The Bullet by Kelly Mary Louise

Author:Kelly, Mary Louise [Kelly, Mary Louise]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-eight

* * *

They say we are born with five basic senses.

Remember, you learned this as a child, from picture books: What does the bunny see? What does the bunny smell? And so on. Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Five. But some people have more. Some people can sense when rain is coming. Some mothers of soldiers swear they sensed a chill, an arrow of foreboding, hours before the telegram bearing the unthinkable news arrived. I believe them. There are bonds that surpass the capacity of modern science to explain.

Then there are the curious solutions that nature devises, to counter a deficit. My great-aunt, deaf from childhood, could sense vibrations, could determine the location of a sound, through her feet. She would curl her toes, bony and freckled, onto the warped boards of her front porch, then she’d jerk upright and point, a full thirty seconds before the rest of us heard the mail truck rumbling up the drive. One sense falters; the others sharpen.

So it is at night.

At night it is the sense of sound that will save you.

By which I mean, you could not see the man’s shadow outside, waiting. Could not touch it, as it slipped to the back cellar window, where the black was absolute, where the moonlight did not reach. You could not smell his fingertips as they closed around the doorknob. Could not taste his sweat beading, salty and glistening, under wool.

No, but you could hear the glass shatter.

You could hear the bolt scrape as it slid back. Hear the floorboard creak, protesting the weight of the foot that should not have been there.

I was asleep when he came.

• • •

AT FIRST, I thought it might be Will returning. Will, having turned around, having decided he wanted to stay the night after all.

I lay suspended, halfway between dreaming and awake. My pillow was warm. I would make him apologize. He would have to grovel. Then I would scoot over, let him slip naked between the sheets, let him curl against me. I made a purring sound, turned beneath the blankets. Hurry up, silly boy. What was taking him so long? Why had he made such a clatter letting himself in? Why was he not padding up the stairs? And something else was nagging, some detail not right, swooping and buzzing at my sleepy brain like an insistent insect.

At last I caught it: Will did not have a key. Will could not be in my kitchen. I sat up.

Listened.

I had imagined this moment. Every woman who lives alone must harbor her own private night terrors. In my nightmares these confrontations always unfold in black and white. Grainy, like a Hitchcock movie. Me, willowy and bearing a distinct resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, my floor-length white satin dressing gown cinched in a bow around my waist. Something—not a specific noise so much as a nameless but urgent sense of menace—routs me from bed. I slide on fur-trimmed, kitten-heeled mules and light a cigarette (still channeling Ingrid here). Inhale for courage.

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