Dec 09, 2011 22:40
She left the pub at 1:13 am after spending most of the night on a barstool, laughing up at him and leaning her body against his shoulder - much too close considering that her boyfriend was out of town. She hugged him goodbye and could still feel his eyes on her as she clicked across the street in her boots and opened her car door.
The streets were empty and her windshield was foggy. She took a moment to assess herself and decided that drinking one beer and a glass of water three hours ago meant that she was capable of driving, even if she still felt a little paranoid. It was time to grow up.
She hit every green light on her way out of town. The radio started to play one of her favorite songs, and she turned it up as she made her way fearlessly through the fog, singing at the top of her lungs. Her mood lifted. For a moment she was proud of everything that she was doing in her life, felt like everything was finally coming together. She always found it funny that songs allowed her to dream for a total of three minutes.
She parked in her driveway and double checked that the car doors were locked, remembering what her mother had said about people being “desperate around the holidays.” She glanced at the huge scratch that ran along her driver’s side door and sighed. There wasn't much to worry about.
At her front door she paused in the glow of the Christmas lights to try to find her house key, which looked exactly like her work key. She really needed to do something about that.
There was a rustle to her left and she glanced up, expecting to see the neighbor’s cat shitting in her flowers again. She froze and dropped her keys to the ground with a loud clink. She took a step back but couldn’t force herself to do anything other than stare in absolute horror at the thing stumbling out of the bushes towards her, heaving itself with an exaggerated effort towards the exposed flesh of her neck.
The only sound that came from her mouth was a squeal - the same squeal that she inevitably made when she looked down to find a spider or a bee making its way towards her. The kind of squeal that, once she regained her composure, would make her glance around to guess who had seen her make a fool of herself.
That was all she had time to do before there was a gaping hole where her throat had been and she lay bleeding and half devoured on the porch, her eyes wide and glassy in the dim light.
And she wasn’t proud of it.