A Brick for the Eyes
By: Samuel Ade
Tags: Literature, Fiction, Horror, Short Story, Story

She walked with pride in her tight cheap dress through the crowd, with a fancy hat she wore to impress the other women and the men. The town folks were looking but she held her head high. Her husband was missing a few months ago and yet there she was, hoping to be admired as her obese limbs pushing the limit of her inflexible costumes.

They all knew she was a tiny bit special. Some even saw her crying alone while holding a flower once, when one second before she was smiling. They pitied her husband somehow, and simultaneously wondered why he wanted to be with her. If not for her father’s deed, they supposed he wouldn’t have married her in the first place.

A few months back, right in the evening which her husband had gone missing, their house was echoed with shouts. She was throwing everything around; a glass, paintings, plates, chairs, and with those strong hands she also appeared to almost throw a heavy wooden table.

“I have done the work you should have done, as a man! And all I ask is you treat me like those wives in town!” she yelled with a plate ready to fly in her hand.

“You think I have done nothing? Your fat stomach would not be satisfied if I did not risk myself out there all winter chasing boars! I also wouldn’t ask for your help if I think you couldn’t handle it!”

The storage-basement room they were in felt warmer as the firewood burning. A boar was almost done being harvested for its flesh and skin near a few chunks of wood in the corner. Her husband was a hunter. In winter like this, he sometimes hunted for a few days to a week if the weather was too harsh for him to come back. He had a little cabin in the woods exclusively for hunting businesses.

“I am sick of your nonsense! You are going crazy! Fancy dinner? Dresses? One day you’ll ask for a diamond ring! Those women are duchess, their husbands are rich, and so were their fathers before them,” he said while putting his furry cloak on. “I am going to the cabin.”

“You go out again? I can’t believe it . . .”

Before she could finish her sentence, the door slammed shut right on her face. A fight like this had been going on for the last several days. Her husband would say he went to the cabin, but a couple of times a friend of hers said he was in the tavern, with the other men drinking ales.

She hurried outside and found her husband walking towards which obviously was the opposite way from the way to the cabin.

“Where are you going? Your cabin’s over there!”

“I am going to the tavern,”

“Get over here, come back home! You have been wasting our money on drinks yet never took a chance to buy me something!”

“Look at you, you are not a woman. You are manly as any man I have ever met! Even manlier than some! If only you knew the reason I married you.”

She was shocked hearing what her husband just said. Her heart and mind were full of anger and sadness, a dangerous combination that could turn anyone blind. “I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that, please take back all you said.”

“You heard me, and I am going now, don’t stop me.”

She tried to stop him, but he kept on going. The harsh cold air, the frustrated mind, and fatigue from mending all the broken walls and roof of their house, made her plunge into darkness. She had no control over her body anymore. She picked the nearest chunk of wood she could see and hit it hard onto her husband’s fragile back skull.

In an instant, he was gone. A stream of reddish juice poured unceasingly from the back of his head, it almost seemed like water crushing out of a frozen waterfall at the end of winter. She was looking as dead cold as the weather straight to his warm body. What she had just done a man of God would condemn as immoral, yet her eyes did not spark any kind of regret. The piece of wood in her hand looked satisfied covered in blood as if a vampire just had its dinner. But not the blood in the neck it sucked out from, it was the juicy head that of her husband. Fractures of his skull remained firmly clung on the hard winter wood. She starred at him for a whole minute, enjoying the adrenaline that ran through her body like a drug.

“You never listened,” she said while gasping for breath. “You never understood, you selfish bastard! All I want is what those girls get from their husbands! A simple dress, a dinner once in a while, you never even kissed me! You never even looked at me like the way they look at their wives! Now, look at you, cold dead and lifeless.”

She dragged her husband’s body into the house, putting him in the basement while she swept away the blood trail on the snow outside. The wood she used to take her husband’s life was chopped with an ax horizontally and now it became a chopping block. An easy disguise for a murder weapon.

The news of him missing spread after some men came to their cottage asking for him. She said he went to his cottage a few days ago and hadn’t come back. She told them it was usual since he could hunt for days. But when the man never presented for a month, rumors were inevitable. Suspicion began to arise that might be a little chance he was not missing in the woods but killed somehow.

The fact that the wife went to the town buying bricks and concrete by herself strengthened this rumor. She had never done that. She said it was for mending her walls.

There was only her in that cottage now for all the town folks knew. But she knew she wasn’t alone at all. It was quite the contrary, she never felt as loved as this before. Only now she had received the nonstop attention for herself from her dearest.

Every night before sleep, she would try her new dresses in front of a wall opposite from the bedroom, which was once used by the couple. The wall had one brick missing which leveled with her eye. When it was looked closely, a vague shape like a pair of eyes can be seen starring coldly from inside the wall.