(This story has never been published before! Happy Halloween! If you like, you can hear me read it on YouTube. Trigger warning: domestic violence.)
There’s a laser gun in my purse, and I’m wearing sunglasses to cover the bruises. There’s a tenderness to me, psychologically, that can’t bear to be touched. Robert’s tender, too: tenderly concerned, solicitous. It won’t last. I’m not stupid. And yet, here I am, trying to decide whether to go inside my own home. Whether it’s safe.
Whether he’ll kill me.
I unlock the front door. There are a dozen roses on the table in the hall. Robert has dinner on the table, candles lit.
He comes over and kisses me on the cheek. “How was your day?”
I shrug. I don’t trust him.
“I made you dinner.” He smiles at me, his eyes pleading for my approval. My heart leaps at his eyes, and I curse it as a traitor.
I don’t want to have this conversation, so I blurt out what’s really on my mind: “Will you get a brain scan? I don’t have to be the one to do it.”
Robert flinches. I can see his fists clench, and for a moment I think he’s going to hit me for asking. But all he says is, “Why?”
Honesty is frightening. “I want to make sure there aren’t any organic reasons for you to hit me.”
His mouth twitches. I know he wants to say something bitchy about how he was hitting me because I was medicating him without his knowledge. He caught me injecting him while he slept–chemical castration in case testosterone was making him aggressive, combined with antidepressants. It didn’t work. Apparently, he’s far more likely to beat me if he can’t fuck me. Intellectually, I knew fight or flight was close to feed or fuck, but it’s another thing to see it in action. It doesn’t really go with the happily ever after myth I was taught as a child.
But then he smiles, although the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
“Thank you.” I walk over to the table, meek and mild.
“How was your therapy?” Yes, I’m in court-ordered therapy because he beats me. And on mandatory leave from the hospital while they investigate me, because he beats me.
Before I realize what I’m doing, I turn and glare at him. His hand comes out of nowhere, backhanding my already bruised cheek. I hate my tears, but I can’t help myself. It hurts.
He grabs me by the hair and shoves me over the table. My face is pressed into my baked potato; I probably have sour cream and chives in my hair. “Don’t you fucking look at me like that.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. It’s hard to talk when your face is pressed into your romantic candlelit dinner.
He leans over me, pressing his lips to my ear. I can feel his erection pressing into my right buttock. “I can’t hear you,” he croons. Like it’s an endearment.
I raise my voice and speak as clearly as I can. “I’m sorry.”
He kisses the back of my neck, gentle again. “I’m sorry, too.” He stands up. I stand, too, and he hides a smirk as he wipes the sour cream off my face. “Let’s eat.”
The anger is a physical sensation stronger than the pain. It’s a heat in my chest and belly. But I smile back, and try to look grateful, and we eat. After dinner, we have sex. After the sex, he says, “No brain scan,” and rolls over to go to sleep.
No.
I reach into my purse and pull out the laser gun. I press it into the back of his head and say, “Into the bathroom.”
“You’ll never work again. I’ll see to that.”
He doesn’t resist or try to escape. He knows I know exactly where to shoot. The brain stem: it would irreparably destroy his autonomic functions. Most police and military who commit suicide choose EOG (“eat own gun”) for that reason.
I tell him to lie down in the bathtub, then take a syringe out of my purse and inject Robert with a paralysis agent. I need him awake, but unable to fight me.
Then, I throw on sweats and pull the scanner and medical kit out of my trunk. I then go upstairs and attach the scanner to Robert’s head.
Robert’s brain looks mostly normal. His amygdalae are small, far smaller than average. I sigh. Brain damage to the the cortex, including the amygdala, can cause hypoemotionality, hypersexuality, and an oral fixation. There’s a correlation between hyperactivity in the left amygdala and Borderline personality disorder. I suppose I was hoping for signs of damage, but there aren’t any. There have been studies in hamsters that show decreased aggressiveness in hamsters with amygdala damage, but Robert’s not a hamster. Studies with monkeys with amygdala damage show a decrease in maternal behavior, sometimes abusing or neglecting their babies. That’s the last thing I want.
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Maybe I should be checking his hypothalamus or hippocampus. They look normal. The only thing that looks atypical is his amygdalae. They’re quite active, which isn’t that surprising. The left is more active than the right.
I can fix him. I can cut the violence right out of his head.
I get out a laser scalpel. I can see the fear in his eyes, the increase in pulse and respiration, the increase in brain activity in the amygdalae as I start to cauterize one of the blood vessels that feeds the left amygdala. Slowly, carefully, until the activity is closer to the right. I know it hurts him, but I need him to be conscious so I can see the change in brain activity.
The paralytic is wearing off; he’s able to move his eyes again. They’re terrified, pleading.
“This is for your own good,” I tell him, and kiss him on the forehead. “I love you.” And if this round doesn’t fix him, I can operate again. As many times as I have to.
Till death do us part.
Want another short story? There’s one here.
