Melpomene's Hand

Billie heard the sound of a woman moaning before she felt pain. After awhile, she realized she was that woman with long, guttural cries escaping from her throat as if she were a wild animal.

Billie wanted to touch the top of her head. It felt broken in two. She was afraid. She couldn’t remember why she was hurt. She lay there for a while and then she became aware of something else, another wound on her body where something touched her in a repetitive motion.

This wound hurt differently than her skull. It felt bruised and raw as if her flesh had been torn. She lay very still, eyes closed, focusing all her attention on these sensations, as if she was doing yoga, breathing, feeling her body as her lungs inhaled and exhaled. Breathing seemed to diminish the pain.

Billie sorted through possibilities for the repetitive touch but couldn’t place what it could be. She lay for a long time with her eyes closed, no longer thinking, only feeling. Suddenly, she recognized what the strange action was. Licking. Something was licking her.

Billie bore down on the image. She felt a tongue, soft and wet, gritty like sandpaper, and warm. She kept her eyes closed and lay as she was, trying to decipher the animal belonging to this tongue.

Her brain felt like it was stuffed with straw. She tried to fight through the dry tangles, sensing that she was in the middle of danger. She needed to figure this out, but she was so tired. It was hard for her to think. Her fatigue was greater than any she had ever experienced. She was too tired to fight through the confusion in her brain.

She rested for a while longer, eyes glued shut, scarcely breathing. The licking continued.

Her body, a stalled engine, fought to come back to life. Her nose picked up a smell. Billie crinkled it, concentrating on the smell. She labeled its qualities—pungent, acrid, and sour. She should know what smelled like that. If she weren’t so tired, she would be able to decipher the smell.

The animal, or whatever it was, continued its licking. The thought occurred to Billie that this creature was probably benign. With each movement of its tongue, she felt its efforts to nurse and clean her wound. Thinking this unlocked her brain; Billie began to come back to life. She decided to open her eyes. Slowly she released her lids.

In the darkness, she could see a furry animal bent over her, paw resting softly on her shoulder, but recognition of what it was eluded her. The animal startled when Billie’s eyes opened, but after a brief pause, resumed its nursing. Billie shifted her head ever so slightly to stop the sharp pain that once again was pounding through her skull. Her head must be split wide open.

Suddenly it came to her that this was a cat. A cat was licking her. A cat. She laughed out loud, relieved.

The cat scampered back a few feet, watching her. When she stayed silent, the cat crept towards her, once again placing its paw on her shoulder. Then the cat moved closer to Billie and resumed tending her.

Now Billie recognized the smell she had been trying to label. It was the smell of a cat living in the wild, a strong animal smell that came from bedding down in grass and bushes, burrowing into hollows in the ground to make a den for itself, a whiff of cat piss on shaggy, unkempt fur.

The cat stopped after her thought—as if Billie communicated her understanding telepathically— then resumed its task. For some reason, the fact that a wild cat was licking a wound on her cheek was not frightening to her. In fact, Billie felt reassured by the cat’s presence. She was not completely alone after all.

Billie relaxed her tensed muscles and stared at the sky overhead. Her mind slowly began to sort out facts. Early dawn she guessed. Sun not up. Night, but not for long. Sky lightening to the color of gray, gray as a catbird’s feathers. Stars losing shape, fading. The chill of air just before the sun began to climb over the horizon creeping into her bones, reminding her that she was in danger.

Around her, nothing but the cat moved. Still air, still trees, still grass. She realized she was lying on her lawn, out behind the house. Lights from the kitchen blazed into the yard and helped her see. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the cat had orange stripes on its fur, and Billie realized the cat was not a wild, feral cat, but the one she secretly fed every night after supper was finished, and she was cleaning up the kitchen. Billie had even named her. She had picked Sasha for the cat's name.

Sasha was a classic tiger. Orange and white stripes undulating around her body, alternating in rings around her sleek tail. White whiskers framed her mouth. Sasha’s piercing yellow eyes picked up the lights from the kitchen windows and shone like beacons. They were the color of an amber necklace Billie wore in autumn, when the color of the beads matched the color of elm leaves that blazed up suddenly to match the sun.

Sasha’s body had become plump under her care, a solid cat, even bigger with her thick, matted fur coat. The cat suddenly stopped her work, lifting her head to listen to a sound, cocking her ears in its direction. After a minute of careful listening, the cat bent down again and resumed licking Billie’s wound. Sasha was taking great care to be gentle when she licked her. Billie was grateful to Sasha but she needed to see for herself how badly she was hurt.

Billie lifted her hand gingerly to feel the top of her head, and pulled it back in surprise. There was a knob surrounded by a mass of hair coated with a wet, gooey substance. She brought her hand close to her eyes. There was blood on her hand.

Tentatively, slowly, Billie moved her right arm and began bringing her hand closer to her face so she could feel her cheek. She didn’t want to scare Sasha. She moved slowly. The cat was watching her out of the corners of its eyes.

Sasha had never let Billie closer than a few feet. It made what was happening to her now seem even more surreal. Billie moved her hand closer and closer. Sasha looked up now, watching Billie’s hand, but stayed where she was, seeming to sense Billie’s need to explore her wound. Gently Billie touched her own cheek.

There was an open, oozing wound on her jaw, as if a fist had struck her there, splitting open her soft skin. She let her hand fall back to the ground. After a few minutes, Sasha returned to licking Billie’s wound. Billie lay still, pondering her situation.

She had been feeding Sasha for many months. She fed Sasha every night after the evening meal. Billie slipped outside and placed food scraps on a flat, sandstone rock that decorated the flowerbed behind the house. Billie sometimes even left food on her plate so that there would be choice scraps for Sasha. Billie pushed a piece of steak, or hunk of roast off the rim of her plate and hid it so that Peter, her husband, couldn’t see. When Billie finished her meal, she crumpled the paper napkin and scooped the scraps into it as she cleared away the plates for dessert.

After Peter left the kitchen, she slipped out of the house and put the bits of food on the rock, calling softly, Here Sasha. Here Sasha. Come get your supper.

In the beginning, Sasha wouldn’t present herself. All Billie could see was the tip of her orange tail above the tall, tangled grass at the edge of the woods. Over time, Sasha slowly became comfortable with her presence, emerging from the woods at the sound of her voice. Sasha watched as Billie placed food on the rock, and then moved back to stand by the kitchen door.

Sasha picked her way across the yard, and stopped, taking in Billie’s every move. After awhile, satisfied that Billie was going to stay where she was, Sasha would eat.

Afraid that Peter would come into the kitchen while she was doing this, Billie never stayed long, just long enough to see that Sasha was alive, was eating the food, and then Billie returned quietly to the house, closing the door behind her with care. Sometimes she watched from the window as Sasha devoured her meal, then sat and licked her face, her long pink tongue washing her face and paws, satisfaction written into the curve of her back. When she was finished washing herself, the cat trotted lightly across the lawn and disappeared into the woods.

Billie wasn’t sure why she hadn’t shared Sasha’s presence with Peter. He wouldn’t care. Peter liked animals. They talked about how some day they would get a dog. They both wanted a Sheltie.

There was so much distance between the two of them. A chasm growing wider every day. She knew because she hadn’t told Peter about Sasha, she was adding to the list of secrets kept between them.

Peter kept secrets so she was making secrets of her own to keep. Of course Peter’s were dark and ominous while hers were not secrets so much as omissions. She withheld her thoughts. She didn’t share her feelings. She omitted the most innocuous events of her day when they talked over supper. She didn’t understand exactly why she was leaving out details of her life but Sasha became one of her omissions.

Billie wasn’t sure that Sasha was female. It just seemed so to her. So Billie chose a female name that she liked.

Billie wiped her hand on the grass and brought it to her cheek where Sasha was licking. Sasha didn’t seem afraid now. She tentatively touched the cat’s head, ready to withdraw it instantly if it frightened the cat, but Sasha surprised Billie and began to purr. She purred louder and louder until it became a wild thrumming. At that point, the cat put both paws down on Billie’s shoulder and kneaded it, nuzzling her wet cat nose against Billie’s neck at the same time.

Billie petted the cat and tried to sort things out. Why was she lying in the grass? What had happened?

There was not a sound anywhere in the world at this moment except for Sasha purring, and her own groans escaping involuntarily.

Billie remembered nothing about what had happened to hurt her and bring her to this point. It seemed strange that she remembered Sasha and Peter but couldn’t remember the one piece so critical to her figuring out how to get to a place of safety.

Even though she couldn’t remember why and how it happened, she was sure of her instinct that she was in mortal danger and needed to run and hide. She also knew with certainty that it was Peter, her husband, who had done this to her. And she knew a third thing with certainty as well. He hadn’t meant to hurt her but his pain was so great that he could no longer control himself. Which was why the situation she was in was so dangerous. He was a menace to her and didn’t know it. His behavior was becoming more strange and erratic, ever since he returned for the last time from Iraq. She remembered that as well.

She tried once more to remember the events that brought her here, to the ground outside her home, wounded and confused. Her head throbbed worse now than before. It hurt to think.

She struggled to sit up. Nausea rose and filled her mouth with the taste of bile. She extended her right arm and lay back down, cushioning her head. Sasha resumed licking her scalp.

Billie lay and relaxed under Sasha’s protection, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be lying in the grass with a cat licking her scalp. She even dozed off for a while and might have gone to sleep completely except she was cold.

In the half state between alertness and sleep, she began remembering. Fragments came back to her, the sound of Peter throwing darts down the basement. He was throwing at the target as hard as he could. That sound warned her that violence was coming.

The darts had gone thud, thud, thud, changing to whack, whack, whack, the sound growing louder and louder, faster and faster. The sound of the darts was like a train going down a long steep grade except there were no brakes squealing from trying to stop. Soon, the train would run away. This is what scared her, knowing she was about to face a train flying off its tracks out of control.

As she lay there, simply remembering the sound of the darts as they tore into the dartboard made her afraid. So much hostility, frustration and anger were contained in each whack. Towards whom was Peter hostile, she remembered wondering. Was it directed towards her? What had she done to provoke his anger? Perhaps it was aimed at himself? His anger was like a corkscrew, turning and destroying the very essence of his being. This time, she remembered thinking, she was going down with him. He was going to destroy himself and he was going to kill her.

She heard the darts again in her head and Billie flinched reflexively, scaring Sasha away for a few minutes, but the cat came creeping back and resumed her care of Billie. Billie saw now that her instincts were right about Sasha. Sasha was female.

More fragments drifted through the thick mat of awakening memory. Billie remembered her fear sitting in her chair upstairs in the living room while listening to Peter throw darts. Her tension headache increased in intensity with each whack. She remembered thinking that it was time to flee but her body was frozen by the headache. She wanted to go into the bedroom, shut the door, pull the covers back and lie down and allow the pain to run its course.

Slowly more things began coming through her confusion. She was sitting in her chair, focused on the headache, trying to get the energy to stand and move. She was concentrating so completely on willing this action that the sound of the darts receded and became background noise. Now it was the pounding in her head that held her attention.

Suddenly she was startled back to the present by Peter bursting into the living room. His face was red. He was sweating. His eyes were seething with hatred. He was reaching for her. She recoiled in fear from the fiery blackness that had taken over his eyes.

Billie remembered being jerked from her chair and thrown into the kitchen. She remembered screaming. She swallowed now and felt the raw edges of her throat.

Billie struggled to sit up again. If she sat up, things might become clearer. This time nausea passed through her and left. She reached to touch the top of her head. She felt the knob. It seemed to have stopped bleeding. Sasha was sitting back on her haunches, watching her. Billie pushed herself into a standing position. Sasha ran back towards the woods.

Billie staggered to the garage and clung to the wall for a moment. What had happened after the screaming?

Think, she ordered, uttering the word out loud but the sound of her voice seemed to disappear as soon as she spoke, vanishing into approaching dawn like the night.

Chapter Two

He wouldn’t have hurt her if