The Gift

She stared at the phone for the umpteenth time. It had not buzzed for over 7 hours. With a huge sigh, she sank her head into the smelly pillow. It reeked of the smell of stale blood. I must wash this tomorrow, she thought.

As she lay down with her brand new headphones plugged into her ears, she wondered how long it would be before she stopped feeling sad. She wondered if she loved him. After all that he had done, if he deserved what she gave him. After a few hours, she awoke with a start. Her bedroom was pitch dark and no one was breathing down her neck. She glanced at the clock. 9 pm. She tiptoed outside, turned on the light in the hallway,and glanced at the door. It was shut. He was not here, thank God!

She thought about yesterday when he had come home as usual with the fresh smell of alcohol on his stale breath. It took her a tad longer than usual to open the door and he had thrown the keys at her face. Sigh! The gash on her forehead looked like Harry Potter's, she chuckled. But she didn't care. He had told her that he loved her just the same as he raped her at night. It was the usual. She dare never protested as he tied her hands to the headboard, ripped her clothes off her body, and penetrated her without any mercy. She had learned that holding her breath, and thinking about the riverside that she visited with her father as a young child, helped ease the pain. And so while he groaned and moaned, she lay there in silence, like an ice-cold corpse, perspiring with anticipation to closure.

Yesterday had been his birthday. And he wanted a special gift from her, he said. He wanted to see her burn his name on her thigh. She quivered with fear. And when a teardrop ran down her cheek, he slapped her hard. He had forbidden any tears. How could she have forgotten? Stark naked, she walked to the kitchen to grab the lighter. She heard a guffaw as she walked out the room and cringed at his exclamation of how he wanted to carve his name on her buttock.
"Bring back a knife too", he yelled.

The shrill alarm in her cellphone brought her back to the present. Did I really dump him last night, she thought. After all these years of abuse, silence, screams, and tears, she finally had the courage to throw him out of the house and dump him. When she had walked inside the bedroom last night with the steak knife in one hand and the lighter in the other, she saw him sprawled over the bed on the bed, disgustingly naked, with his mouth open. Within seconds, she slit his throat and watched him bleed to death.

Then she threw his corpse out of the house and dumped him into the backyard on his birthday.