Ashamed, Absolutely

“6 nights east was where they found shelter, food was little, but their company was aplenty.”

The night Felicity Jane Dahmer took off along Harrows Steep, she was very hungry. The car slid along the winding road like a thread, the bends ran a thin carpet of ice, and the car skidded and rattled. The roof was tall and long, bearing space for Felicity’s tall mound of product infused hair, as well as a track of dim LED’s, scattering faint neon smears across the interior. A loose fog drained from colourless clouds across the sea, the pools of moisture had Felicity slick the wipers on. The road was bare and unlit as the sun dimmed under the horizon, her headlights gleamed, and her audio novel was a shout in the empty country. 

“Jane, why must you live in this tired solitude. Take a swing at your children. The axe could take them both in one blow. Drive them up the wall. Toast the room with a lick of their�"“

Blood dripped from a gash high up her arm. Wrapped under bandage, 4 dips in the flesh. She wasn’t embarrassed, per se. Ashamed, absolutely.  The journey had taken her from Georgia, Alex county along the connecting ‘business trail’, about 9 hours pre-rush hour, which took her along an industrial estate and humming porridge factory by the field. Slithering amongst a terrible cluster of commuters and Lorries, she was driven. By the car, which was under considerable control given the conditions, but also the dryness on her lip, the trail of grit along her tongue? The roof of her mouth was a desert, wetting like a sponge as she suckled the lid of a beer bottle, never sipping, mind you. She pierced a tiny hole in the lid with a screwdriver and squelched her lips along the cold, drops were enough to quench her drive for moments at a time.

It was December 23rd and she hadn’t been paid, but she had spent little of last month’s pay and carried a firm bunch of notes in a glass jar by the passenger seat. A risk, out there in the cold, she knew. She knew that had she toppled over the edge, tumbling into the sea, a sheet of Franklins would swim across the ocean. She didn’t care, part of her welled with uneasy hope at the thought. She wondered, as the moon began to stare like the eye of an impatient mother, just how her children would think of her after all of this.

They would love her all the same, they always would.

(They would hate me into their teens, fantasising their dark red revenge.)

The same, uneasy welling of hope flustered her. A tuft of loose hair fell across her forehead, twitching her. Her hands bounced instinctively, the wheel teetered to the left and the wheel shrieked, as did Felicity. She pounded the wheel for control and slammed the break with a high heeled shoe and stopped dead. The audio crackled and a chill wound across the car, painting a dim grey colour across the windows. Her breath screwed up along the windscreen as she fell forward for a moment of replenishing solitude. What would her kids think of her?

(They approach with a match, they throw it, it catches my blouse, the fire rages up my torso and stops at the stump by my elbow. They track me down to my tenement flat in Redoak County, they flood in through the windows, beat me and�")

Her thoughts were swimming in the same soup and she faded until she was jolted by the bright scream of an impatient driver, sending her back along the icy road. The darkness seemed to puddle and blotch until the sky was void, the sea was a single pearl stripe painted by the painfully bright moon. The road sparkled in her headlights. The car behind had droned by 40 minutes ago, she hadn’t checked the time in hours, although it shone in the centre of an orange display but the dashboard. She wanted to, several times, but she wondered how it would feel to see, in numerical script, just how incompetent her mothering had been on this specific night. The audiobook began to dwindle. The world was abandoning her.

‘�"and that night as the Norah’s fled the scene, a blizzard�" ‘, the old man seemed to whimper, tired of reading to the degeneracy of Felicity Jane Dahmer, who in truth had lost her focus on the story as she left Alex county 4 hours ago.

The night drove on and she found herself asleep at the wheel, tucked into an alcove of mud and snarled trees. Leaves hooked over the car like a caring blanket. Her sleep was peaceful, but thin. She woke several times as the ticking of a cars headlights snored by. She woke in a daze that was unintelligible, to her. As if the moments were dreams laced with the sting of reality. The leather chair chilled, as did the air she breathed. She checked the time upon waking, 4:19 it said. She shunted the key and the engine purred, the heaters clicked on and she held the wheel in ambition of perhaps driving, at some stage. The bandaged wound up her arm fired for a moment, a hot and intense sting. It vibrated then ceased. She had, by her somewhat uneducated foreseeing, 30 or so miles until she reached Redoak, and maybe from there the journey would be eventful. She’d have a reckless driver to shun, a collapsed drunk to ponder. A traffic jam to wind her. Something to distract her was all she thought she needed�"

(God, they’re going to kill you, Felicity. You think kids forget that easy? They’ll look at you and see not their mother, but the mother-... no, the person who did that awful, awful thing.)

A tear dribbled along her cheek, she didn’t notice until it fell upon her collar bone coldly. She couldn’t tell why a tear fell along her tired face. Maybe it was the chill rattling through the warming fans. Maybe it was her children wincing 50 miles behind her, scornful and disgusted. She reversed, slid and stalled the car. She reignited the engine easily and made her way towards Redoak County, with a look on her face that was as hard as it was vacant. As regretful as it was lustful.

 

***

               

                Felicity woke up in a fuse of burning pain. Revolting, pulsing agony like she hadn’t felt since…

                She tried to wriggle the pain away, maybe it would fall through the stump and land in a convenient heap on the floor. She needed her goddam drugs. Her dream fled her entierly, as if she didn’t have it at all, as if the air she breathed and the body she inhabited meant nothing. Nothing mattered but the sore, flashing pain. A spotlight of hot flushes fell across her lower body, her clenched chest began to hurt. Her breathing quickened to pants. The room hadn’t changed, the door was locked, she was cramping in both arms. Her right hand had lost circulation and was a tingling useless slab hanging from the arm of the chair.

                Tough rain was driving against the window in long swades for the length of whatever this onslaught of pain was. Like gunshots in the dark, the rain was illuminated by a bulb of light from somewhere below. The moon was tucked behind the Oaktree. The pain eased to a moaning sting after God knows how long, and that’s when the dream began to come back to her.

‘So, you’re starting to remember?’ the Voice asked, but it knew.

                I was driving. I had a destination. I wanted and didn’t want to go there.

                ‘There, huh?’

                It was something… somewhere grand.

                ‘I think you got it. You travelled somewhere, you have to remember where you were going and what happened when you got there. An attacking? An accident you were pulled from?’

                I can’t remember.

                ‘So maybe… you weren’t attacked. You were sleeping? You were sucking on a beer so s**t knows what could have happened to you on the tail end of that long journey. How long was it?’

                Alex to Redoak? Say, 8-9 hours?

                ‘And for how much of that were you a fading, drunken wreck?’

                I only remember one bottle.