Welp, my first submission, so of course I pick the single most retold story on the entire site to make it with, lol. I haven't seen one that goes exactly this direction, which is honestly probably to the good. All due warning, this goes to a pretty dark place, and be aware CW: Self-Harm. I originally wanted to shoot for 750 words, but had to abandon the idea when I'd pared things down to the bone for what I wanted to say, and was still almost 400 words over. So, I went back and fleshed things out once more. I did take one potential liberty with the capability of a certain A-named voice-activated home automation device, in that I assumed you could set it to trigger specific actions based on a door being opened. I honestly have no idea if it really can do that, so if it can't, apologies and please accept it as a necessary artifice.
Thanks very much to my editor, they know who they are.
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I walked out the door of the club into the cold night, furious and no longer able to stand spending one more second with those backstabbing snakes that called themselves my friends. I fished my phone out of my pocket and sent Linda a text saying she had hurt me very badly and I was absolutely devastated, but if she called me back within five minutes or returned back to the club in that time, maybe we could fix our marriage. I called her right after I sent the text, but after a few rings I got voicemail, where I left the same message.
After five minutes of wandering the parking lot and streets outside the club I called her again, but this time it went straight to voicemail. I was automatically getting ready to leave a second message, but as I was listening to her voicemail prompt, it hit me: the fact it rang the first time but not this time meant her phone
had
been on at the time of the first call, but she'd turned it off afterwards. This meant she had to have seen the text and the callerID on that first call, but had deliberately turned her phone off anyway.
At that realization, something in my head abruptly snapped, and I could feel the outside world falling away from me. It felt like a monstrous black maw had opened up beneath me, preparing to swallow me whole. Strength abruptly drained out of me like water running out of a broken bottle. I could dimly feel myself crashing to my knees in the snow by the sidewalk as my phone fell from my now nerveless fingers. The maw snapped closed, and my awareness ceased.
The next several hours are almost completely lost to my conscious memory. I only retain a few stills, like individual frames from a movie; empty roads covered in snow and lit by foggy streetlights, me sitting and weeping uncontrollably on a snow-covered bench in a park Linda and I had taken many walks in, a darkened oak tree getting spattered with quickly-freezing blood as I pounded my head into the bark crying "Why, why, why..."
When I returned to awareness, I found myself standing on our home's front porch. I was shivering from bone-deep cold, my head was throbbing in pain, and I could taste the coppery taste of the blood that had run down my face. I had no earthly idea how I had subconsciously directed myself all the way home on that long walk, nor did I have any idea how long I had been standing motionless and insensate on our porch before returning to consciousness.
I was moving largely on autopilot as I went inside, dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, hung up my coat on the rack, and turned the heater on high to warm up the chilly house. I went into the bathroom near the entryway to clean the blood off my face and do something about the ragged flesh on my forehead. I glanced at my reflection when I finished, and it looked like I had aged 10 years in the last few hours, beyond the damage I'd apparently done as I battered the tree that was now hidden behind gauze and medical tape.
As I stepped out of the bathroom, reaching into my pocket for my phone only to find it empty, reminded me I'd left it behind in the snow when I collapsed. I wasn't even sure if I had hung up the call, or if she'd have a super long message of empty noise. As I stepped into the kitchen, the oven clock informed me that it was now 6:47am. I both felt utterly exhausted and drained, but at the same time propped up by some kind of fell energy, and knew sleep would be impossible without some kind of intervention.
I grabbed a glass before I left the kitchen, and went to go to the liquor cabinet in the family room, planning to drink myself unconscious for lack of any better plan on what to do next. As I stepped into the room, my gaze rose to above the mantel, like it had done countless times before, to look at the large picture of Linda I at our wedding. For the second time that night I felt something inside snap as the visual reminder of happier times and what would be lost hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I could see that the black maw had returned, and I collapsed to the floor; the crashing of broken glass accompanying me as the maw closed again.
This time, however, I remained entirely conscious, which was
