MicroHorror

How long can you hang? How long can you keep your neck tight in a noose? How much do you care about your life?

The annoying girl who went on and on and on about her Super Sweet 16 only cared four minutes and seventeen seconds.

Tonight I’m lying in bed wearing my coat. Again. Every night when Dad goes out for business he puts me in bed with my coat on so we can run more easily and faster if need be. For years I thought this was pretty damn silly.

But not tonight.

Outside a car just stopped–it doesn’t have its lights switched on. In the moonlight, I see four men stepping out of the car. They’re coming. They’re coming for me.

I close my eyes.

Steps on the stairs.

They’re here now.

“The saddest day in my life, ever, was when I saw a corpse without a head,” she said.

She told me that she was working as a maid in a hotel at the time, and it was she who found the naked, headless body that belonged to a girl who wasn’t even old enough to drive a car.

The head was sawn off with a brand new saw–$12.99 at the Ace® Hardware store. From the jagged remnants of the neck protruded muscles and veins that looked like an octopus’s tentacles; blood leaked out of it to soak the hotel’s linen.

I saw that corpse, too. But the saddest thing I ever saw was that same girl, crying, begging for her life, when that pretty little head was still on her shoulders.

When you’re tightly bound on a chair and the delicate scalpel slowly nears your eyeball, you’ll think for a second: No, he wouldn’t really, would he?

The gibing pain makes you scream so loud it shatters your fragile vocal chords, but you don’t notice. Or don’t care.

Because while you’re screaming in pain, and see the scalpel nearing again with your distorted one-eyed sight, you’ll only scream to pray the inevitable will pass over.

Which it won’t, because it’s inevitable after all.