A Gentle Hell by Autumn Christian Read Free Book Online Page A

inside.
    I will tell you a secret now, the terrible and ugly truth about our neuroses. Our parents and our lovers will tell us that we are afraid of nothing, in order to dispel our fear. They will try to convince us that the dark outside will never crawl through the windows and drape itself over our beds. No, dear, you will never find a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag. Don’t worry, nobody is looking at you when your limbs become hot wires and you trip over the furniture. Hell, you probably already know what I’m going to tell you.
    June got bit again.
    My car broke down on the way home and I didn’t get back until late at night. When I finally did manage to get home I didn’t find June standing at the threshold of the door with her arm outstretched. I thought immediately of that moment over three years ago, when I’d found her in the field out back with the rabid dog. My pace quickened. When I got to the house I found the front door open and the wind howling through the living room like a cave. One of the corners of the rug was upturned. When the wind lifted I smelled a tepid, coppery smell.
    “June?” I called out.
    A gasp in response.
    I turned on the lights and found June draped over the upturned couch, a lamp shattered at her feet, her chest cracked open, half her face torn. The blood pooled into her navel and congealed in her hair.
    I ran to her. Knelt and tried to feel a pulse.
    “Oh god, June,” I said.
    She coughed and spit up blood all over me. Her eyes shot open.
    “He bit me again,” she whispered.
    She closed her eyes and became still.
      This time in the hospital the nurses didn’t have to hold her down for her shots, as she was barely conscious. I kept asking “Is she going to be okay?” so many times that the doctor with the sloping jaw and cat-shaped birthmark on his face asked me to go out into the waiting room. When the doctor came out I cornered him, wringing my hands so hard I thought I might break my wrists.
    “She has several broken bones, a punctured lung,” the doctor said, “multiple lacerations in her back and throat. We’ve done the best we could.”
    I swallowed hard. If I had her white dress then, I would’ve pressed it again my nose and mouth.
    “So she’s not going to make it?”
    “We think she’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve stabilized her.”
    I laughed.
    “Then what was that bullshit about ‘we’ve done the best we could’?” I said, and laughed again, heady, timorous. “You’re a sick fuck.”
    Much to my surprise, the doctor’s face broke out in a smile.
    “Can’t disagree with you,” he said.
    June stayed in the hospital for seven days. On the eighth day they called me and told me that she could go back home. When they wheeled her out of the hospital in a wheelchair to come meet me in the carport, June was smiling underneath all her bruises and cuts.
    “How are you?” I asked. I bent down to hug her. She brushed her crooked mouth against my cheek.
    “I feel fine,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
      When I drove her home I expected her to be limp and sluggish. Yet she kept her head erect against the car seat, and her eyes open. They were bright and ferocious, brighter than I’d ever remembered.
    “Are you sure you’re fine?” I asked.
    She smiled at me and in that smile I thought I saw the hint of a cold thing, something I couldn’t quite pin down. Cold like crossing a tile floor barefoot in the middle of the night. Cold like the slick branches of a bending tree.
    June healed fast. She stayed in bed for several days, but soon she was able to walk around, though with a slight limp, and even got up and down the stairs. Though the change in her was sudden, at first I didn’t recognize it. I suppose that’s what happens; you get so caught up in a routine that it’s easy to keep living in the dream of it.
    I thought I should’ve felt relieved when June stopped waiting at the threshold for me to return, but instead I felt lost,