FLASH FICTION : Harris Killjoy

This story was another experimentation (2004 seemed to be the year for those) where I tried to write a story known as flash fiction which is a story that is less than one thousand words. This is the result (clocking in at a little over 800 words). Tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what I was thinking when I wrote this thing. But oh well. If you enjoy reading it, good. If you think it seriously sucks, well, hey, maybe some people shouldn't be so prone to complaining about how long my "short" stories are. Not that I plan on shortening my work for the sake of people's low attention spans, of course.

It is completely impossible to attain any level of happiness or even become mildly content for an extended period of time, at least for me.

By all accounts, I am blessed. At the age of twenty-nine, I am married to a wonderful man who treats me like a princess. His name is Gerald and he is always there for me, always trying to cheer me up when I am feeling down. He frequently makes me laugh and never makes me cry and is always willing to do whatever I ask of him. We hardly ever have any arguments, and he does everything in his power to keep me happy, and I truly appreciate all he does for me. Right now, I am pregnant with his unborn child, due to give birth within three months now. This is only the start of what we hope becomes a beautiful, loving, and happy family. We have been trying to conceive for years now, and it is finally happening and we're both very excited--Gerald very openly exhilarated, while I am grateful in my own way, I suppose. After five years of being married, we are both very much in love. I know he loves me with all his heart and soul and I want to believe that I love him as well.

I dream the same thing every night--different variations of the same recurrent nightmare for the past five years. In the dream I am married to a different man, a brutal man who beats me. While I remain pregnant in the real world, in the dream world he has forced my miscarriage and I can remember crying in the distorted, surreal atmosphere, covered in blood, with a feeling of hot lead pressing against my stomach from the inside as I peer down through teary eyes upon the corpse of the miscarried fetus. Harris Killjoy is without remorse as he repeatedly beats me, each time worse than before. He is a sexual monster, but consensual sex is boring to him, and he cannot get hard unless he rapes and sodomizes me, leaving me a crying mess as blood oozes out of my ruptured colon.

I awaken, screaming shrilly into the darkness. Gerald reaches over to comfort me as I cry into his shoulder, but to me it is a meaningless gesture, for I am left inconsolable, unable to move past the horrors I have endured night after night inside my head.

Dreamland blends into reality until all becomes a distorted haze and I can no longer distinguish between the two. I now long for the merciless assaults of Harris Killjoy, for the nightmare marriage becomes real to me, while my union with Gerald--my handsome prince charming with a heart of gold--grows more artificial with each passing day. Through the pain I suffer at the hands of my abusive lover, I feel alive for the first time.

My hand now closes around the butcher knife as Gerald enters the kitchen. He meant well, but through killing me with kindness, he inadvertently deceived me into thinking that happiness could be possible in such a mundane existence, a mere illusion of a world of cruelty. His eyes rise in horror--hurt by this unexpected betrayal--as I glide the blade in a smooth arc, rupturing his jugular. Blood bursts forth in a crimson fan from the side of his neck, splashing my face, and although I am by no means happy, I feel alive nevertheless somehow.

Once more my dream comes alive as Harris Killjoy lies bleeding to death in a pool of blood beside my feet, gazing up at me with glassy eyes and a pallid, pasty hue, no longer a symbol of brutality, but of weakness and defeat. I stand trembling before him, my clothes drenched both in his blood and my own from my miscarriage so long ago.

The dream dissolves before my eyes and once more it is my loving real-world husband Gerald lying dead at my hands and tears stream from my eyes when I realize what I have done. I swallow, choking back sobs of remorse as I look down upon my belly--six months pregnant. Squeezing my teary eyes shut, I ask myself how I could possibly bring a child into a world so cold, even with the former illusion of warmth and love. I then turn the knife upon myself and immediately fall dead as the blade pierces deep into my broken heart.

 

The End

September 07, 2004