Losing Charity

Losing Charity - 14

I freeze.

I want to scream again, I do. But my throat locks up. Squeezes shut. All I manage is a wheezy little gulp. An urk, no more.

"Urk," I say.

The horror of this situation is shutting down my brain. Freezing up my poor little neurons. I cannot cope with this.

Cannot. Cope.

At my limit. Check please. Checking out.

Peter burns. Skin black and split, the yellow fat beneath sizzling and dripping into the pit, sending up pops and hisses and clouds of stench. Burnt hair smell. Burnt flesh.

I'm a mess. Almost killed. Almost naked. Covered in my own unpleasant body fluids.

The image of those ghastly purple eyes is still fresh.

And now this. A voice. From a burning pit.

A pit no one could be alive in.

The only person in the pit is dead, dead, dead.

And I hate to speak ill of the deceased, but...

Good riddance.

I mean it. He tried to kill me. Peter Sutaf tried to kill me.

I'm glad I'm not dead.

I'm glad — I admit it — that he is.

Look, I was not ready to die, okay?

But this? This voice?

This I can't handle.

The voice is deep. Gruff. Speaks like someone from Brooklyn.

A native, not a hipster.

Brooklyn. It's not right.

"Hope I'm not interrupting anything," says the voice.

My poor brain is flailing, looking for some way to explain this voice coming from inside the fire pit, from beneath Peter's cooked corpse.

An echo? A trick of the acoustics in this crazy room?

Is there a man inside a crawlspace or hatch or something under this room? A custodian, the building super, a repairman? A fireman?

None of those make sense. But nothing about this makes sense.

I decide whoever it is, they're here to help me. Here to rescue me. Here to get me out of this nightmare.

"He ... he tried to kill me!" I choke the words out with effort.

"Was it consensual?"

"What?" My voice rises a few octaves. These are not the words I expected to hear. I expected reassurance. I expected "Hold tight, everything's going to be okay, you're safe now."

"Was this something you wanted, him killing you?"

My mouth moves wordlessly, because I have no words.

"I'm not judging," says the voice. "This guy I knew in Germany wanted to get eaten by a cannibal. This was his thing. So I introduced him to this other guy who had the right appetite. They had a great first date. No second date, but what can you do?"

"What? What? What?" I cannot comprehend what he is saying. Cannot process.

"Don't want you to think I'm not open-minded is all. Whatever games you and boyfriend here are up to, it's all good. Though from the looks of it, he's the one on the menu here. Barbecue!"

"He's not my boyfriend," I say. Like that's the key point here. The one thing I need to make clear to the disembodied voice telling me about matchmaking for German cannibals.

"His loss, am I right?"

Normally, I would take the compliment, but this is not helping. I feel I am not being understood at all.

"He tried to murder me!" My voice is hoarse with a trainload of emotions trying to squeeze through my throat all at once.

"Hmph," says the voice. "He wasn't very good at it, was he?"

A huge sob bubbles up and I burst into fresh tears. I can't take any more of this bizarre conversation.

"I need help," I say. "Can you please help me?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

Something moves in the pit. Peter's body shifts and slides deeper into the hole. A head pops into view.

I have no screams left to give.

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Losing Charity © Dan McGirt 2019. All rights reserved.

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