I needed a bigger light than the one on my phone so I went to the drawer in the kitchen and pulled out the small flashlight we kept for emergencies. I flicked it on as I headed into the bedroom to get my gun case from the closet. I didn’t know what was going on but I had a vague idea that I might need a weapon. The first thing the beam bounced off was the bed.
She was wearing her favorite yellow sweats and lay on her back on what had become her side of the bed, her eyes staring at the ceiling. Blood surrounded her, soaking into the sheets and dripping to the floor.
No.
It’s possible I screamed that word, I don’t remember. Perhaps I merely whispered. I do remember that my breath refused to leave my lungs and my head roared. My body filled with ice crystals and my heart faltered. Without knowing how I’d gotten there, I was on the bed, a frozen statue on my hands and knees gazing down at her. I’d dropped the flashlight and its glow reflected back from the big mirror she had me attach to our little closet door. The stark light washed over her as I stared at her unseeing eyes, her rich chocolate face that had become a dull grayish brown, her perfect full lips that were slightly parted as though she was about to speak.
The dark liquid from her body.
I drew a ragged breath into a tightened chest that was a ball of pain, my eyes unable to leave her face. I wanted to go break the mirror to banish the light so I couldn’t see her but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I reached down a trembling hand and closed her staring eyes – gently so as not to cause her decapitated head to shift. My eyes burned but refused to release their tears. With no capacity left to move away, I lay down next to her, and a part of me died.
I wanted it to not be real, to be a horrible nightmare brought on by the spicy food I’d eaten for dinner the night before. I wanted it to be a hallucination, a memory from some stupid horror movie. But I wasn’t able to give myself a lie in which to hide and I knew it to be true. For whatever reason, this terrible thing that was happening, this… this… wrongness… had taken Zoni. And I had not been able to protect her. To save her.
I don’t know how long I huddled beside her with her lifeblood soaking into my clothing but it had congealed, and the flashlight grown dim, when at last I was able to force myself to move. I wasn’t really thinking, but it seemed the thing to do, so with care, I began wrapping the sheets around her. When I had her cocooned, I stood there looking down with dry, hurting eyes.
We were to be married in three days. Her gown was waiting at her maid-of-honor’s place so I wouldn’t run up on it in our tiny apartment and see it before our big day. My tux was waiting for me at the rental company. I was supposed to pick it up at three. Her parents and sister were due to arrive from Baltimore the next day for the wedding. Everything was ready. We were ready.
Feeling numb and brittle, as if I might break if I moved too quickly, I began to carefully strip out of my blood-stiffened clothes. As I lurched my way to the bathroom on legs I could barely feel, the lights in the apartment came on. I ignored them. That the power was back was a minor point at the moment. I wanted to wash everything away, make it be last night or any time before now but all I could do was wash away the blood.
My fractured mind began to try and function while I was showering, and it occurred to me to wonder how she’d gotten back to the apartment without my seeing her, but I drew a blank and so I let it go. It didn’t matter. Knowing wouldn’t bring her back to me. When I was done, I got into jeans and a tee shirt, and staring at my blood spattered sneakers, I put on my other pair.
I stumbled into the livingroom where I found my cellphone on the couch. The clock on it announced it was nine forty-three a.m., and I checked to see if it was working now. There was a signal. Hoping to find out what the hell was going on, I cleared my rusty throat and croaked, “911”. The phone didn’t respond to my voice command, so I punched the emergency fast button and listened to it ring as I glanced towards the window. The fog had dissipated and the sun shone brightly over the tops of the uptown towers.
The phone quit ringing and a recorded message came on telling me that due to a citywide crisis all emergency personnel were busy but if I stayed on the line someone would help me. I wasn’t surprised. I shuffled over to the window and looked down. In the bright, cheerful rays of the sun, I saw people in the side parking lot. Some were alive, others, not. I watched with dull eyes for a moment before turning away.
I waited for an answer, and when the message began to repeat, I clicked off 911, and not bothering with voice command since that seemed not to be working, I went to my contacts and tapped the number for my parents’ landline.
The answering service kicked in and my dad’s voice that still carried a slight Jamaican accent, said, “Greetings, family and friends. You missed us this time but leave a message and we’ll call you back. If this is a solicitation, forget it. We don’t want any.” Giggling in the background, my mom’s voice said, “Stop being silly, James!”
It beeped and I rasped out, “Mom! Dad! Pick up!”
Neither did. I shivered and hung up. They were both home. One of them should’ve answered.
I lowered myself to the couch trying to further clear the shock and confusion from my mind. I tried not to think of Zoni wrapped in sheets and lying in the bedroom. I needed to find out what happened, and I needed to talk to my parents.
I switched on the TV. At first, nothing came in except that “no signal” message gotten when the set doesn’t synchronize right off, then the screen flashed and pixilated before clearing. The sheet white face of a channel nine news reporter stared out. He looked as dazed as I felt as he informed me that whatever this… thing… was, it was citywide and there were a number of casualties, but our emergency services were handling it.
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed and continued. “We have no data on exactly what caused the, ah, the event that occurred this morning but government authorities are advising everyone to stay in their homes and—” the picture and sound cut out.
Event. It sounded so tame, like a concert or a ball game. The word seemed so… so… inadequate. But then so did “disaster”, or “catastrophe”, or any other such terminology. There should have been a different word, a bigger, more important word for the thing that killed my Zoni.
I sat a few more minutes watching the “no signal” message bounce around the blank screen, then I turned it off.
I tried 911 again but got the same recording. I hung up and called my parents again. Maybe they’d been outside and hadn’t heard the phone. This time I tapped my mom’s cellphone number. There was no answer, and it was the same with my dad’s phone. Then, the phone signal disappeared again and I was back to getting no reception. I looked towards the bedroom. I had to go check on my parents. I didn’t want to go back in there but I couldn’t leave Zoni like that.
I strained my brain and came up with the only solution that managed to work its way through the wool that filled my head. The bedsheets in which I’d wrapped Zoni were what she’d called our “every day” sheets. Her blood had infused the plain white linens and dried. It wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t like that. I hunted around in the plastic storage bin she’d called our linen closet until I found the red silk sheets she’d gotten us last Valentine’s Day, the ones on which I’d laid flowers and a big box of chocolates for her.
I spread them out and gently rolled her sheet-wrapped body into them, and snugged them around her tightly, like a shroud. Then I used her sewing scissors to cut up the pillowcases, and used the strips as ties to ensure it wouldn’t come loose. Better. She’d loved those sheets.