All too soon I was standing on the doorstep, trying to dig out my key from the clutter in the bottom of my handbag. I couldn’t find it, but that didn’t mean a choice between dumping everything out on the ground or ringing the bell—long ago, and without telling Peter, I had hidden a spare as insurance. The brick was still loose and the key was still there. It was a bit stiff turning in the lock, but it let me in.
The house was dark and silent. He hadn’t even left a light on for me. I felt annoyed and yet relieved that I wouldn’t have to hide my guilt and lie. With luck, I wouldn’t wake him. I switched on the light in the corridor and opened the bedroom door and then I stared in horror feeling everything, my own sense of identity, swirling madly.
The bedroom furniture had changed. The bed was in a different position. And in the bed, sleeping beside Peter, was a woman. Peter’s wife.
Not me—I wasn’t Peter’s wife any longer. I wasn’t anything to Peter. Not since our divorce had become final, more than two years ago. And for two years before that we had ceased to live as man and wife.
I stared and stared as if seeing a ghost, but the only ghost in that house was me, the ghost of myself as I had been five years ago, when I was turning thirty. Meeting Nick tonight had brought that troubled young woman back to life, made her more real than the woman I thought I was now, thirty-five and single, living in a shared flat in Kilburn, with a room and a life of her own. What sort of a life was it that could vanish so completely after a brief meeting with an old lover?
The ghost I had become stared and stared, unable to move, unable to think of how I could explain my presence when they woke, as they would at any moment, and found me here, more than four years out of my rightful place.
BLOODLETTING
by Kim Antieau
Kim Antieau was born in Louisiana in March of 1955, raised in Michigan, and now lives with her Canadian husband in White Salmon, Washington. More and more the pattern takes shape. She was reticent with regard to number of cats. Antieau has come on very strongly in the horror genre in the past several years—her record all the more impressive in that her sales were to Big Press magazines and anthologies. Her first collection of short stories, Trudging to Eden, appeared this past summer from Salamander Press.
As to how she spends her day, Antieau relates: “I will say I have so many irons in the fire right now that I should become a smithy, a welder, a vulcan, something pertaining to fire. I work as a librarian, writer, publisher, editor, and artist. I’m creator of MommaEarth Goddess Runes, a modern divination tool for women. I’m also creator of a new comic strip called Vic and Jane. I am also editor and publisher of Daughters of Nyx: a magazine of Goddess stories, mythmaking and fairy tales, plus I recently finished another novel, The Jigsaw Woman, which I hope someone will finally have the good sense to buy.”
Anna’s blood began speaking to her soon after she was hit by the car, soon after she began reading about all the killings.
Someone in the city park gunned down ten people. Another person took a shotgun to the top of the Cramer Building, began shouting “Bang! Bang!” and killed twenty people. Then there was the mother of two from Manchester who tried to kill the governor, and the teenaged boy who killed his entire family one evening after an argument about which reruns to watch: Barney Miller or M*A*S*H*.
Anna had noticed a few murders here and there before her accident. As she sat every morning sipping her tea and cutting her toast into small pieces before eating them, she would occasionally glance at the front page of the paper. More often than not, however, she flipped past the first page, scorning the headlines. “What country are we invading this week?” she would say. Then she’d turn to the Living or Entertainment sections. She liked reading the book reviews the best, planning which book to buy for her weekend reading.
Sometimes, on the way to the books, a headline would catch her eye. She would skim the article and shake her head, wondering how this woman could have killed her own children, or that man his wife.
Everything changed after the accident. Anna had been walking down Fourth Avenue on her way to her job as a secretary in an ad agency when she decided to stop at the bakery across the street. She remembered later that she had looked for cars—she was certain of it. In any case, a car hit her. She was rushed to the hospital with internal injuries. They hooked her up first to one solution and then another. For hours—days?—she watched the deep red liquid dripping into her veins.
The ad agency sent her a bouquet of flowers and a get-well card signed by everyone in the office. They told her they missed her “quiet sweetness” and wished her a speedy recovery. Her father came up from the country and offered to take her home. “The city’s no place for a hurt girl,” he had said. “I can’t take care of you here.”
She kissed his cheek and told him not to worry. Her neighbor Bev had promised to look in on her when she got out of the hospital. Besides, it would be like a vacation.
“I can sit around the house and just read and watch television,” she said. “It will be a great rest.”
Anna was grateful to be alive and even more grateful to finally leave the hospital. She had the newspaper delivered to her home every morning and began watching the early morning news shows.
“I don’t want to lose touch with the real world,” she told Bev when she brought over a poppyseed cake for Anna one morning.
Sometime later, Anna’s blood began speaking to her. She didn’t know what it said, exactly. It just seemed to buzz at her. She told herself it was her organs readjusting themselves after the accident. She told herself this as she read the front page of the morning paper. Someone else had been killed in a park in a different city. Later the buzzing grew, and she turned up the evening news to drown out the noise.
And then she remembered that she had someone else’s blood inside of her. Was that why her blood was buzzing? They had put someone else’s blood into her body. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who could have been sick. She had heard of people getting diseases from transfusions. Perhaps this was what was happening to her. Her blood was not talking to her. She laughed in the quiet of her apartment, kicking at the newspaper she had dropped at her feet. Talking blood was nonsense. She would ask the doctor about it all when she went in for her check-up.
The doctor listened to Anna’s story of buzzing blood.
“I really can’t explain it,” she said, grinning widely, letting the doctor know ahead of time that she knew how foolish she sounded. “It just buzzes. Could I have caught some strange disease during my transfusions?”
The doctor checked her out thoroughly—that was how she put it. “I have checked you out thoroughly,” she said, “and I really don’t think there is anything wrong. You’ve had a terrible shock to your system. You need time to rest. That’s why you’re at home, Anna. You haven’t let those little devils at the ad agency talk you into doing any work at home, have you?”
Anna shook her head and smiled shyly, waiting for the doctor to pinch her cheek or give her a lollipop or something. She had been silly, hadn’t she?
The days passed, and Anna read her papers and watched television. The man who killed the people in the park said voices in his head had told him to shoot those people. The man in the Cramer Building said the same thing. A woman who had killed her children said little. She pounded on her chest and cried, “Mea culpa, mea culpa!”