The Girl in the Cell

"Do you think a dog did that to Lester?" 

"I don't know. I guess so. What else could've done it?" 

That was the thing; their neighborhood wasn't exactly crawling with wildlife, which left a dog as the only practical conclusion. But there were only a handful of dogs in the neighborhood, and Billy felt sure that none of them would have done it. They were all were quite peaceful, with the exception of the Denker's dog, but the Denker's always kept their dog inside the house. Could it have been a stray? That could be it. But one question still went unanswered: How did the cat get outside in the first place? 

"Think we'll get a new one?" Karen asked. 

"I don't know. Dad probably won't want to. He never wanted to have a cat anyway." 

"Yeah, but Mom will make him get a new one." 

"I don't want to finish this," Samantha piped up from behind them. 

Billy and Karen turned around in time to see their little sister throw her cone onto the sidewalk. 

"Samantha!" they cried in duet. 

 -----

Vera had been Homecoming Queen, but that was a long time ago, and looking at herself in the mirror it seemed that that had been another person entirely. The person she saw staring back at her had lines on her face, wrinkles around her eyes. They were not prominent; most people didn't notice them at all, but she did. Every time she ran into someone who she'd known when she was younger, an old school friend or a distant relative, she had a hard time facing them, couldn't stand the thoughts she knew they must be thinking. 

Oh, look how much she's changed, she imagined them saying. 

She could see it in their eyes. She knew that they were thinking this, even if they didn't know it. She didn't like the woman she saw in the mirror, so she turned away. She wanted to be far away from the mirror, that mirror that could only tell the awful truth that she was not little Vera Bane anymore. She was Vera Smith now, wife of Richard Smith and mother of three. Things hadn't turned out as planned. She'd wanted to really be something after college, had wanted to teach, had wanted to be an artist, perhaps even a writer, but then she'd met Richard and things had changed. Now she was a fucking soccer mom. No, this was now how she'd pictured her future. 

She decided to do a little housecleaning while the kids were gone. (After all, what's a good little homemaker to do?) She got the vacuum out of the closet. As she plugged it in she was startled half to death when it roared immediately to life. Someone had left it on again. Karen and Billy had been told too many times already to switch the vacuum off when they were done with it, not to just unplug it while it was still on. 

With her left foot she pressed the lever that allowed her to lower the handle, then started in the living room, picking up whatever the carpet had collected since she had vacuumed last. She weaved her way around the furniture from one end of the room to the other. Finished with the living room, she moved on to Richard's den. Then it was time to clean the second floor, and she dreaded having to carry the heavy machine up the stairs. As she started up she heard a door slam shut somewhere above her. The upstairs hall ran out of sight to both the right and left of the stairs; the slammed door sounded like it came from the left. 

One of the kids' rooms. But they're... 

They're gone, she thinks. Karen and Billy had taken Sam to get an ice cream cone. 

They could've come in when I was in the den. The vacuum is so loud I wouldn't have heard them come in. 

But this thought seemed phony. A flutter of unease arose in her chest.