She can hear the noise coming from the attic again. It woke her up in the middle of the night, echoing through the dusty entrails of the house like a rumbling that passes through one’s intestines.
She likes to stare at the stain on the ceiling, to gaze into its gaping black void as it stares back at her, ready to suck her in. Its sharp, contrasting outline is visible and clear against the white plaster of the ceiling, even more so when it’s highlighted by the moonlight. She lies there and watches it move. It’s dilating and constricting, then dilating again. Breathing.
Her bedroom reeks of rot and mold. The stench is suffocatingly sharp in the summer heat. Cold sweat trickles down her forehead, pours into her eyes, stings them, but she doesn’t blink. Not even once. Not while the sounds are still there.
Scratch, scra-atch, scra-a-a-atch.
“Shut up,” she breathes out, her voice barely a whisper.
Scra-a-a-a-atch.
“Shut up!” she yells out, surprising herself.
The noise halts. The house grows quiet once more. Quieter than the inside of her head. A minute passes; nothing disturbs the silence that seeps through the cracks in the ceiling. Another minute follows suit. And another.
She snores her way through the night.
Every other day she paints over the stain, covering it with a thick layer of white titanium paint that stings her nose, but by morning the stain always comes back.
It’s a good thing she never has visitors. It’s a good thing that no one can see it.
He welcomes her into his home: old and decrepit. Porch stairs groan with exhaustion when she walks on them; wooden floors creak with each step she takes, and furniture sighs under her weight.
He’s set the table for two: burning candles, cracked porcelain plates overflowing with food–a big juicy steak for him and a heap of salad without salad dressing for her–soft jazz music floating on the wind, caressing her ears.
She tries to fight back tears of joy, but her feelings are too strong to contain. No one, not ever, has done so much for her.
Their lovemaking is passionate yet tender. He pours wine down her throat and honeyed words into her ears. When she offers her love with desperation, he accepts it with entitlement.
That night he offers her to move in, and without hesitation, she accepts.
She thinks she’s in love.
He knows she is, even though the words never left her lips.
She sells everything she’s ever owned. She has no need for things of the past anymore. She’s ready to start over.
She moves in with him, investing all her money into their love nest. For a while, at least, she’s happy. Then things start getting sour again.
He starts drinking occasionally, then sometimes, then most nights. His physical violence and verbal abuse toward her mirror his drinking frequency in their progression.
It begins with a punch aimed at the wall, which nonetheless finds its way to her solar plexus. Betrayed and confused, she runs into the night, leaving him behind with his head resting on the tabletop and an arm tenderly wrapped around a gin bottle.
She runs down the street while cold tears run down her flushed, burning cheeks. She wants him to run after her; she dreads what could happen to her if he does. She wants him to catch up to her, to apologise, to beg for her forgiveness. She dreads that if he does, he might beat her half to death instead. Or, worse yet, that he won’t notice her absence at all and won’t even remember any of this in the morning.
Hours later, cold and shivering, teeth chattering and disappointed, she comes back and finds him exactly where she’d left him.
Next day, when he sobers up and she threatens to leave, he does everything she’d hoped for: apologises, begs, promises he’ll never stoop so low again.
She desperately wants to believe him, so she does. She forgives and tries to forget last night as if it was a dream–a nightmare. After all, she’s got no other choice, nowhere to go, nobody to ask for help or protection, no one to love. No one but him.
She tells herself she deserves a little rain in her life, but it’s going to be nothing but sunshine and rainbows from here on out.
It drizzles a few months later and pours a couple of weeks after that. She takes it all in stride. Doesn’t run away anymore and doesn’t threaten him with exodus either. With each weathered storm in their lives, he apologises and begs a little less.
A year into their family life, he stops making empty promises altogether and she stops expecting them. His nature, mercurial at best of times, becomes down right erratic. He hits her on the daily basis. Though she resents him for it, she learns to live with it, to accept and expect it.
Her body is black, green, purple, and blue. She feels like a Pollock painting.
She’s in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet lid. Two stripes on the pregnancy test before her eyes look like two little gravestones: one for her, one for the baby.
She cannot keep it. Doesn’t want it. He’ll use it against her, knowing full well that now she’s got no way out of this, the beatings will only get worse.
Days pass, weeks go by, but she doesn’t tell him about the baby. Instead, she buys a misoprostol and hides it in her medicine cabinet among her tampons, thinking that he’ll never find it there.
She’s wrong.
Next time he aims his fists at her stomach, she covers it with her hands in a protective, instinctive gesture. He is drunk but he’s not stupid, and nothing goes past him. He starts to suspect something. She can see it in his eyes, in the way he watches her when she goes to the bathroom when morning sickness overwhelms her, in the way he smells the air afterward, trying to sniff out that sour smell of fresh vomit.
Next time she goes grocery shopping–or rather booze shopping–she comes back to him sitting on the stairs in the foyer with a pill in his trembling hands. He knows what it is, and his blows are especially strong that day, but all of them are aimed at her legs and her head.
If she didn’t know better, she could have thought that he’d make a good father.
Just as she’d feared, his assaults get worse and more frequent once he knows about her pregnancy. She hates herself and the situation she’s put herself and her baby in. She reminds herself of her mother. When she feels it kicking in her stomach for the very first time–incidentally, this happens when he is thrashing her–it feels like the baby is fighting back, trying to protect her and. In that moment, she knows she has to do something. If not for her own sake, then for the baby’s.
This must be what mother’s unconditional love must feel like.
She starts lacing his drink with arsenic–a little at first, to ensure he doesn’t notice the change in taste, but then gradually increasing the amount in her haste to be done with him before the baby is born.
Slowly, painstakingly slowly, it starts to accumulate in his body. They have more than enough pesticide in the shed to poison a village, but she worries he might be suspecting something when the symptoms develop. However, to her great relief, he attributes his constant vomiting and nausea to his drinking, and diarrhoea to her cooking. When his skin darkens and lesions start to appear, he doesn’t recognise them for what they are, but she knows he’s on the brink of death.
She prepares him his favourite dish for his last meal: mac-and-cheese with buckets of gin on the side. He enjoys every bite he takes and every mouthful of drink he gulps down, masticating loudly and gulping even louder in the process. She enjoys her salad, but she enjoys watching him even more.
Suddenly, without warning or reason, he suspects something. Maybe her unusually good mood gave away something? He narrows his eyes at her, purses his lips. Can he taste the arsenic? Smell it on his breath? She has been especially generous that night.
She feels the tension as it grabs her by the neck, stealing her breath–the feeling is all too familiar, and she’s experienced it in this very house countless times.
He says, “Have some mac-and-cheese.” His offer is not an offer at all but rather a command.
She doesn’t comply right away; her eagerness would give away the fact that it’s the drink that is poisoned.
“I don’t want to put on weight; you keep telling me that I’ve gotten pudgy,” she replies, trying to keep her voice steady and calm.
“Have some anyway,” he urges her, slurring and pushing his nearly finished plate of mac-and-cheese towards her.
Obediently, she eats while he watches her like a hawk. The sound of her slurping and chewing is the only noise that disturbs the brooding silence that settles between them.
“That’s enough,” he proclaims when she’s almost done with the food. She hasn’t had such a heavy, filling meal ever since they started living together. The food sits heavy in her stomach–or is it dread that’s making her nauseous? “Have some gin to wash it down,” he recommends, pouring her a drink.
She binks. “You know I can’t.” She places a hand on her little bulge, skin taut and tighter than a drum.
“One drink won’t do no harm,” he says, pushing the glass into her hands, forcing her to bring it up to her lips.
There’s no way out of this. Her heart sinks to the soles of her feet. If he finds out she’s been poisoning him, he’ll kill her and the baby right there and then.
His nostrils are flaring, bloodshot eyes heavy and lidded with drink. He’s ready to blow up at the smallest sign of rebellion, the tiniest peep of protest or disobedience. He clenches his fists–a sure warning sign–so she starts drinking. Hot liquid trickles down her throat, burning it like liquid fire on its way down. Her face cringes at the taste, and already she’s thinking of an excuse to go to the bathroom, where she’ll quietly force herself to throw up before the poison is absorbed into her bloodstream, before it starts coursing through her veins and reaches the baby.
“Have another one,” he says, already pouring her another drink.
“The baby–”
“I said have another one!” he roars at her, hitting the table so hard it creaks in protest. His whole body is trembling, head shaking, eyes wandering as if she’s constantly on the move and he’s trying to keep up with her, even though she’s not moving a muscle. Drool pools in the corner of his mouth. She hopes that with a little more, he might reach the threshold and drop dead.
She upends another portion of gin, cringes again, watches him watching her. How much time has passed? How much does she have left to throw up? She struggles not to look at the grandfather clock behind him. The hairs on the back of her neck stand up, goosebumps appear along her arms, but she keeps her face blank, void of emotion–or at least, she hopes she does.
He gives her a complacent grunt as if he is satisfied with her behaviour, then proceeds to drink straight from the bottle. Seizing the opportunity to get away, she gathers the dishes and dirty cutlery and heads to the kitchen. From there, she means to stealthily slip upstairs to the bathroom, but to her great disappointment, he follows her like a shadow, intent on not letting her out of his sight.
Finally, when she can’t stand it no longer and it looks like there’s no other way around it, she says, “I need to use the bathroom.”
He bores a hole in her with his eyes before mumbling, “Go use the bathroom, then.”
Relived, she breaths out and clumsily waddles up the stairs. When she hears the scraping of his heavy shoes behind her and looks back, his proximity startles her and makes her hopes disappear like smoke on the wind. It looks like he’s intent on following her still.
She makes her way to the landing, thinking that there’s got to be a way for her to throw up without him hearing or knowing it. She decides that she’ll just lock herself in, throw up, and wait for arsenic to kill him. Bathroom door should be sturdy enough to withstand his blows.
Her bare feet make soft, plopping sounds on the black-and-white bathroom tiles. She’s about to close the door behind her when he stops her, one hand leaning on the door jamb and another pressed against the door.
“No need to close the door,” he says. “Nothing I ain’t seen.”
She raises an eyebrow, keeps her voice level even though she’s squirming inside with anxiety. “Are you going to watch me?”
“How else am I going to make sure you’re alright?” He smirks.
“How thoughtful of you.”
Suddenly, his whole face contorts as if he’s just seen something disgusting and vile. He flings himself towards the sink and throws up, his whole body seizing with heaves.
Seeing him throw up makes her nauseous as well. Her vision becomes blurry, and before she knows it, she’s hugging the toilet bowl and vomiting too. Violent streams of liquid leave her body. She feels like she’s about to spew out her insides along with her baby.
Sometime later, when both of them can’t stop vomiting and her limbs shake and spasm from dehydration, she manages to cry into the bowl between violent heaves. “Call the doctor!”
“You bitch! What did you do?” he yells at her. Bent over the sink, he barely has enough time to say the words before another ribbon of liquid and undigested food leaves his mouth.
“There’s arsenic in the gin,” she admits, hoping that his preservation instincts will be stronger than his anger and that he’ll get some help, if not for her and their baby, then at least for himself. Either way would suffice.
But he doesn’t go anywhere, instead he grabs her by her pony tail and pushes her head into the toilet bowl, drowning her in water and vomit. “Stupid fucking wore! After all that I did for you, this is how you repay me?!”
She’s in and out of water, in and out, in and out. Vomit gets into her nose and her airways, into her throat and her eyes.
In and out.
In and out.
Then, with one violent and smooth gesture, he throws her against the sink, breaking the mirror with her face and making shards of glass rain down on the floor and fly everywhere. Some even get in her eye and cut open her cheek. A huge chunk of glass falls in the sink by her hand.
He’s going to kill her. She can see it in his eyes, in their reflection in the countless shards around her. There’s no escaping them and their murderous intent. She’d known all along that this is how it would end, ever since he’d hit her for the very first time. Maybe even before that–maybe from the moment she’d met him. Maybe that’s exactly why she’d approached him in the first place. But that was before; now, the baby has changed everything.
She grabs the shard with bare hands–its sharp, cold edges bite into her flesh–and slashes at him. At his throat. At his face. At his raised hands. She’s seeing the world covered in red fog; there’s blood in her eyes–his, hers. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that she doesn’t stop, so she doesn’t.
Not until he stops yelling.
Not until he stops moving.
Not until he stops breathing.
Not a good while after that.
At night, she lies awake, staring at the stain on the ceiling and stroking her belly. She hasn’t felt the baby kick or move since that gruesome night; still, she believes it’s alive and well–safe and sound, deep inside her. Because if it’s not…
If it’s not, then…
She’s got nothing left but the stain.