realize why he was awake in the first place. She had woken him up. The muscles in his jaws tightened at the sounds of her clawing and scratching in the distance.
He sprung out of bed to silence her.
The commotion grew in intensity with each step forward. Paired with the after effects of last night’s vices, the sounds resembled a handful of keys being dragged against a car door. He teeter-tottered his way down the stairs, using the handrail to precariously support his 6’4, 230 pound frame. By the last step, the noise was deafening. He locked his eyes with hers and let his rage take care of things — as it always had.
Betty stopped scrubbing the blood off of the floor and braced for impact.
She held his drunken gaze with defiance, but that was all she could do. Without a word, he closed the gap between them, meeting her on the far side of the kitchen’s marble-topped island. He towered over her petite frame, eyeballing her bruised skull, caused by an earlier exchange, and the bloodied sponge in her hand. He drove his heel into the swell of her back and flattened her into the puddle of soap and semi-coagulated gore. Betty felt the air being pushed out of her lungs. After what felt like minutes, he removed his size 14 from her backside and stomped back to bed. Betty laid motionless until she heard a sharp slam, followed by the click of the bedroom door’s lock. She quietly continued scrubbing the floor until the sun came up.
The mood was different when the little ones were awake. At 8:20 he strolled downstairs, clean-shaven and grinning effortlessly through the threads of his 3-piece suit. “Hi daddy!” Jack and Kaitlyn yelled in unison — their mouths sticky with French toast and Aunt Jemima. He shot them an easy smile and moved in for kisses on each of their foreheads. He walked over to Betty as she scrubbed the batter-stained pan and spatula over the sink. He looked beneath her feet for last night’s blood stain, but it had disappeared. He stood behind her, wrapped his fingers around her waist, and dug his square chin into her shoulder. “I’ll see you tonight my love,” he whispered before slithering his lips against her neck for a kiss. He hoped Betty would radiate with disgust so there’d be a reason for him to be mad at her later, but ten years of marriage had turned her skin to hide. To his surprise, she shot him a coy smile and whispered, “Love you honey, have an amazing day.”
“Bye kids!” he yelled on his way out the door. A “Bye daddy!” duet echoed through the lofty white halls of their suburban castle just before he shut it behind him. Betty let out a short-lived sigh of relief, immediately realizing that she only had fifteen minutes before the kids had to be outside to catch the school bus. She franticly wiped the corn syrup from Jack’s shirt with a damp paper towel and ushered both of them out the door in ten. Betty walked the two to their designated stop and kissed their heads until they pushed her away. She watched as they stepped on the bus and rode into the distance. That day, the sky was a brilliant blue and filled with clouds like pillows. The breeze was divine and the birds sang, but all of the sunshine had vanished.
After stepping back inside and locking the door behind her, Betty closed her eyes and embraced a rare moment of tranquility. She listened to her methodical breaths and smiled. After a lengthy period of silence, she returned to the kitchen and cleaned the small piles of cinnamon and brioche flakes off of the kitchen island — then came the dishes. Plates were washed and racked, measuring cups were rinsed and tucked back inside of the cabinet, and the bread knife was wiped off and stuck with its family on the wall’s magnetic knife rack. In that moment, a ray of sunlight trickled through the window above the sink and reflected off of the kitchen’s immaculate surfaces. The collection of blades shined in unison like the world’s deadliest set of jewels. Betty had purchased many kitchen knives over the years, but one had always outshined the rest — not because of it’s sheen, but because of its unfulfilled destiny. Betty pulled the 6-inch butcher knife off the wall.
She grabbed the cleaver by its wooden handle, immediately entranced by its gravity. She held it in front of her face like a hand mirror and whispered to her reflection, “Is today the day?” The face in the blade stared back in silence. She had been asking this distorted person the same question for nearly a decade and she was always given the same answer,
“not today my love, but one day very soon.”
He had given Betty plenty of opportunities to exact her revenge. Thanks to his affinity for scotch, he ritualistically turned catatonic by sundown, giving her ample time to find out what his insides looked like. Betty knew what she needed to unleash upon him, the rage that she had bottled up so tightly, always ruminating just beneath the surface. But she couldn’t turn her fantasy to truth, not at least while Jack and Kaitlyn were still living at home. They were too young to understand the things he had done to her. They were too young to witness the things that she would do to him. They were too young to forgive her for what she was going to do.
There’d be at least another twelve or fifteen years of patiently waiting and enduring his abuse before that glorious night would finally arrive. The night where a cocktail of his blood and flesh would paint the room. The night where her laughter and his screams would fill the air. The night where she would finally teach him what his mother never could. The night where all of the years of pain and suffering would be climactically released through the cathartic ritual of butchery.
He would never let her leave. She would have to slay the monster.
“One day very soon,” her reflection reassured her. She could hardly recognize the face in the blade. Its face was flushed with hot blood, the eyes bulging as its skin crinkling in a twisted smile. Betty and the stranger stared at each other and laughed, filling the house with maniacal cries for hours. The shrieks echoed in the endless halls of their suburban paradise, daring to be heard by any hapless bystander. But in the blink of an eye, the laughter stopped, and the room turned silent. Betty kissed the flat steel of the butcher knife before gently planting it back against its sacred spot on the wall. She tucked her awry hairs behind her ear, wiped her foamed lips, and adjusted her dress.
Then she went back to cleaning.
