Those Eyes

 Here's a short story I wrote yesterday :)

She was never quite normal. Always a bit, off. But she was so, perfect for me. She was an excellent musician, a strong, brilliant young woman with so much potential and drive. And oh, so much love.
    If only he hadn’t taken her away from me. I almost wish he had killed her when he had the chance. What he did to her was so much worse - he, took away her mind. He took away who she was and left her an empty shell trapped in that dark basement forever.
    I was the only thing left she’d even respond to - show that tiny glimmer of recognition in her blank eyes. If you’ve ever been to an animal shelter - all the dogs penned up, their constant unnerving feeling of fear and terror - you have some idea of that look in her eyes when she had an, episode.
    It had been just over a year when after he, destroyed her, that they took her away from me. I knew it would happen eventually, but I’d hoped to keep her for a little longer before we had to part. But I guess it was for her own good.
    I remember it like it was today, because it’s in my head everyday. I was in the shower when she managed to get out of the house. It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten out, but usually I’d find her less than a block away curled up in ball and get her inside before anyone noticed and reported it.
    But this time, it took me a while. I saw her a few blocks away running, screaming, and looking back like a fucking horde of zombies was chasing her. I started to run after her and try to catch up, but I didn’t get very far before that goddamn cop pulled up and started to question me. After all, I was chasing a women screaming for help and bawling her eyes out. I tried to quickly explain while I was running, but I guess he didn’t believe me and grabbed me by the arm. While I was frantically trying to explain to him that I needed to get her so she wouldn’t hurt herself, he sent his partner out to retrieve her.
    Before he got close enough, however, she ran into the middle of the street and pulled out a gun - Jesus Christ, it was my gun, that I got to protect her. She screamed one of her blood-churning screams and, without blinking, fired off half a clip into the air, thankfully missing all the cars.
    I don’t know all of what she saw when she went into that zone - but I knew some of it from what she repeatedly hollered at the “monsters”. Some sort of deformed, mutant people chasing her, crazy scientists trying to do horrible experiments on her, aliens - intense bad acid trips, really. The worst was the bugs; she’d scratch at her skin and try to brush them off of her but they’d just swarm up over her body making that horrible, clicking cockroach sound. Caterpillars, beetles, occasionally bees. Insects had been a severe phobia of hers before she lost her mind. I’d seen her have a panic attack over a ladybug before.
    Finally, the cop’s body collided with hers and the gun flew across the street. She scratched and struggled but he managed to get her into cuffs and drag her panicked body to us. I took her face in my hands and looked deep into her eyes.
“Baby, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.”
She slowly came back to her blankly, distant-memory look and her breathing slowed.     But of course, that couldn’t be the end of it. They drove us down to the cop shop and asked me questions while she started at a wall with that emptiness in her eyes. They sent her to a facility where I had to answer more questions. I didn’t want to think about the answers, but there was really no point in lying now.
So, she was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder?
Yes.
And had lost her ability to think logically?
Yes, she’s crazy.
The woman looked discomforted by my not so politically correct terms.
Any suicide attempts?
A few times, before I crazy-proofed the house.
    For the next three years I visited her every day after work - bringing her gifts, reading her books, putting on her favourite movies - hoping some part of her would come back. But nothing, not even the massive amounts of attempted therapy, helped. She would never come back. Her mind continued to torture her for hours at a time. “It broke my heart,” could never come close to how her pain made me feel.
    On night I got a call from the facility letting me know she’d managed to escape. Like a frightened animal, she could find the smallest hole so squeeze through. I drove around for hours looking for her, until I noticed her in the fetal position in a park near the house. I took her home and calmed her down, warmed her up. I held her in my arms for a good hour before she started to see those awful things. I watched her and cringed, looking into those beautiful grey eyes. Tears drizzled onto my shirt. I couldn’t take it any more; she was, to the truest extent of the term, in living Hell. Constant torture, nothing good left inside her.
    I remembered the time that she had clawed at her wrists for so long with her short, mangy fingernails, that she’d actually managed to get trough to her veins enough to seriously endanger her life. How much pain could someone possibly go through to do that to themselves?
    That’s when I knew I had to end it. I went into my safe, her horrific screams sounding loudly in the background, and got my Glock. The tears really started to pour as I cocked it and held it to her head. Her broken face looked up for a second, and for the first time in over four year, it looked like she understood; like she begged me to end it for her. I had to do it quickly before I thought about it and changed my mind. “I love you,” was all I could manage before I shut my tear-bleeding eyes and pulled the trigger.
    I called the police and put the gun in her hand before it really hit me. I looked at her lifeless body and died inside. My baby, was gone. She was all I had left. But she was out of her brutal misery. I held her and mourned, died, bled inside. My heart wasn’t broken; it had been chipped away at for years and had finally dissolved.
    When the police showed up they gave me another half an hour with her before they pried her cold corpse out of my embrace and took her away. No one suspected anything; an insane, suicidal mental patient who had escaped from an institute for the criminally insane and killed herself at my house while I was out looking for her.
    While sitting in the lonely abyss of my home, looking at her wonderful paintings on the walls, I realized she was never given justice. I had spent so much time worrying about her, taking care of her, that I never thought about the sick fuck who did this to her. He kidnapped my love, and my three year old daughter. He raped and killed my baby in front of her. He kept my soul mate in a dark, cold basement for 9 months - raping her, torturing her, fucking with her - before the police found her. Then he made me put her down like a sick animal. He was alive in a prison somewhere, and I hadn’t done anything about it. That was not okay. And that’s when I snapped.
    I spent the next few months, my fingernails growing to unhealthy lengths, researching, searching for that fucking monster. When I finally found him, I showed up on visitation day and had a brief conversation with him.
“Why?” I asked, trembling.
“Why not?” he smiled, then laughed.
Wrong answer.
The sound of his laugh made my decision final. He could not be given the privilege to live a second longer. He deserved to suffer, he deserved to go to Hell. Not her.
    I dove across the table like a fucking badger and dug my inch-long sharpened nails into his jugular. He tried to fight back, but he was in chains and my temporary insanity coupled with thirst for vengeance made me quick and powerful. Like a bloodthirsty animal I dug my knife-like nails into that demon’s throat and pulled ripped them back out from under his dirty skin. His veins and flesh tore with a sound like cutting an overly-juicy ham. He tried to scream, but all that came out was a low, gurgling sound as the blood drained out of him onto my hands and the white prison floor. I was now the one laughing. A crazy laugh, like the one’s creepy methheads have. I had ripped his throat open six inches before the guards got to me.
    And now, as I sit in this prison cell for the rest of my life, I have no regrets. Justice has been served and my baby is no longer suffering.
    I remember her as that beautiful, courageous woman holding our gorgeous little girl with that smile that radiates joy. I remember her eyes as not blank and empty, but so full of meaning and feeling that, when you looked into them, all you could feel was love, good. Nothing could ever shine quite as bright as those eyes.

Let me know what you think!