Murder House

Everybody in town called it the Murder House, but Mia simply called it home. Here is the front porch where (he stood and hacked open the door with a hatchet) she used to play with her dolls. This is the parlor where (Mother was slain) she learned to sit up properly and greet guests nicely. Here’s the kitchen where (the knife was taken) Mother cooked breakfast and here is the master bedroom where (the rest of it happened) her parents kept a small chair, a lamp, and a basket of books. It was her favorite spot in the house, keeping her (hidden while her father’s blood splashed the walls) safe and happy.

Before, she had just been Mia, a quiet girl with big eyes and dark hair pulled back by a bow. After, she became The Only Survivor, the little girl who witnessed her family’s slaughter. People didn’t ask her to play ball or Freeze Tag anymore. They asked her what it was like to hear her father scream, or how did she feel knowing that the scary man could turn around and find her at any second?

“You were in the chair, right?” they’d ask. “Quiet as a mouse, but he still could have seen you, couldn’t he, if he had just turned and looked? If he had stopped chopping at your dad’s face for long enough? If he had taken a breather from stomping through your house, his feet echoing on the hardwood floors, as he called for your mother in that creepy voice? What if he had seen you?”

Mia didn’t answer. She didn’t have to answer anything, her aunt told her, not even to the police, unless she wanted to. Being a survivor gives you certain privileges, her aunt said, and keeping your own council is one of them. They lived together now, and probably always would, unless Mia wandered off on her own and simply disappeared one day. Or fell down a hole in the ground or staggered into barbed wire or ran into the pointed end of somebody’s ice pick several times. You know, however accidents occur.

Or maybe she’d live forever and become an angel like her mother. She hadn’t believed in angels before, but suddenly she needed to, desperately. She needed to think of her parents floating around in unearthly white with thick, beautiful wings, instead of how she saw them last. Parts of her father. The crumpled sack of her mother, still wearing her prettiest shoes. She always joked that she wanted to be buried in those shoes, but the police had kept custody of them. She was buried in a new, stiff pair instead.

Her aunt never let her come home, saying that the house had been irrevocably changed by what had happened. “It isn’t your home anymore, Mia,” she said, her fingers fluttering to fix Mia’s perfectly straight hairbow. “It’s become something else. It’s become…” Mia could tell she was going to say the “Murder House, but she took in Mia’s dark eyes and changed her wording.

“…more like a memorial,” she said, but Mia knew what her aunt was thinking. Yes, the Murder House. Something ghoulish and sensational and carnivorous.

But today, Mia had slipped away and let herself into her home. She still wore her house key on a chain around her neck. The carpets had been cleaned, the couch was removed, and the walls had been scrubbed and coated with fresh paint.

She walked past the bathroom where (the man had washed his red, red hands) she had carefully brushed her hair before bed. Past her room, decorated with (bloody handprints and DNA) carousel horses and stuffed animals. She hovered briefly in the doorway of her parent’s bedroom, and then padded gently to the reading chair in the corner. She sat on it gingerly and pulled her legs up beneath her.

She had been reading a book that night. The Secret Garden. Her parents had both assured her that she would love it. She had been deep in a world of English roses and creeping vines when everything had happened. Then suddenly the room was noise and heat and that strange, warm smell, red roses and red satins and red everything that streaked across the curtains and wall.

The man was a stranger, someone she didn’t know, but as she stared at the eerily mechanical movements of his chop-chop-chopping arm, he turned and looked at her directly. His face was expressionless, blank, but his eyes burned black and began to smoke.

He pointed at her, pointed to his own temple, and put his finger to his lips. Black oil leaked from his eyes and ran down his face and neck. He put his finger to his lips again, insistently, and Mia nodded. The man looked satisfied and turned back to what was left of her father.

She hadn’t spoken a word since that night. Not a single sound. When her classmates asked her what she would have done if the man had turned to see her, she couldn’t tell them a thing. He had seen her. She had seen him back. They had both looked.

∼ Mercedes M. Yardley