Writer

Jessica Penot

This section is dedicated to my short stories.  I will feature one new short story here every month.

Short Stories

                                                   

 

The room was being devoured by thick, foul smoke.  Christine coughed and waved her hand, in a pathetic attempt to give her mother a hint.  Her mother, as always, ignored the hint.   The fat woman riddled with tattoos in the thirty year old lazy boy chair was her mother. She sat in her chair as if attached to it, as if it was some extension of herself.   Nothing ever changed.  Christine could move forward.  Graduate College.  Get married.  Go to law school.  But her mother was trapped in a timeless place, wrapped in coils of cigarette smoke.

Her mother didn’t acknowledge Christine when she walked in the room.  The fat woman just sat, like a lump of rotting flesh, in front of the TV.  Tattoos crawled up her naked arms.  The usual crap.  Dragons.  Bleeding skulls.  Her mother was not a creative woman.  Christine stared at her mother for a while, waiting for her to say something.

“So,” Christine said   “Why did you call me all the way out here?  To watch TV with you and the roaches.”

Her mother got up awkwardly and began rifling through her dresser.  She stumbled awkwardly about, attempting to negotiate the piles of trash that filled her apartment and her massive girth simultaneously.  She grimaced as she moved, as if she was irritated by the necessity of any motion at all.  She rooted through all of her garbage until she found what she was looking for and then she threw it at Christine and went back to her chair.

“Happy Birthday,” her mother said as she tossed the key at Christine.

“What the hell is this for?”  Christine asked.

“You are thirty.  All the women in the family get the key when they turn thirty. And you have to give it to your daughter when she turns thirty.  You give it to her or she’ll die.  Enjoy.”

“Why?  What am I supposed to do with this thing?”

“What do I look like? I did what my mother told me to do.  Now fuck off.”

Christine left without saying goodbye.  She walked out, cursing under her breath and clutching the key.    She had never known her father and her mother had gotten worse and worse as time progressed.  Once, long ago, her mother had been an amazing woman.  She had sung opera and gone to Julliard.  Her awards still hung on her smoke stained walls.    Christine had seen old photo albums and she knew there once was a time when her mother was young and beautiful, but time had erased all traces of the woman that had been and the woman that had raised Christine had been subhuman.  She had never touched her or talked with her.  She had provided the most basic necessities of life and that was all.  And now this key.  It was the first thing her mother had given her in years.

She went home and climbed in the shower, trying to erase all the feelings and stench that had crawled with her from her mother’s home.  She wanted to forget.  It was her birthday.  She was supposed to be happy.  Everything was going right in her life.  She had just made partner in her firm and she was pregnant with her first baby.  Why did she let her past control her?  She wanted to scream.  She wanted to burn away the part of her that came from her mother.  She dried herself off and collapsed on her bed and wept. 

Christine didn’t hear her husband come in.  But she felt his soft hands on her skin.  She stopped crying when he stroked the small of her back and kissed her shoulder blades.  She smiled as he stroked her still naked body and ran his fingers through her hair.  “I see you got an unusual birthday present,” he said as he kissed her.

“How did you know?”

“Well, you are lying completely naked on the bed.  Showing it off.  I’ve never seen anything so sexy.”

“What are you talking about?”  she asked.

“The enormous tattoo on your lower back.”

“What?”   She ran to the bathroom and stared at the tattoo on the small of her back.  She couldn’t see all of it, but it looked like a tree with a door in it.  “What the fuck?”  she exclaimed.  “I hate tattoos!  You know I hate tattoos!  How did this get here?”

Her husband was standing in the door.  His face was painted with shock and worry.  “You don’t remember getting this?”  he asked.

“No!  I know what happened.  My mother did this.  She must have drugged me or something.  Who else would have done something like this?  I knew she wouldn’t have called me over there to give me some lame key.”

“What key?”

Christine handed him the key. “That’s odd,” he said.   He turned the key over in his hands.  “Your mother is insane.  I can’t even imagine how she would pull this off.  It would take days of work to do a tattoo of this size and detail.  It is brilliant.  It would have cost a fortune too.”

“How else would I have got this tattoo?  What other explanation can there be?”  He held her.  He stroked her skin and kissed away her tears.  Finally, he returned his attention to the key in his hand.

“What is it to?”  he asked

“What?”  she asked.

“The key.”

“She didn’t say.”

“You know, this is going to sound crazy, but it looks like it matches the keyhole to the door on your back.  I wonder if there is some meaning to that.”

“Excuse me?”

“It looks like this key fits the door in your back,” he said again.

She felt the cold metal against her skin and then a tingling sensation advanced up her spine.  She closed her eyes.  It felt good, like a caress or a kiss.  The sensation crept up over her skin and then down her spine, shocking her with something that felt like an orgasm.  She fell to her knees.

The pleasure faded and she was left feeling cold and numb and then another sensation spread over her.  Pain.  It cut through her like a knife, filling her with dread and terror.

She could hear her husband scream, but she could do nothing.  She was paralyzed by the thing cutting into her back.  She could hear the struggle, but could not turn to see it.  Glass broke.  His screams turned to desperate wails.   She heard her husband fall.  She heard him kick and fight.    All she wanted was to see his face, to hear his voice whisper in the dark.  She wanted his hand in hers, but as the pain stopped, silence filled the room.  A river of blood drifted across the bathroom floor.

She turned around and her beloved was gone.  There was only the key in a puddle of blood.  She picked up the key and dropped it in the toilet, but she could not flush it.  Something her mother had said lingered in her memory.   She put her hand on her still flat stomach.  Her mother said her baby would die if she didn’t pass the key on.  So she pulled the key out of the toilet and sat in the puddle of her husband’s blood weeping. 

Somewhere from the shadows she heard a voice.  The first voice of many.  “You are ours now,”  the voice whispered.   

                

 

                                                                                                

The Key