vignette-devil in the kitchen

"The Devil is in my house." She sat up in bed. "Now I'm definitely not going back to sleep." Fear rose in her throat and flooded her mouth. It tasted like pennies. "I wonder if this is the night?"

He scanned her framed photos on the walls and tabletops as he made his way toward her bedroom. Tribal children smiling and hugging her 'round her neck. Peace corps. Pissed him off. Photos of her smiling and accepting a diploma at graduation. Looked like a sit-com. Now he's furious. Hatred boiled inside his gut, although he didn't know why. His teeth clenched in his jaw, and he was aware of the leather gloves creaking as his grip tightened on the butcher knife handle. The butcher knife he'd found in the kitchen drawer. Prison had heightened his senses such that he knew her fear even before he hit the hallway.

She finally lay bleeding numbly on the kitchen floor. "It's about time," she thought "I was beginning to wonder". The thought that she was about to have the best sleep of her life and the irony the idea represented made her chuckle. The city air provided a deceptively fresh breeze through the open fire escape windows. Despite the grime of said breeze and the spreading lake of sticky blood on the floor, the kitchen was clean. Clean and claustrophobic. Somewhere she heard a lonely saxophone. It may have been real but could have just as easily been a hallucination.

The whole scene was so familiar to her. As if it had been set on stage for a play she had rehearsed a hundred times. Dreaming of one's own death over and over can become very tiresome, not to mention the toll it takes on an otherwise normal nights' sleep. She was glad to be done with it. It sure would be great to have one last cigarette, though.