Ankle Snatcher by Hendrix Grady

Author:Hendrix, Grady [Hendrix, Grady]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, thriller, Adult, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781662517051
Amazon: B0CF3LKZDQ
Goodreads: 195945776
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2023-09-26T07:00:00+00:00

I waited in this room. I waited in that room. I couldn’t think clearly enough to make decisions, but there were no more decisions to make. Someone else told me where to go and what to sign. I must have given my name and date of birth a hundred times, but there was never an interrogation. They never asked me a single question about Tess or what happened last night. They had no interest in me or anything I had to say. I wasn’t a person. I was a crime.

Every time they left me alone, my lungs filled with panic and I started to drown. I had to take deep breaths and hold them for a five-count, and every time it took more of them for my heart rate to go back to normal. The holding cell smelled like BO. There weren’t any windows. I didn’t know what time it was. But I was grateful they never turned out the lights. I was grateful the bed was a concrete block rising out of the floor. Nothing could hide under that.

My public defender talked to me about sentences and plea bargains and this many years and that many years. I tried to tell him I didn’t do it, but he waited until I had talked myself out and then asked if I was taking any medication. He asked about my history of drug use. He seemed sad that the strongest drug I took was beer.

They hadn’t found Tess’s body, but they found her hair in my sheets and her DNA under my bed. I assumed when they said “DNA,” they meant “blood.” They found one of her fingernails broken off in the wooden frame of my box spring, like she’d been trying to claw her way out. They found a fragment of her tooth embedded in a floorboard. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.

I didn’t want to think about any of it.

What I did think about were the beds. I panicked when they took me out of the bright holding cell with its concrete-block bed and drove me to a place lined in linoleum with a narrow platform attached to the wall. After they turned out the lights, I thought about getting up in the middle of the night and letting the Ankle Snatcher take me the way it had taken Tess. It had an eye-for-an-eye symmetry to it, but in the end I was too scared of the pain.

Uncle David and Auntie June came right away. They wanted to see me, but the thought of talking to them scared me too much, so I refused their visit. They sat in the courtroom, though, their faces begging me to reach out to them, to acknowledge them, to let them help me. All my life they’d helped me. They’d made sure I never felt like a survivor, or a burden, or an afterthought, and they didn’t do it out of guilt or duty—they did it out of love. None of their love mattered.

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