The Adulteress

`Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife [or husband]. Neither shall you desire your neighbor’s house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.` 
-Deuteronomy 5:21


I have lived a normal life. The kind of normal most human beings could not take. I lived through those thirty five years of my life as an only child to whose parents were the nightmares of any normal kid. I just lost both parents in a very normal accident. Most of you may find these thoughts cynical. I won't defend nor hold myself liable for this gratifications. I am being cynical. The old man was in his pickup truck driving from a night club while my mother was on her way home from playing the nightly Binggo Bonanza when all fate seemed to agree with the death lord and took them unwillingly. According to the investigations, Pop's truck hit a tree, head on and  instantly died at one oh-eight after midnight while Mum was long dead in her truck when she was found approximately nine minutes after Pop hit the tree. She apparently choked on a peanut, panicked and had a stroke. Second actually.

So there I was, in my old room, trying to figure out my eulogy for later's necrological services. It's kind of weird when everyone expects your devastation and yet you find yourself...normal. I wasn't happy with the loss of both of my weird and eccentric parents, they were still my parents and I am just a normal kid who loved his parents no matter how gruesome their ways were. But I, for some reason after a week of searching for my innards to be wobbling, found none. No tear seem to find it's way to the ducts. I find myself...okay. Is this the ever so famous apathy everyone's talking about?

The services took longer than I had expected. Suddenly I realized how big the senior citizen's community was. The sea of pixels floating in front of me seemed to be a still life digital painting of desaturated image of grays and whites.  Hair dyes were obviously not a trend in this town. The supposed open air smell fought its way to my nostrils and deemed to have failed. The enigmatic pungent smell of pomades and muscle pain sprays won the epic battle. I felt like a five year old again.

Dinner alone was weird. If there's anything I have that wasn't normal, that was definitely the first time. I was working on-call as a senior accountant on a very well known firm in the city, so I rarely get to have dinner in my apartment dining room, much more with someone. Eating on the dining table in my parent's house didn't bring the nostalgic feeling, the aloneness did. The peas helped.

I just sent the rest of my dinner to the trash bin when I saw something brush by the kitchen window. The pale muddy incandescent lights of the house didn't help with my scheming of the century old kitchen that matches the century old house. It was pitch black outside with no moon showing so I was pretty sure it was inside this house. Whatever it is. I soon gave up my search after kneeling to the wood paneled floors and search the bottom of the empty refrigerator and just settled with the conclusion that it was just an optical illusion brought about the gleam from the frames of the window.

The next day was totally exhausting. I had to sort everything on my own. The numbers weren't as painful as the thought of nothing was really left of you but debts to pay. I'm capable but that's not the point. Anyway, I tread on until lunch time and decided to eat at the back. We have this picnic bench at the backyard where I used to play after school.  It was a very humid afternoon so I decided to have lunch there. The picnic bench was situated a few meters away from the house. I sat with my back at the house facing the high wooden fence that had ivy growing everywhere. I was munching my sandwich when I saw the pile of broken windows piled into a clutter not a few feet away. I wonder which window in the house was replaced. I begin to stare into the panes and there were still some panels with glass on them. Those can still be recycled. The reflection of the house came into focus with the afternoon sun showcasing it's white washed wooden facade. Then I saw something in the reflection. A patch of black just below the attic window. I turned my head to see what it was, an initial reaction, but then I couldn't. A pair of cold white hands seemed to hold my head from both sides. I could tell they were of a lady's because I can feel her nails on my temples. I can't feel any pressure from the hands but it's stopping my head from turning. Or even moving. And as I was about to say something, I couldn't. My tongue seemed to have been tied to a knot. My thinking seemed to have been tied to a knot. I can feel her hands in my head pressing, trying to prevent me from moving. I couldn't move my hands. I can feel my half of a sandwich disintegrating between my fingers. The glass panes! I quickly looked at the clutter searching for any glass, broken or otherwise, that could spare me a reflection of the being that was challenging  the norms of my psyche. At the topmost square of the nearest window pane was the answer to my temporary panacea. I for a second doubted my perfect vision as I tried hard to squint an image of me and my perpetrator to that small and dusty piece of glass. If I were to know what I would have seen that day, I would never have looked for that broken window. The image that caused me to drive back to the city and leave everything as they were, my sandwich on the backyard picnic bench, my half dug pile of clothes in my suitcase, the debts that were never mine but is to pay, the memory of my weird parents and the childhood I never did enjoy. That one image that left me nightmares for years and the cause of my painful hypnotic sessions with a shrink, that I have to go back to that one afternoon of my life just to get relief but to no avail,  fails every time. The irony of that one image of a memory is the answer to everything and yet I'd rather die than relieve that one horrifying afternoon.

I was never a believer of anything. Until that one time when I had to see the face of an enigma, a shadow, the unnameable, I tried to grab hold of every possible theory or belief of the logical and at the same time, if there was a god, or demi-god, that could grab me by the shoulders and take me out of where I was sitting that humid afternoon, I would have begged. If I only knew what I was looking for. And then I did. Squinting at that glass a few feet away from me seemed to take every inch of my concentration when all of a sudden the image became as clear as the white washed wooden facade of the house. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, sweat drenched and all. She was wearing my mother's apron. I instantly knew it was my Mum's since it was the only apron she had. Twenty years ago. It was that cream apron with red lace on its hem. But what puzzled me was the dress she was wearing underneath. It was a graying moth eaten century old dress with a rounded collar and pleated balloon skirt that went all the way down her ankles. Her sleeves went up to her wrist which contrasts the perfectly pale white skin she has of her hands. By then I saw my reflection perfectly still in the mirror. My head against the bony fingers she has. The nails that were in sight of my peripheral vision seemed to catch the color of her dress since it was all gray. All nine of them. She was missing a finger. Her left ring finger. And only then I felt that round, nail-less half of a finger press against my left cheek, as if showing me, letting me feel the now obvious. The grayness seemed to go over her head until I saw her face. If it was to be called that. She has the head of a beast, of which I never seen or even imagined. Her head seemed to be covered with fur that what appeared to be her hair went all the way to her shoulders. She was grinning, flashing her yellowing rotting teeth. Her eyes, of human's, continue to stare at me in the god forsaken mirror. And in a flash, without removing her gaze at me in the reflection, she leaned beside my head and whispered in my ear with the voice that resembled a monotonous wail of an army of dead soldiers, "Stay with me, love. Stay or I'll eat your spleen!" Then she burst into guffaws, a coughing choking sound that could only come from a wilderness beast of some sort. I could only feel my heart stop beating and my whole body was now seemed to be drenched in cold sweat. And she was really half-choking and half-coughing. As soon as I felt free of her grasp I shot into a sprint beside the house, out the front and into my car. A shriek. Or a laugh, I can't seem to recall or my mind just won't let me, had sounded after I started the ignition and hit the gas full speed. I never looked back, or even shot a glance at the rear view mirror, too horrified and afraid that I might see her, that thing, running after me, or worse, sitting in the back seat.

I never dreamed or even thought to recall this memory until now. Now that I'm lying in my death bed some forty years after. I just thought I had to tell someone. I never got back into that house. Or even into that town. I never knew and will never know, what was that thing wearing my mother's apron, or that black patch I saw just below the attic window, or even why she had said those dreadful words that faithless afternoon. I would be failing the cause of this confession if I were to say I never had nightmares or even episodes of that instance. In actuality, it caused me some psychological nuisances such as to never to eat alone again, the fear of mirrors, and to feel greatly of head massages. This might come as humorous to some of you but this is the end for me. I soon will pass and the memory of that afternoon, like her graying dress, will soon fade into tall tales in camping trips, the lip-glossed cheer-leading initiations or a simple urban legend that will have many different versions.

The house was brought down after some years of no claim. I was contacted once or twice but declined the relation to it's dead owners. I heard the neighborhood was converted into an executive village but it's name I would not know. And would never know.

`Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.`

-an 18th Century proverb