Red Rage

Some would say she was crazy, but he said she was at the mercy of prostaglandin.

In reality he didn’t really know, but had read so many theories regarding the upheaval of the menstrual cycle it could be any of them, all of them, or none of them and something else entirely.

But he did not believe it was permanent.

Maybe the testosterone made her so violent. That was the problem: the rage that if it had a color would be the red of day-old dried blood, dark and tacky. In their circle of acquaintances it was entertaining, to see who would be left standing when she was mad, but half of him – the rational half – feared the fourteen days heralded by the wane and wax of the moon.

The other half awaited the claws and teeth, the fits and the fists, with a decidedly perverse excitement.

He had read many articles about the madness which caused the occurrence of irrevocable events. Was there ever such a thing as a rational murder? He tended to think all was lost in the adrenaline and disassociation of a moment’s pause in societal conditioning. But when she picked a fight with someone two times her size, taunting with suggestions that his dick was smaller than a newborn’s, he had to concede that some planning was involved in that ridiculing tack. It wasn’t the type of thing one said in the heat of the moment.

No, this was the type of thing she said in the heat of the moment.
You lying sack of shit. You hate me but I’m too easy to toss aside.

It was true, cutting to the heart of the dysfunction sharp as the knife they used to dispose of the neighbor.

A calculated insanity, culminating with the eruption of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone.

The neighbor had been an easy mark, decidedly. Desiring community and to please, he was reminded of Santa Claus. The neighbor liked to preen for the pretty girls who came to visit, and most of all for his pretty neighbor. She had cottoned to this quirk very early on and purposely teased him with suggestive outfits and sudden bouts of helplessness while he was at work.

He did not need to ruminate on what else went on with the neighbor during the day. But that smug grinning face greeted him every day when he came home. The guy was on disability, set for what became the rather short length of his life. The smiling face, fake bonhomie motivated by lingering guilt, polishing the horns like he didn’t know.

But he knew, he always knew.

He got off on it sometimes, playing a game like that bizarre white trash couple in Sideways. She didn’t want the interloper to be punished, she wanted to be punished. But he could never use as heavy a hand as she desired. And he paid the price, enduring catcalls from the coterie when he turned up the next day with bruising.

That girl smack you down again, loser? You sorry fucker.

The neighbor was a target of opportunity, the dumb bastard, only wanting to be liked. He was teetering on the edge of senior citizenhood, wanting to be reminded that he was still relevant.

Or willing to suffer the pretense.

But she made him pay for his desires, and isn’t that what transgression was all about? Making other people pay for your pain?

She related the account with great relish, how the neighbor had been so thrilled to be at her playful mercy, tied down, seemingly helpless. Until she got out the biggest screwdriver from his toolkit and drove it into the torso below the rib cage, perforating the small intestine.

He kept screaming, like he thought someone would hear him, like he thought someone would care.

She had been snippy, snappy that morning. Just the usual bitchfest which indicated he’d have to pry any affection out with a crowbar. So he blankly asked what set her off, this time.

He said I wasn’t ladylike. He said I was mean, and it was unattractive, and why did I have to be that way; why couldn’t I be sweet and nice.

He had watched enough Oprah to realize that women hated to be pigeonholed in methods of behavior. Men could tolerate any amount of thuggery from other males and spare their pride but the moment a woman employed the same tactics she was a problem and they would scold.

They walked over to the other trailer and inside to silence, and the smell of dead things.

He looked at the neighbor, sprawled on his bed drowned by the red rage. Blood splattered his bald head. She had scarred his face, post-mortem, with a box cutter.

His first concern might be considered distinctly feminine:
How the fuck are we gonna clean this up?

She made a face.

“What?”

“I just started. Damn it, these are new pants, oh fuck!”

She ran out and left him, as usual.

But he accepted it as an explanation.

Perhaps, in his desire to assign some kind of blame he was doing more harm than good. Clearly she needed the kind of help he was unable to provide. But early on in their acquaintance he had stopped calling only to wonder what she was doing, and to whom. And when she turned up, pushed her way in, ready for a scene likely to bring the police he surprised her by simply giving in.

Like the force of unseen processes at work, down to the molecular level, the universe of the body was only partially understood. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic event, the explanation is derived from observation and evidence. But the moment of disaster, that is often never explained.

The night of the moon, so hot, so wet, she couldn’t stop, kept humping him like a thing, not a man. He was bone-weary and his head was trapped in a vise of stress and fear. She was a being made of viscous liquid and petulance. She was hungry, ripe and brutal, and he bore the eventual pain of being used out of some primordial penance.

All the matter in the universe is merely displaced, never destroyed.

The evidence endures to condemn, though sometimes not for years.

Her insanity was clear and direct, his was obfuscated by cross-purposes of fascination and dread.

He thought of the popularity of the witch, he thought of the femme fatale.

He thought of prey.

Like that dumb bastard.

The neighbor had set his PIN to her birthday, and she knew it. Now she could collect for as long as the crime could be concealed.

Some people seemed to want to be slaughtered.

When it was his turn he’d smile in vindication.

Because he knew resignation would make her mad.

So very mad.