A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian Read Free Book Online

refrigerator. That’s when I heard her scream.
    I ran to the back door, grabbing the first thing that I could think of, a wrench sitting on the counter that I’d used to fix the washing machine.
    “June!” I called. I couldn’t see her out there - and the
    From behind the fence, she screamed again.
    I jumped over the fence and found her face down in the dead winter grass and the neighbor’s dog tearing at her back, biting into her neck. Blood ringed the dog’s muzzle, a strip of her sweater hooked into his teeth.
    “June!”
    She made a rasping noise as if trying to call out for me, and the dog stepped on the back of her head with one paw, pushing her face further into the dirt. I ran across the field with the wrench held tightly in my fist.
    When I got close enough the dog turned toward me, snarling. I saw the rabies foam in its muzzle and when he lunged at me I hit him in the side of the head with the wrench. He wailed and fell into the grass with the force of the blow. I hit him over and over again until he was dead.
    That night in the hospital the nurses had to hold June down as she got shot after shot into her stomach. I held her hand and she turned her head from side to side with sick sweat on her forehead. Her back and neck were covered gaping holes of gore.
    “He took my wings,” she kept saying, “that dog took my wings. I’ll never get better now.”
    “It’ll be over soon,” I said.
    Even in her delirium, she insisted she keep the sweater and mend it, though I could never wash out the blood.
    It got worse after that. She quit her job because she saw rabid dogs lurking everywhere, in bushes and back alleyways and in the eyes of customers. She refused to go out into the backyard or in the field where she’d gotten bit. Instead she stayed in the house trying to stick her fingers through the nylon sutures in her neck. She stopped going up into her studio to paint or draw, and wouldn’t tell me why - perhaps because even in the innocuous paintings of children and flowers she saw herself reflected back, and in herself she saw the virus and the rabid dog.
    She clung to me with a new ferocity. Consolation meant nothing. If I wasn’t in the room, stuck to her, then it meant that I must be in the back field, face down in the dead grass, a wild creature tearing my wings out. Or that at any moment a dog might bust through the window, spraying glass across the living room, and set in to devour her. When we had sex she did it quietly, focused, her arms wrapped around me and her red hair dripping down over my eyes. She rocked on top of me with the steady rhythm of a hypnotist, not with pleasure, but with mechanics, as if she could seduce me with squeezed hips and sweat to never leave her side.
    “Only two people die of rabies a year in the entire country,” I said. “You’re going to be fine.”
    “It could’ve been me,” she said. Then she turned and pulled up her mended sweater that she refused to get rid of, the bloodstains still clearly visible on her back, and showed me the scars on her shoulder blades.
    “It was me.”
    That was when the round of psychiatrists and therapists started. I took her to every place within three hours of our town that I could find. They sat her down on half a dozen couches and extracted the gray matter from her brain. They got her to reveal more to them than she’d ever revealed to me. She feared abandonment because two of her siblings had died, and her mother divorced twice. Not to mention the dog. They laid her childhood out on a map, dosed her with drugs, talk sessions, systematic desensitization.
    In response she withdrew further into herself, and started to stand in the open threshhold with her hand held out in front of her, waiting.
    When I thought about leaving, I thought of her in the translucent white dress, her arms snarled in the branches of the tree. Somehow the image kept me running up the driveway every day for three years to take her hand and lead her back