Enough is enough

Written for Miranda’s #MidWeekFlash

It’d been a busy day of baking, preserving and canning, and I was exhausted. Life as a doomsday prepper was never exactly fun, but days like this made me hot and scritchy and aching for escape. I wanted to LIVE, not just exist. I wanted someone else to take care of the chores, the cooking, all of it. 

When Mikey crashed through the back door at sundown, cussin’ and yellin’, I flinched.

“WOMAN!” he roared, “WHERE’S MAH DINNER?”

“Comin’ Mikey,” I replied quietly. He didn’t like women who yelled.

He smelled like a brewery, and belched loudly as I plated his dinner up. I made sure everything was just as he liked it, then took it over to his easy chair. The portable radio was tuned into some conspiracy theory station, and he nodded and mumbled at it, while I popped the tray on his lap. “There y’are,” I whispered. “Dinner.”

He tucked in, eating like a pig, snorting and gulping, the whole time keeping up a list of my faults: “It’s cold, YOU’RE cold, I hate mashed potatoes, blah, blah, blah…” When he finished, I took his tray away and gave him a beer. He turned the radio up and ignored me.

Not long after, he began to doze, the empty bottle falling from his hand and rolling across the rug.

When I thought enough time had passed for the herbs I put in his food to put him deeply under, I grabbed up my heavy marble rolling pin. Steeling my nerve, I came up behind Mikey, raising the tool high above my head. I drew a deep breath and brought it crashing down on his skull with a sickening crunch. Blood flew and he screamed, but I brought it down again and again and again, until he stopped screaming, stopped moving, stopped breathing.

All I had to do now was dispose of the body. I stripped him quickly, not looking at the destroyed mess of his skull.

I dragged him outside, towing him across the yard to the pigsty. Reba and Ellie came to greet me, grunting softly. I hefted the body up and into the trough, then nipped back to the kitchen for a bucket of scraps. I returned to my girls, who were already nosing at the body, and decorated his remains with potato peels and onion skin. Trash, just like he’d been.

I went back to the house, filling a bucket with hot, bleachy water before I scrubbed and scrubbed to get rid of the blood and brain matter decorating the living room. When I was done, I stripped and dumped my clothes in the bucket, then went and showered. 

By the time the sun rose again I was clean, dressed, and leaving the house for the last time. I closed the door and walked down the steps, with nothing more than the clothes on my back, a rucksack, and the twenty thousand dollars in cash Mikey had kept ‘hidden’ in the woodshed.

Time for my new life to begin.

I was free.