Saving Lizzie

Short Story

 I had a daughter before. As the days pass, my memory of her has begun to fade. I can't help but wonder if I would even be able to remember her face now if it weren't for the worn out picture I keep with me. She was always smiling, only six when she died... She had my jet black hair and her father's blue eyes. She was born with a chubby face, nothing like my sharp, pointed features and at six years old it had already become obvious that part of her would never lose that baby-like roundness. I loved it but...

 My husband was...different, unkind. He had changed in the years leading up to the epidemic. He lost his job a few years before the whole epidemic started and he wasted no time in taking up drinking in place of his work. It's strange how I can still remember the stench of him, the way he'd be soaked in alcohol, sweat, and cigar smoke when he'd wander into our bedroom late at night, while I can barely remember his face or the way he use to hold me. I can't even remember the way it felt when we first made love, but I remember that stench.

That night, he had stumbled in around three a.m. He kicked up such a racket that he awoke me despite the pill I had taken to help me sleep, knocking against the sides of the hall, making his way to our bedroom, tripping over his own feet. I sat and I waited for him to make his way into the room, my eyes pressed tightly closed as my whole body tensed in wait, ready to pounce or run if I needed to. He hadn't been home in three days; part of me had even begun to hope that he wasn't going to come back. As I lay there I worked myself up into a fit, the rage was coursing through my blood when I shot up from the bed, ready to tell him off and kick him out once and for all. At first, I thought he might have been in a bar fight, the way the blood spilled from his face, covering almost half of it with dark liquid.

When he stepped into the light, I knew what had happened, what he had become. I knew about the epidemic. I had seen it in the news, but I never thought that it would get to Arkansas. I hadn't even spared it much thought, they always overreact with these sort of things and then suddenly everyone is in lockdown. The images I saw on the television were bad but I didn't actually think they could affect my real life... But I recognized the way he looked, matching it to the photographs they had shown on the news. It was so much worse in person: The way his eyes were glazed over and bloodshot, his skin so pale it almost seemed translucent. I could see the straining veins beneath it, sticking out every which way, seeming like they were about to burst at any moment. The smell of blood mixed with alcohol as his mouth hung limply open, blood dribbling out and onto the carpet. He let out a moan, one that got choked by the bubbling of blood catching in his throat. Blood spewed out of his mouth, dripping down his chin and staining the light blue sheets I was still lying beneath. There was a moment of silence between us as I stared, struggling to take in what I was seeing.

He came at me then, stumbling towards me, pulling himself onto the bed and pulling the sheets straight off me. I scrambled backwards, banging the back of my head on the baseboard before rolling myself off the bed and onto the floor. My hands reached out, grappling for anything I could use as a weapon. We didn't keep a gun in the house, not with Lizzie running around — it would be too dangerous. I remember having countless arguments about it at the kitchen counter. The worst was when he found the 9mm pistol I had been keeping in my old, beaten up purse. I couldn't help but give in to him with the way he was screaming his head off about how Lizzie could have gotten to it. I don't think he understood that the safety was on and the gun wasn't even loaded, I just used it to scare off the soon to be high school dropouts who hung out smoking in the parking lot long after school had already gotten out. It made me feel safe to have its familiar weight on me, something to keep me out of harm's way when I'm working the late hours at the Harrison School downtown. The school didn't scare me as much as the students did, half of them would drop out before the end of the year, off to sell drugs or whore themselves out, it was just that kind of school. Which made it all the more dangerous to work at. Still, I changed out my gun for pepper spray since he insisted. I never regretted that decision more than I did that moment as I was lying there, my hands straining to find anything to protect myself within the dark room.