Any Night in Suburbia
Eclectic
It's cold tonight.
It's cold most nights this time of year. But tonight is unique in its sharp piercing blade-to-the-bone chill. I stand here, outside this house. This house like any other on a typical suburban street in middle-class America. The lawns of the neighborhood are trimmed and green, with bushes and sapling trees strategically placed and dimly lit in the dark by solar-powered spotlights. I know that the stars are overhead, bright and distant, twinkling on this moonless night, but I can not see them due to the faint suburban street light glow that hangs above the city like a layer of musky fog.
I stand in a small neighborhood corner park, at the edge of a cul-de-sac. Behind me, the house. In front of me, a greenbelt of fescue grass, scattered concrete picnic tables, and in one corner a newly-placed play area complete with a jungle gym and swings within a now-muddy sandpit. The sprinklers stopped about a minute ago, when I, standing in the grass, had looked up in an attempt to see stars through the streetlight polution while allowing the gentle spray of sprinklers to wash my soul clean.
It was in that moment, looking up into the night air, chill breeze across my body, jeans and sweatshirt soaked, that I had reflected upon my actions.
It had only been a few seconds before, when, still breathing deeply, I dropped myself over the wooden fence onto the grass of this park. On doing so, crouching as I landed, I dropped the steak knife with my left gloved hand. I took off both of my leather gardening gloves, and slipped them into my right back pocket, and that is when the sprinklers came on. As I lifted myself to a stand, I looked up towards the sky, leaving the knife. Wiping my face, my tense muscles eased and my breathing relaxed as I inhaled slowly and deeply.
I have never felt so hot inside in all of my life. I rapidly descended the stairs of the residence, my hair matted, coarse, and dripping with drying blood. I flicked the knife back and forth between my gloved hands as I passed by the family photos on the walls. My stomach raged with superheated adrenaline and my breathing was still quite rapid, though not nearly the heaving intensity of moments before. My boots left prints with each step on the carpet, and, crossing the tile of the kitchen, I reached for the rear sliding glass door. Just before opening it, I took one last look back. The kitchen was untouched, but for the steak knife in my opposite hand. The family room was empty and silent, the television screen in the corner, black, except for a faint reflection of me standing within the kitchen, made possible by the neighboring park lights intruding through the glass. The hallway and the stairway, each with framed collages of family photos, were an echo of the past. I slid open the door and tiredly jogged a few steps to the side yard fence, where I promptly heaved myself over and into the freedom of the night.
She was the last one and so small. She was awake and looking at me from her bed. A drop of blood fell from my scalp onto her cheek and she squinted briefly before returning to stare at me. Those precious eyes of innocence twinkled with a reflection of light, as tears began to well up. With my right hand, I covered her mouth, and with my left, I plunged the blade directly into her soft trachea and through to the bone of her vertebrae. She struggled then, strongly for a toddler. I held her mouth down with greater firmness pushing her into the pillow as she thrashed with feeble limbs. My bloodshot eyes grew wild as they stared into her open watery blues. My breathing grew to a crescendo; rapid, heavy, and scratchingly hoarse, a desperate plee for air. In an instant it was over as I turned the blade and twisted it through the remainder of her throat away from me. The blood soaked the sheets, and gentle spurts shot out with each fading beat of her little heart. I took in one momentous breath, and my mind filled of crimson hatred. My intestines, my chest, all filled with an interior flame, though my skin stood cool and pale. My very soul felt of hot damnation. Leaving her room, with its plush toys and dolls, I headed down the hall towards the stairs. I stepped over the father’s corpse and past the blood-drenched walls, sprayed across towel cabinets and framed poster art, toward the stairs and eventual freedom.
I stand in the park, shivering with the breeze across my soaked clothes. And now I walk away from the house from where I had sought to enter. The memory of the action to be taken, subsiding now. In that house, a family slept. And I, a murderer in mind alone, realized forever the power of human choice.
