u/Emotional_Art_6075

FInal part from theres a woman trapped behind a brick wall in the woods.
I make him walk ahead of me. He trots in the direction he warned me of last night, mashing foliage beneath his boots. There’s maybe a meter of distance between us. I have a half-empty spray can of mace in my back pocket that I haven’t told him about. 

Birds from the tops of branches, twist their necks to watch us move past. Every so often, he launches into a, “I know what I did may seem unforgivable, and I was never gonna leave her there…” Sometimes he finishes the thought, sometimes he doesn’t.

I’m either quiet or I tell him, “Just take me to her.” So, in other words, it’s tense. My legs shake in between each step, and my heart’s bruising against my ribs. Ten minutes feels glacial with this much adrenaline coursing through you, but we almost manage without incident until he mutters:

“You know, I meant it when I said I was going to show you. You didn’t have to lie to me this morning.”

My scoff sends a flock of birds flying from a nearby tree.

“What?” He asks obtusely. I know he’s trying to bait me into arguing with him. Just like I know it would mean stooping down a level. Still, I bite.

“I was worried for my safety,” I clarify.

“So now you’re scared of me?” He doesn’t miss a beat. “Why would you come out here if you don’t trust me, Thea?”

I’m fully aware that I’m being manipulated into an emotional argument, and yet, “There’s a difference between trusting someone and just blindly listening to them.”

“Is there?” He asks with an air of it being something meaningful.

Luckily, I don’t have to answer from the hip because the structure appears in our sights. I stop, and Colby turns to me. “You wanna talk about trust?”

He nods.

“Then stay right here and let me talk to her alone.”

“What? No way.”

​#

This is bullshit. I’m crossing my arms, watching her walk towards the brick wall. The sound of leaves crunching beneath her steps dissipates, and I’m left with just the chirping birds. It’s hard to get an angle between all the trunks, but her silhouette is outlined by the mossy, grey-brick wall. I can see that she’s leaning forward and speaking.

The leaves around her sponge up the sounds of their conversation. Her expressions are impossible to make out with her back turned to me. Even so, I’m too pissed off to think of what I’m gonna say when she returns, so when she does, I just stand there. A memory of me stood beside the towering kitchen counter, receiving reprimands from my mother.

“Let’s go,” is all she says.

Before I can reply, she begins walking, and I can’t help but feel a little pride watching her navigate the pines.

“No, wait, Thea,”  I call out to her, and she stops.

She turns and rolls her eyes at me, “What?”

“What about freeing her?”

She squints her blue eyes at me and crosses her arms. I prepare myself. “I’m choosing to trust your judgement.” Before I can sigh with relief, she continues, “To me, the woman behind that brick wall seems perfectly ordinary, if not a little traumatised, but if you believe there may be some concealed malice there, then fine.”

“What do you mean by ‘fine’?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe, I’m prepared to leave her here if that’s what you think is best.” I scoff at her, but she doesn’t let a smile peek through her pressed lips.

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not what I want.”

“It’s not?” It’s Thea’s turn to scoff. “You mean you left her there, after telling her your name and my name, and planned on coming back the next day as if nothing happened.”

If anything, it says something that she thinks like that. “Christ,” I moan, “how is it so easy for you to see me as some psychopath, but not a voice in a crypt as something supernatural?”

“Because psychopaths are real.”

“Ghosts were a concept before psychopaths!” I shout it like I’m making a point. Really, the argument is just spiraling.

“Whatever, Colby, I trust you.”

​#

Obviously, I’m lying to him.

Again, it’s not like I’m sold on Colby as a psychopath, but the situation has evolved past the point of my character judgement alone. Our best bet back, unfortunately, lies in getting him to make the decision to free her. Marissa was vocal about her suspicions, but I told her to press charges on her own time. I’m only trying to get us home.

“Did she answer the questions when you asked them?” A crow caws from the structure, and I turn, pretending to search for it. When I don’t respond, he chuckles in exasperation, guessing correctly that I never asked. “What did you even talk about?”

Something about the tone of his voice makes me temporarily mute, but even as I’m only able to stare at him, it’s like he’s reading my thoughts.

“Don’t tell me,” he says while rubbing his forehead and groaning. “You went to the woman in the wall and only spoke about how to deal with me.”

Damn it. I give him a weak shrug and an uncontrollable smile that flares up in awkward situations. He squats over the ground for a moment and stares up at the pine leaves above with a dumbfounded laugh.

“You don’t think it’s odd that she’s immediately trying to turn you against me?”

“I think considering the circumstances, it makes sense that she’d-”

“Fine, fuck it,” he interrupts. Both of his knees make popping sounds as he stands. More leaves suffer on his way towards the brick wall. My retread of his path is significantly quieter.

Frustratingly, his outrage has drawn me in; here he is about to make the rational decision and all the while despising me for it. It’s ridiculous. I dodge the swiping branches and see the mossy brick wall.

Colby sighs. My feet hit the ground as if they’ve been nailed there. The structure looks more ominous on my second encounter. Wind slithers across the forest. I can’t explain the uneasy feeling coming over me.

​#

What the hell was I thinking? I can’t believe I made her stay there all night. Thea shuffles in behind me just in time to reach the brick wall. To my surprise, she overtakes and begins for both of us.

“Marissa, it’s Colby and Thea. Hang tight, we’re gonna get you out of there.”

“Colby,” she repeats in a raspy mutter.

“Don’t worry, he’s here to break the wall down.” She’s placing her palm on the wall and stroking it with her thumb, but there’s a rattle in her voice. Grabbing the first big rock I see and lifting it over my shoulder, I gesture for Thea to scoot. “Marissa, try to find cover.” It hits my ear as insincere.

My hands draw back to throw it into the wall.

“Wait.” I stop at Thea’s order. Staring at her face, I can see that she’s thinking hard. Her fingers are tugging at the skin on her neck. “Marissa,” she calls out, leaning towards the wall. There’s a long drag of silence while Thea stares at me, “What year is it?”

Really? I stare at her with a look of indignation, but she holds up her hand for me to wait. We do, among the chirping birds, to hear Marissa’s answer. After a couple of seconds, I look at Thea again, and she shrugs.

“Marissa?” Nothing. Silence behind the brick wall.

“Marissa?” I echo, hoping her distaste for me might elicit a reaction. We both wait for the other to act. Thea doesn’t look worried, but conflicted. I can imagine that I have the same expression on.

I’m not sure if I would’ve gone through with it, but when I raise the rock over my head, I feel Thea’s palm on my shoulder. The rock hangs by my side, while I turn to face her. Her eyes are open wide so I can see all the pale details in her irises.

“Let’s call it a draw.”

They amputated my wife’s arm today.

By "they," I mean doctors; it didn’t come as a shock to either of us. In fact, I’d been saying for weeks that it was time to be off with that sickly limb. I think maybe my exact words were:

“I would rather reach out for the empty space than hold the corpse.”

She said I was being insensitive. I said she was being sentimental; it was like leaving grapes on a vine to spoil.

In the weeks that passed, I witnessed how the concept of ripeness could become a memory. Puss bubbles would hiss noxious gas out at me for the slightest provocations. Craters of rot, patches of necrotic flesh blistering up her arm, ceasing precisely at the hinge between forearm and bicep. That old limb was long dead.

But my old lady is stubborn. And in her bouts of hardheadedness, she would use it, swinging it limply to waft around the fog spawned of its own rot. And during our meals, she would lay it across the table, pretending her fingers still worked. I never once saw how she managed to eat with one hand. No, my eyes were always fixed on the pale white bone peeking out from the middle of her forearm.

When our intimacy died, she asked if I still loved her. I said, “Of course,” meaning it. But following the kiss I planted on her lips that I knew better than my own, I tasted something bitter at the back of my tongue. She noticed when I winced. We never said anything about it, but she nervously scratched her arm and filled the inside of her nails with a slimy layer of skin.

#

“I’ll miss this old girl,” She tells me in the hospital room.

“Why?” I ask her. It seems like an ignorant question, but the fact that there are so many reasons is what makes me curious to which she’ll pick out in particular. She doesn’t answer. She looks down longingly at the pile of decay strewn over her lap.

I repeat to her a lullaby of proofed-over platitudes, sung to me by the nurses about her procedure. She nods them off and rubs only her left eye.

When the doctors come, I hug and kiss her while holding my breath. Watching her move down the hallway, it sways with her movements as if to wave goodbye.

Waving back, I allow myself to smile, having finally bested the wretched limb.

#

The first time my wife shows me her stump, it’s been months since the surgery.

The white bandages come off, and I can now see how her bicep ends. Like a mountain grown in reverse, its toppled peak aims at the ground with a lumpy point of pale flesh. I’m caught between breaths by the sight.

I ask her if she feels a whisper of the arm still there, like the nurses said she might. She tells me “no”, flatly. Maybe her exact words are:

“It lives only in my memory, in the moments where I forget and reach out for something that’ll never come to me.”