Known - A "One in the Oven, One in the Chamber" Stand-Alone Story for Rhino Writing Contest #3

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Empty.

The word leapt to mind as Anna closed the front door. It dragged a profusion of synonyms in its wake: vacant, abandoned, devoid… desolate… worthless. They swirled through her head like the dust motes her return home set into motion. She imagined she could feel it, the air heavier somehow now in a place where only she ever moved through it.

As if sensing the thoughts from within her womb, Anthony first gave a reassuring flutter then crammed a remonstrative foot painfully up into her left rib. Anna recalled that one of the French words for "pregnant" was "pleine," meaning also "full."

Irony.

Gently massaging the alienesque lump in an attempt to coax her baby’s foot into a less prominent—not to mention painful—position, Anna hefted herself up the stairs. She needed a shower and a nap.

The water reddened her skin and filled the bathroom with a soothing fog of steam. Hot enough to almost make her feel clean. She placed her hand over the precious passenger and reminded herself she needed to deal with all of this emo garbage before it had a chance to affect him. The party life was behind her. Maybe that had been okay for Anna the worthless and unwanted, but it was not going to be okay for Anna, the mother of Anthony.

What an idiot she’d been. Dom and she had been “together” for six months. He had talked about marriage, kids. Of course, he’d talked about these things while high when they were living in a squalid shit hole overrun with fellow addicts and other guys probably mobbed up with Iggy LoDuca, but when she found out she was pregnant she had known instantly that she had to change.

That she wanted to change.

She had tried to give Dom that chance, too. When she went to him for the last time, sonogram photos in hand showing a beautiful baby boy sixteen weeks from birth, she had pleaded with him. Not for herself, but for Dom. She explained she didn’t want to be with him anymore, but she would never keep him from his son. That the parent-child​ relationship was so precious and he shouldn’t miss this opportunity to be more than he was, to be a part of this family.

His sneer had broken the spell she’d cast over her own sense. She could finally see he was never what she’d thought—hoped—of him. And then he had plunged in the knife and twisted it. Every agonizing word was emblazoned on her memory.

Family? What would you know about “family?” Your mother’s one of a hundred whores your dad fucked, and the one he married, he cut to ribbons in front of his only legitimate daughter. So save the speeches and don’t embarrass yourself by coming here again.

She had gone to her mother then and the truth had been in her rheumy eyes. Anna was the daughter of Ralph “the Blade” Stanzio, and the little girl who had been found plastered to her own mother’s corpse by coagulated blood was her half-sister.

Anna had a vague and singular recollection of Amelia. A birthday party back when her mother was still somewhat functional. They had left early. Amelia running to her at the car with a goody bag in hand. Don’t forget this! Her mother in tears of rage. It made sense now.

Internet searches turned up empty, and Anna had started leaving messages on boards for siblings separated as children, in the vain hope that perhaps Amelia was looking for her, too. But after six weeks she had nothing to show for it.

Donning a comfortable but attractive nightgown in a soothing seafoam green, Anna crawled into bed, dragging the body-length pillow under her right arm and leg. Softly humming Pink Floyd’s Wish you were Here to the baby boy she could hardly wait for, she drifted off to sleep.

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The jangle of the phone wrenched her awake. Darkness had fallen and she was disoriented at having slept so long. The old-fashioned ringing of the second-hand landline she had hooked up to a thirty-foot wire was piercing. Rolling to hang her arm over the side of the bed, she fumbled for the handset, finally—blessedly—silencing it with an answer.

"Hello?"

"Hey!" The voice at the other end was familiar. Vaguely familiar to her but very familiar with her. Long conditioning in the social niceties of non-offense had her responding in kind, if warily.

"How's it going?" She hoped this guy would identify himself soon. She winced at the realization he could be any number of casual hookups she'd been too drunk or high to recall.

"It's good, really good. How about you?"

"Oh, um…I’m doing pretty well. Just...the usual." Anna's laugh was nervous.

His seemed mocking.

"You don't even know who this is, do you?" A pause, then more laughter. Anna scrambled to recover.

"I'm sorry. You sound so familiar but I can't quite place your voice."

"That's okay. It's Ben."

Her relief at knowing was short-lived. She remembered Ben well. The blatant leers. The threesome "jokes" that were just poorly disguised pleas for Dom to share her like a sweatshirt. And how hard would she have protested? She didn’t want to think about who she’d been then. So recently, yet a lifetime ago.

"Oh. Hi, Ben. Look, I don’t really-"

"I like that green thing you're wearing."

Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. Lungs refused to inflate. The world went utterly silent as if it could retroactively block out the sound of his words, words she was both certain she did not, and certain she must have, heard incorrectly.

With a purposeful, carefree lilt to her voice, she asked, "What was that?" Surely no terrible thing could have been said to precipitate such a confidently voiced question. No dangerous or threatening response could be made to this most optimistic request for repetition. She heard wrongly and now Ben would clarify and she would laugh later at her auditory hallucination.

"I said, I like that green thing. It shows off how big your tits are getting. You never really had any before. You're better this way."

Her eyes flew to the only window in the room and she realized for the first time how inexplicably dark it was. The second story bay window was bare to the open view of the forest behind the townhouse and on the second floor, no one was looking in. Or so she thought. The only thing that marred the view was the giant security light that normally poured into her room all night long, leaving it perpetually gray-lit.

Now it was black as coal.

She scrambled from her bed, phone still pressed to her ear, breath coming in pants and gasps. She ignored the hard bang of her hip against the nightstand and fumbled for the lamp. A small voice in her head said it was a bad idea to light herself up in that window, but she had to banish this all-consuming pitch.

"--Told Dom he shoulda just given you the money to get scraped out, but I was so wrong. Shit. You need to be pregnant all the time."

Where was it? Her careful padding of the air, where the lamp should be, turned to desperate swishes through the stygian space. There! Trembling fingers tried and failed to twist the switch, and--

"Oh man, listen to you. Yeah, breathe heavy, get ready. I’m on my way."

As if in confirmation, she heard the final words double. I’m on my way, said the earpiece. I’m on my way, said the voice in the hall. She plunged her thumb down on the clunky hangup button over and over in an attempt to get an open line, to call 911, but the phone was a dinosaur she should have replaced long ago.

An explosion as the hollow-core door was kicked in. A beam of light pierced the room, and in her panic she knocked the lamp to the floor.

"Hey there, Anna. Annie. Bitch."

Shielding her blinded eyes, she retreated a step and, catching her foot in the phone cord, toppled backward, one hand grabbing at her abdomen, the other catching herself against the window seat and nearly arresting her descent. But he was on her in a flash. Crushing her. Wrist snapping at his added weight she screamed and plunged to the carpet beside her bed. His hands were everywhere, grasping, pinching, squeezing, probing. His chuckle came from deep in his throat, hoarse with malice and desire. The flashlight--discarded beside him, shining up into his maniacal grin--was a tiny thing, useless as a weapon.

No way was he going to let her live after this. She had to fight. Reaching over her head she felt for the fallen lamp with her uninjured hand. Beneath the sounds of her pounding heart and his animalistic grunts, she heard the ominous slip of his zipper. And beneath his crushing weight she felt tightening, seizing around her womb. No. Please God no. I finally want to live. I finally have someone to live for. There was the lamp. Anna gripped it and with all her strength whipped it up over her head and into the face of her attacker.

Shit! She had hit him mostly with the shade and he knocked it aside and out of her hand like so much useless fluff. But what was this? His hands didn’t return to their vicious exploration, they had gone to his throat, and his eyes were bulging out of his head. Had she hit him harder than she thought?

Another contraction drew her attention, and she began to slide out from under Ben, not sure but also not caring what had halted his assault. She turned over, crawled toward the window seat, and then flipped back to face him.

But he wasn’t there.

Instead, in the dim ambience of the flashlight she saw the face of a woman hovering disembodied over her all-black clothing. Ben was on the floor in a heap, the phone cord wrapped so tightly around his throat it was buried in the flesh.

"Who…how?"

"I was watching your house." The woman in black smiled. "I saw your messages, but in my line of work I have to be careful. So there I was, scoping the place out, making sure you were who you said you were—and only who you said you were—when I see some scumbag jimmy your patio door. I gotta be sure it isn’t just your boyfriend forgot his key you know? So I come up close, and then I heard the scream. Well I was ninety-nine percent sure at that point, so I came in strong."

"Ninety-nine?" Anna was in shock. Almost nothing the woman said was making any sense.

"Well I can’t know what kind of recreational games you might be into, but yeah, ninety-nine percent sure."

How could she be so calm? There was a dead man on the floor.

"Police…"

"Oh, no. No cops. I got this. What are sisters for if not a good ol’ rape intervention and corpse disposal?"

Anna stared in disbelief. She saw it now, the girl she remembered in the face of the woman before her. A little girl who had seen her mother killed by the father they shared, who had suffered more than Anna could imagine, and she was so…

Strong.

And Anna knew in that moment, that she would be strong too. For herself, and for her son. If the child who had slept in the bloody arms of her dead mother could grow into the Amazonian warrior who stood before Anna now, she too, could shed the chains of her past. With the son who had saved her from herself, and the sister who had saved her from violation and certain death, she would make a new life.

She took the proffered hand and let Amelia help her to her feet. Then Anna began what she already knew would be one of the two most important relationships of her life with three simple words:

"I remember you."

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Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this, please kindly upvote, follow, and resteem!

Want to know what's up with Amelia's day job? Check out the teaser chapters for my work in progress, One in the Oven, One in the Chamber, a humorous noir starring a pregnant assassin.

Chapter 1.1
Chapter 1.2

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Many thanks to @carolkean for her endless encouragement and for this awesome and inspirational contest. Also to @authorofthings for her quick and excellent feedback. If you want to be part of a terrific and supportive group of writers, check out The Writers' Block sometime.

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