The unexpected

The moment Maria woke she knew something was wrong. The air wasn’t thick with smoke and her bedroom door was slightly ajar. Jeff always had a cigarette when he woke and never left their door open—the cat would get in. Gumball wasn’t your normal, loveable cat. He liked to bite your feet while you slept, and sometimes he’d gnaw until someone yelped. Jeff banished him from their room the very first night they brought the cat home, even though Maria hadn’t minded the nibbling.

She flipped the black quilt to the other side of the bed, and let it hang halfway to the floor as she stretched last night’s debauchery from her muscles. Drinking until early morning hours at the club was getting to be too much for her aging body. It wouldn’t be too long before she’d be blowing the flame from thirty-five candles. She ran a hand through her dark hair, slicking it out of her face before venturing out, in her underwear, to find her roommate. Boyfriend was too serious a term for Maria to use.

“Jeff, you awake?” she called out to him in a rough voice, smelling the slight bit of Guinness and Tequila still on her breath. No one answered. She called again when she reached the kitchen, but stopped short at the sight before her. The tiny row of cabinets that lined the wall in the closet sized kitchen were wide open, spilling their contents to the floor in piles. Her favorite mugs—the set of seven with the things you can’t say on television—were littering the floor, chipped and cracked.

“What in the hell?” She stepped back to survey the damage. The insanity didn’t end in the kitchen. It continued with broken frames fallen on the vinyl tiles, glass precariously placed in the footpath, and a blood trail leading across the carpet of the living room.

“Oh my God.” She breathed as she entered the open area where the couch was slit down the middle, stuffing thrown haphazardly around the room.

How did I not wake up during all of this? She thought.

She ran, hopping over shards of picture frames, back to her room to throw on some shorts and a top, zipping boots up her ankles while balancing on one foot. She snatched her phone from the nightstand and dialed Jeff’s number, but just as she’d guessed, his phone was sitting on the nightstand at the other side of the bed.

“Damn it, Jeff. What have you gotten into?” She whispered to the empty room.

The hallways of the complex were tight and damp at all times, during all seasons. As she came out of her aparetment, she noticed they wreaked of rust and sweat. Like something had been dragged from Maria’s place, bleeding. She hoped it wasn’t Jeff’s blood, but the realist inside of her knew otherwise.

She followed the line to the other side of the building, where it ended at a boxy window. Cold winter air trickled in the opening and swirled around her feet like an eerie mist as she stepped closer. If she looked she was sure she’d see a corpse. Even if it wasn’t Jeff’s body down there, would she be able to stomach the sight? Curiosity and terror battled inside of her until the need to know won out and she stuck her entire head out the window, gazing down at the alleyway three stories below. The red stain on the ground wasn’t the size of a grown man’s body, but it was close. Curvy at the edges, with splatters and dots circling around it, like the paintings Maria created in her studio downtown. She might have tried to recreate it if the circumstances were different, but considering the possible origins of the patterns, she didn’t let the thought even surface in her mind.

A smudgy line led off down the alley, and her stomach sank to her feet as she forced depressing thoughts out of her head. She tried to communicate to her body that it had to move, that she couldn’t let Jeff bleed out if he was still alive. She retreated from the cold air outside, removing her hands from the window sill and finding they were speckled with blood; blood left over from something being forced through the opening. She shrieked, wiping furiously on her shirt, staining it with streaks of burgundy. After a minute of hyperventilating, she forced herself to stop and breathe. Placing her hands on the wall for support, she closed her eyes and tried to visualize the downstairs rooms: laundry, lobby, office, utilities.