A Splash of Crimson: Strange and Scary Stories

I dedicate this to April and Kennedy. VELOX BOOKS Published by arrangement with the author. A Splash of Crimson copyright © 2023 By Jackson Arthur. All Rights Reserved. This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. An Unfinished Door As I sit here waiting for the pills to do their job, my butt on the floor and my back against my bed, I think about my husband and the night that we met. My bedroom is empty, quiet, and the silence allows my memories to be loud and vivid. I want to say that the night I met my current husband, Nick, was the best, most important night of my life, but I don’t want to risk sounding corny. I want to avoid any cliches. I tend to enjoy a Daniel Steele novel or a romantic movie on the Hallmark Channel, now and then, but I try not to confuse those types of stories with real life. People, mostly women like me, invest in those kinds of cheesy love stories because we wish that our lives would work out in the same way. I like to occasionally take a peek into fluffy fantasy, at the ways I wish life actually was, so that I could escape what life actually… is. Deep down, to be honest, I wholeheartedly want my life to follow those same light and shiny storylines. A soul mate found on Christmas Eve. Or a forbidden romance that evolves into everlasting love. But it hasn’t and never will. My life has never followed a romantic script. It has never been a festive tale, an organized series of whacky events that maximize those cozy and heartfelt emotions, while also ending in the so-called happiness forever after. My life is real. And real life sucks. Real life… is trash. Many years before I met Nick, I had married a man named Roger. I was 19-years-young and still a little wet behind the ears. I was naive, to say the least. Roger had taken it upon himself to introduce me to the cold reality that existed outside of fantasy. He did so with a mixture of callousness and indifference, mainly by using his fists or other solid objects to beat it into my body and my mind. He personally and brutally forced that jagged pill down my throat, forcing me to swallow that bitter truth. Looking back, I can’t say why I stayed with such a toxic human being. Or why I consistently endured emotional, physical, and sometimes sexual abuse for as long as I had. Maybe, after my girlish dreams were shattered, I figured that my marriage to Roger was how life was supposed to be for me. My new, cold reality had possibly numbed me, making it impossible for me to hope or wish for something better, at least for a while. I did eventually escape that first marriage, though. After another hospital stay and yet another miscarriage, I managed to crawl away from it all, beaten and broken, no longer young and far from naive. However, I could not deny the one lesson that Roger had taught me, even if it acted against all the fantasies and dreams of an innocent girl. Life, especially mine, would never be bound by fate or end in true happiness. Thinking about my first marriage still gets my heart racing and my pulse pounding. I can almost hear my rapid, aggressive heartbeats echoing off the walls of my empty bedroom. I take a deep breath and try to calm down, but it doesn’t work. Closing my eyes, I stay with the memories that are flowing rapidly through my brain. In time, I came to terms with the loss of my innocence, as I’m sure every adult had to at some point. It was all part of growing up; I guess. But it also left me detached and floating aimlessly for many years, untethered to anything real or meaningful. I wasn’t lost. But I also wasn’t found. I just simply… was. Back in middle school, I had a best friend named Chrissy. Growing up, she and I were inseparable, two scrawny, skinny girls glued together at our mutually boney hips. We were almost like two parts of a single person. During the summer between sixth and seventh grades, Chrissy’s dad took a new job down south in North Carolina. Without warning or a moment to cope with the change, my best friend was gone. One evening, my marriage to Roger a few years in my rearview, I found myself thinking about Chrissy, something that I had not done in a very long time. On a whim, I searched for her on Facebook, not really expecting much for the effort. Yet, there she was, happy and smiling and married to a military man named Sean. Browsing through her pictures, it was easy to see that Chrissy was satisfied with her life. Fulfilled. Glowing in ways that part of me envied. I wanted my life to fill me with the same amount of light, illuminate me with the same amount of joy. In less than a week after contacting Chrissy, I took off on a road trip to visit her. It was around a nine-hour drive to get to where she lived on Camp Lejeune, and even though I was bone tired by the time I made it to her house, Chrissy and her husband talked me into going out to the bar that night. It was karaoke Wednesday, something they both liked to go to every week. I wasn’t one to sing badly in front of an audience, but a cold beer sounded good after such a long trip. The bar was