Rosemary and Rue | A Dagger of the Mind

Is it too much to ask to wish to move on with my life?

I just want to return the books.

Now I know. I really should have stay at home today.

Should have left him outside the porch and it shouldn’t takes long before he leaves.

Just what was I thinking?

Now I'm trapped in my own house with him. All he does is shout and wail. What does he want from me?

He looked inhuman with those bloodshot eyes looking like they’re about to pop out of their socket.

All the ugliness in this—why didn’t I see even a hint of it back then?

How do I stop this now?

How do I make him leave?

Photo by Sandip Kalal on Unsplash

There was a third person in the room, unseen. But the pair were so consumed by their private storm that they didn’t notice that.

It was her father who had slipped in through the patio door. He had been out in the garden earlier, helping her tend to the long-neglected plants, when the commotion started.

At the first crash of a door slamming and those muffled bursts, he chalked the chaos up to his son-in-law's usual theatrics. Just the same grim sound and fury, the man acting out yet again—an ugly habit that was almost nothing new under this roof.

Shrouded by the heavy parlor curtain, he had blended into the house that hears all, sees all, but never reacts.

It was out of a father’s misplaced mercy; he didn’t want his daughter to see him and feel the sting of shame for her marital strife.

He had witnessed dinners being hijacked by that quiet, passive-aggressive, sideways cruelty where his son-in-law raged without ever raising his voice.

There was no opening to call him out. All they could do was white-knuckle throughout the meal, politely swallowing the insults whole, trapped by the very concepts of civilization and restraint, unable to react without being dragged down into his savagery.

The public humiliation was agonizing for her, and heartbreaking for him to witness as a father.

He wanted to grant them the space to sort things out, yet he couldn’t bring himself to walk away. He resolved to remain an unseen ghost until the chaotic tempest spent itself.

Duroy’s voice was entirely unrecognizable—the broken dialect of an unhinged mind. Like a man turned into an animal baying at the moon, fracturing between desperate shouts and low, garbled mumbling.

Even when he spoke, it was all unmoored noise; any connection to coherency was completely severed.

To the father, it was simply the sound of a man broken by emotion, a husband unraveling in his own home. Little did he realize that the man on the other side of the curtain was not his daughter’s husband at all.

Duroy, his delirious on a toxic mix of drugs and escalating paranoia, caught something in the corner of his eye.

The man behind the curtain was as still as a corpse where there was barely a whisper of movement. But to an intoxicated mind, it was more enough to turn a ghost of a threat real.

In his tunnel vision, shadows took the shape of a rival coming to settle an old score. Everything else outside that narrow track ceased to exist. It was an ambush.

Acting on his paranoia, he saw the antique sword mounted above the hearth. It was the fang he needed for his self-defense.

The piece was a family heirloom Lia’s father had given her when she first moved into the house. Now, it was about to become an instrument of doom.

He snatched the sword from its place and plunged forward. There was no thought behind it nor there was logic; he was simply needed to strike first.

Daily Prompts for FreeWriters

©Britt H.

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