Elation
What We Do To Forget....
Jenny had been sleeping for only about two hours that night, having been non-stop binging the marathon of Tales from the Darkside for most of the day. She usually didn’t have this type of free time– she was stuck having to work two jobs to help pay the bills with her single father. Out of some miracle, she had been able to get away from both that day and have a full 24 hours all to herself. A part of her still felt unfulfilled, knowing that maybe she could’ve spent her day working on the book that she had been writing in her notes for the past few years, dawdling over finishing it paragraph by paragraph, and sometimes sentence by sentence. But she couldn’t bring herself to write any of it right now. She didn’t want to do anything that felt like more work.
So much to her chagrin, she woke up at around 2 AM to a loud bump in the night. She grumbled in her bed, shifting around until she rose from her sheets. She looked around in the dark room with murky eyes before being jolted anew by a loud crash, hearing eerie clinking against the tiles downstairs. Her initial reaction was to stay silent; she was too afraid to even snatch a glance at what was going on down there. She felt like she was a deer caught in headlights until there was a horrible scream and then the silencing of it, followed by a sickeningly wet sound.
That scream came from her father.
It was enough to knock Jenny out of her trance, immediately grabbing the brick of a landline next to her bed and heading into the closet, tears welling up in her eyes and her hands shaking. Though as she dialed the numbers, she could hear footsteps walking up the stairwell….
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Someone broke into my house! They’re coming up the stairs! Please, help me!”
“Ok, Ma’am, where are you located?”
“593 12th Street. Please, hurry, please!”
“Ma’am, I need you to calm down. What room are you in right now?”
“I’m in… my bedroom… Oh God. They’re hitting the door. Oh God. Oh, God.”
“Ma’am, if there’s anywhere in the room you can hide, go in there now. Is your door locked?”
A door slowly creaks open, then softly closes in sync with the banging.
“M’am?”
“Yes… I’m in the closet… please hurry….”
“Ma’am, they are on their way right now as we speak. Now I need you to stay on the line-”
Crack. The sound of wood clattered onto the ground. Soft footsteps could be heard on the other end of the line, along with the unsteady soft breathing of Jenny.
“....”
“M’am…? M’am, are you still there?”
There was silence. And then, slow creaking would fill the receiver, and then a sudden slam of the wall when the door hit it.
“....”
“Please, God.”
“M’am, are you-”
“AAAAAAGGGGHHHH NO! PLEASE! PLEASE, HELP ME! GOD, HELP ME! HEL- Kkh-”
A guttural choking could be heard after the sickening, wet slash of metal against skin. There was a light thumping before light rippling. Eventually, there was a louder thump, and everything went silent.
“....”
“....”
“... M-M’am….?”
