Horror Stories

Little by Little

It's the small things. Of course, it's the little, seemingly insignificant things. Big things have a habit of being conspicuous. Big things are like grizzly bears. They don't gradually insinuate themselves into your lives. They don't delicately become a part of the very fabric of your life. They are either miles away in their usual habitat, or they are wrecking your home as they smash their way towards you, intent on eating you from the feet upwards, with no regard whatsoever for your pitiful screams. The neighbours may be banging on the wall to keep the noise down, but the bear? It gives no shits about your plight. Not a single one.

But then, that's life for you.

The neighbours knew. They had to. And yet they never said a word. Better to stay out of it. Everyone knew. It was a badly kept secret; Stanley Bradshaw was a bitter, mean man. So, why was Carrie the last one to cotton on to this? Why had she not known? Why was it that she never saw it coming?

Stanley was no bear. Not even in the world of men. He barely qualified as a man, if the truth was ever to be told. He was stunted in every way possible. A gnarled stump in a forest of trees.

And yet Carrie loved him.

Love was how Carrie was built. She was made to love. Didn't know any other way. She was aware that there were other ways, but they may as well have been snot covered space monsters, such was the alienation she had towards the alternatives. She was Carrie and she loved Stanley. To cease loving would be to stop breathing.

Now, as she considered the concept of Stanley, she realised that her love was trapped in a time capsule. Whenever she thought of him, she said loved. There was no love, only a memory of a feeling. A way of being that no longer made sense to her.

She wanted to cry, but she didn't know how. Or rather, she didn't know the why of it. This shocked her. She couldn't grieve for Stanley. He didn't deserve any more of her. And so it was her that she mourned. The Carrie who had thrown herself away in a trash can of a man. The nature of her discardment was piecemeal. Stanley had taken an emotional knife to her and made of her a jigsaw that he threw away one piece at a time. Carrie chuckled mirthlessly at this. Stanley knife. Even his name was a glaringly obvious clue.

How could she put herself back together? That was just one of a never ceasing train of queries. She was tied to the tracks, and question after question crushed her. Intuitively, she knew that were she to retrieve all of those jigsaw pieces, they would never fit together again. That woman was gone. She was no longer herself. Neither was she any other woman. Instead, she was caught in a terrible limbo courtesy of her Stanley.

The problem was that once you spent enough time with another human being, you were defined by them. Carrie looked across the dining table and tried to see herself in the man she had devoted herself to, but she couldn't. He had consumed her, but taken not a morsel of her into himself in any meaningful way.

He'd used her, and he was intent on using her all up.

She tried to see the good in her situation. This was her life after all. And this was supposed to be for keeps. She cast her mind back to her childhood and the blueprint she'd been gifted as to how it was to be a wife. The legacy not only of her mother, but also her father. Two parts of a loving whole.

Her father had been a quiet man. She had so wanted him to talk more. To speak to her. To speak for her. There had never been an absence with her father though. If anything, the sparsity of his words was daunting. There was a terrible power in the quiet of him. Her need for him to talk was to sooth and reassure her. Only now, did she see that her mother had given her that in spades, not only directly, but also as a part of a couple that had ceased being two people long before she could remember.