Even now as my muscles strain to keep the scum's head below the surface of the tepid, filthy water, I think I can hear her screams. Most nights, I dream of it in terrifying clarity- dream what I didn't see, was too slow to prevent. Too soft to dispose of the trash as ruthlessly as I do now.
He places her small, limp body on the cutting slab. While the scars it bears are shallow and smooth-edged, I feel a sensation of foreboding creep into my chest. Soon, it will bear gashes so deep that the wood itself will scream in anguish, as he fights to wrench it free. She looks vulnerable, her skin pale and thin, the blue tracery of veins trailing across her face and arms.
I think she might be asleep. My breath catches in my throat, and yet I know I cannot do anything. I just watch.
When the blade rises, I can see her eyelids flutter, and when it descends, she shrieks as it buries into her bones.
He panics, hand flying from the knife, and she just lies there and screams as she stares at her reflection in the blade. A long, dark pool begins to spread beneath her, reaching fingers of blood runneling along the divots in the board. Her screams make the dark liquid shiver, its' pitch is so high.
I can feel my mother's nails, short and ragged, digging into the back of my neck, and a gasp swells in my throat. Grice's hands flap uselessly in the air like wounded birds, trying to shut out her horrific screams.
He finally claps both hands over her mouth, and after a few moments pass, the pale blue of her irises are eclipsed by her upper lids. She does not twitch or struggle. The silence in the shop is too complete for the heart of the city.
After a long second stretches into a clutch of them, his shaking hand wraps around the handle, and he works the blade free. The wood protests as the blade is pulled from its body. He steps back.
I see now that the person on the block is my mother, and her eyes are aimed blankly at the ceiling. She is stiff and bulky, bare save for her slip, like a mannequin waiting to be covered. A cap of foam has crested her lips, though beneath it, I think I can hear her calling my name. It is an awful, strangled little voice.
It doesn't sound as if she is talking at all, but as if the voice is somewhere deep in her chest, and the noise is pushing out past the body of my mother. A distant horror fills me, like the slow stream of a leak before the dam crumbles. When her eyes flick to me, I can hear the little Roche girl scream again.
It is then that I wake, bathed in sweat, the people living in the apartment next to mine pounding on the wall, yelling for for me to be quiet. Recently, my landlady has taken to harping on me about my screaming in the dead of night. She informs me that decent people are sleeping at that time.
Decent people wouldn't hear me.
Decent people don't live in this godforsaken pit.