Valentine's Violence

Ned checked his mailbox when he came to the apartments and looked curiously at a bulletin warning of mail fraud committed in the area. The post office he worked at hung similar fliers, but he bit his lip at the thought of those foolish enough to fall into traps.

Inside his mailbox he found a spider kneading webbing on top of the codex of “past due” notes. He hoped to receive the arcade magazine his grandmother subscribed for him. Relief came over him. She always asked about the woman he spent so much time with, but he never revealed so much as a name.

Ned locked the box back, and entered the elevator. The transvestite from the sixth floor caught the door and shoved her way inside. Ned grumbled. Her stubble grew in patches and her shoulders stressed the straps of her glittered gown. Lipstick clung to her teeth when she smiled. The boulder in her throat rocked when she spoke.

“What are you doing tonight, Neddy?” Her voice bounced from deep gutters.

“I’m just getting off work.” He sighed and pressed the second floor key.

“Will you send me to six?”

Ned gave her a sideways glance, and silently tapped the button.

“I like your beard. You remind me of a bear. I have nothing to do tonight.” She smiled at him, holding her elbows, and swaying her hips. The elevator moved.

“Me neither.” he admitted.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. His ankles hurt from all the standing. He wiped grease from his hands onto his khakis. The couch called to him. Beckoning laughter of his favorite animations echoed in the crevices of his brain. The doors opened. “See you around,” the transvestite lost her smile as Ned left and the doors closed on her.

He untangled knots in his beard and scratched the red hair beneath the sack of fat hanging from his abdomen. He reached into his pockets, sorted through fast food receipts and candy wrappers until he recovered his key. A heart sticker his eight year old neighbor pressed onto the door reminded him.

Ned almost dropped his key but caught it suspended before the lock. Thunder broke over the snow fall outside. He married on the 14^th of February because she was born on the 14^th. That way he only needed to provide her with one gift rather than three. But it slipped his mind...

Ned heard her breathing on the other side of the door. A tunnel of tension formed around him. He swallowed hard, hands in empty pockets, and opened the door to a full sized body pillow ordained with an anime schoolgirl.

“oh, you’re home-” he stammered as the veins in his head massaged his skull, squeezing out more sweat than magnified sun beams. “Its okay. But it might ruin the surprise. Don’t come into the kitchen!”

Ned tracked slush across the floorboards and closed the curtain to the kitchen. He panicked through drawers and cupboards, the pantry, under the sink, in the back of the freezer. Coins of tension expanded in his temples. He took half bottle of ten dollar wine and poured it into a pan. Ball Park Franks thawed in hot water. He mixed ranch and hot sauce together in a Tupperware bowl, opened a can of sweet peas and poured them into the pan. He turned the burner to high, looked to two serial boxes. One with a cartoon squirrel hallucinating over LSD induced spheres. The other with a four star general with a helmet hiding the top half of his face riding a tank into sugar city. He poured them both into one bowl, but found no milk, so he used the rest of the wine, but the peas started to burn and the smoke alarm went off but no matter how many times he pressed the button the mechanism kept flashing and stabbing his ears with falcon cries until he grabbed a broom and slapped it from the ceiling where it died on the floor. He opened a window to let the smoke out. Outside, a neon fish advertised a sea food bar. The ought turned his stomach upside down. He turned off the burner and leaped out the window.

When he came back out from the curtain he carried a five star plate. He sat it before his wife and sat on a stood in front of her.

“Happy anniversary. Don't I think of everything?”

He scooped up some food and stabbed it into the hole he cut out. When it dropped down her body he become lost in the Venus glow of her giant eyes, and the tender tone of her blushing cheeks.

“How clumsy of me,” he wiped the sauce from her spaded chin with a red napkin, rubbing the hardened stains on her exposed thigh where the skirt lifted just enough to tickle the other slots he cut into her. He stroked her pink spikes of hair, lowered his head to bite the food from her crossed knees where he stayed down to spit his mouthful into the fuzzy hole.

“It’s your favorite, isn’t it?” Ned slid his finger down the hole, shoving the serving to the deepest limits with a gentle push. He took hold the shy palm hiding her chin, and rubbed her cat ears. She straightened against the chair as he tightened the chords around her waist and chest. He lifted another bite to her mouth and jammed it in. Greasy tartar oozed from her cheeks and tricked down her face. He licked it from the bow tie around her exposed collar. After spitting out loose hairs, he offered her another bite but she cast a spell over him with the hairline quiver of her yearning mouth. The food fell from his fork so he stabbed it into her eye. “Look what you made do! I slaved over this!”

When he pulled the fork out he took with it tangles of polyester filling. Her longing expression failed to depreciate. She looked up at him with cowering acceptance and his heart exploded twice. He loosened the restraints. “Let us not fight, my love. I confess, I didn’t plan this. But I have something to make it up to you. Wait here,”

He kissed her, left the dim candle light to rummage through his belongings, then he returned with a silver band.

“I was hoping to wait until…. forget it. This is my grandma’s wedding ring. After grandpa died she gave it to me to give to the woman I want to be with forever.” He slid into her mouth. “It’s both of ours now.”

That night he clasped her between his thighs, but slept not. The weight of his legs and skull left deep impressions. In the pale window rays he noticed stitching coming undone along her seams, the color draining from her skin and hair, and dried saliva that he never noticed before on regions he boasted too pure to intrude. “It’s nothing. She’d never be unfaithful...” he fell asleep stroking a tear along her neck. She softened, and he sank further and further until sleep claimed him-

In his dreams she leaned over the bent bars of a fractured gibbet, free from her stitched prison, and just like in the anime he deeply coveted to experience, she stood before him as breathing creature above a pool of shadows and smoke. The perfume in her hair drew him near. He went to take hold of her hands, but shivered in cold sweat when he saw blood trickle down her legs. “No, no-” he stepped back from her as a winged lizard man emerged from the pool behind her. It’s scales glistened like green glass shards. One eye focused from a deep gap in the middle of its head. It took hold of his wife, stretched out its leather wings, and launched with her into the saucers of light fluttering between colliding clouds of green gas.

Ned woke up as if his bed collapsed. His legs and arms outstretched under the white sheets. Warm blood droplets left a trail to the end of the bed. He threw the sheets to the floor, dove under the box spring but finding nothing. He stamped to the closet and thew every item to the floor. Nothing hid inside. He bit his fist, checking the corners of the bedroom, then ran in his briefs to the bathroom, checked the shower, checked the towel hooks on the back of the door, and paced around the living room before finding grandma’s ring wrapped in the red napkin.

Ned clocked in overtime hours at the post office, stopped eating fast food, and jogged every morning before he shaved and showered. The animations that brought him joy ceased to entertain him and he started to clean his apartment. No matter what he tried, he still missed her.

The 14^th of February rolled around again. Ned came home from work. He waited at the doorway for the transvestite to take her mail and go upstairs. Once clear, he went to the mailbox. He opened it, but found it empty but for one letter. He slid it out, opened the envelope. His heart cracked open.

“Ned, it’s been so long since I left, please forgive me- but I’m sick, and have nowhere else to turn. Please, I need money. Time is running out. I never forgot you.” It started.

He read it five times. It detailed how to get her the money and why she couldn’t come herself to get it. Ned stood in the lobby for forty five minutes reading over the handwriting. He tore it in half, but stopped before the stairwell. A harp string vibrated within him and reverberated phantasms of himself in dire need, sick and alone in the street, trapped within fiber confinement. Brushing tears away, he turned around and left the building.

Ned walked to the ATM machine, and drained his account.. By the time he returned the sun evaporated beyond the polluted skyline and dark clouds clustered over the building tops. The alley of the apartments swallowed him. Manhole steam rolled up the walls. Cats echoed in the dumpster, and whispers of the sewer rushed under the pavement.

A shadow leaned on a junked refrigerator at the end and breathed like a respirator as white exhaust channeled down the alley. Ned trembled, his hands soft and sweaty, his tears blinding him. Blood throbbed in his ears. He stood before the shadow, opened his mouth but before his tongue called on the shadow to reveal themselves- a refrigerator box fell over him. The shadow emerged. A toothless, tonsured vagabond raised a foot long bayonet over the box. With one claw he forced the box still as he butchered it in a flushing fury of whitened rage. Blood whipped from the blade with each thrust, and pooled onto the frigid pavement. The shadow pulled the moistened cardboard away, stripped the cash and vanished down the steaming manhole.

No body lay in the alley.

The transvestite looked down from her window at the sound of the attack. By the time she arrived at the scene, only a full sized pillow with Ned caught within lay. She took her gloves off, and blushed. “Well, now… This year I’ll have something to do-”