The Mondays

Case Of The Mondays

I could spin you a lot of stories about my father.

He loved to make me pancakes on Mondays because Mondays were the worst days and my favorite food was pancakes.

I can't even stand to look at the fluffy, golden, breakfast food now.

There was nothing my father couldn't do, he was a superhero to me but to everyone in our small town, he would forever be known as the cause of the Monroe Massacre.

A serial killer.

My father had a lot of secrets and those secrets were set free on one rainy Monday. I had just gotten back from my mother's house, it was my week with her but this week she didn't want me so I was coming back home early.

The rain was pouring down on me, it was early in the morning but the sky was still so dark it looked like morning had never come.

I was wearing my favorite dinosaur pajamas and a little backpack strapped secure to me. I was so eager to go inside and see my father, I was hungrier than usual for pancakes because mom forgot to feed me.

The house was quiet, there was no sweet pancake smell that usually permeated through the air on Mondays.

"Dad?" I shouted.

There was no response from my dad but there was a small muffled scream coming from the kitchen. Suddenly the frigid chill in the air as I neared the kitchen.

The white tile was streaked, stained with different colors of red. Bodies were piled up on our dining table, bodies of young women who all wore the same dinosaur pajamas as me.

One woman was bound to her chair, bruised, bloodied, and pleading.

"You have to get out of here." she said slowly as she rose her head to look at me.

She looked so much like me, her hair was done like mine and in front of her was a stack of steaming hot pancakes.

"Honeybun?" I jumped at the sound of my father's voice.

I turned to see him wearing his apron, the one that I made for him in third grade. He was covered in blood, even his glasses had splatters of red.

"I'm so sorry." he fell to his knees as tears streamed down his cheeks.

I was frozen in fear.

My hero, my father was the monster under my bed, he was the man people warned their children about.

I was frozen in fear and foolish, seeing my father broken hurt me. So I did what a foolish twelve-year-old girl would do and hugged him, the blood on his shirt stained my favorite dinosaur pajamas.

...

"So you helped him?" the deputy asked.

I nodded, he scribbled in his notebook.

"All these years, helped dispose of your father's victims, out of pity?" there was a heightened level of disbelief in his voice.

You know that old saying, the truth will set you free?

Well, my truth had me bound to a nightmare.