31 Short Horror Stories for Halloween

Half

There was something very wrong with my wife. I wish I had realized it before we had gotten married. I had stupidly ignored the red flags that popped up when we were still dating. I went ahead and married this woman and I lived to regret it.

She had an anger problem. It wasn't that small things set her off. She wasn't the kind that threw things. In the three years that we had been married, my wife never hit me. Her anger was very different. It was invisible unless you knew where to look for it. The windows were a good place to start.

I knew my wife was angry when I discovered the fingernail marks in the windows. I would never have guessed a person could do that to glass but my wife could. She would scratch the house, she would smash things in the house whenever she was angry and then tuck them away.

I ignored it. We never talked about the marks on the walls, the broken tiles, the cracking windows, and scratched doors. If we ignored it, we could safely say that we never fought. The first year of our marriage was almost blissful. Our son arrived that year and I barely noticed my wife scratching away at things like a wild animal. It was her hormones acting up, I told myself.

The second year, her anger began to take a more solid, more obvious form. Our friends found their cars scratched up. Some of them had kids that came home with deep scratch marks. I ignored it all. It couldn't be my wife. I pushed the many instances that I could recall when our friends had antagonized my wife out of my mind. It wasn't her.

The third year, I could no longer take it. We sat down to talk about it. I asked her to get help. I came home that day to find my favorite hiking boots torn and shredded. I couldn't guess what she might have used to do it but I'd had enough. I filed for divorce and full custody of our son.

It took a few months, and she was going to get half of everything. I didn't care because I was going to get full custody of my little boy and that was all that mattered to me. She wasn't happy. She said she wanted half of everything. Everything.

The day it was finalized, I took my son to get ice cream. We came home and he ran up to his room to change. We'd go play in the park. He didn't come down when I called him. I went upstairs and there sat my wife, determinedly sawing our son's body into half. She wanted half of everything. Everything.