Just Another Bloody Sunday

I owe this to Deb who, when hearing that I was having a bit of writer's block (i.e., laziness), gave me this prompt with the directive to get it into her mailbox by three o'clock the same day:  "you wake up next to a dead body with a bloody knife in your hand, and little recollection of what happened -- piece together the clues".  FYI, the names have not been changed to indict the guilty.


Holy Bloody Sunday, Janet thought. It is Sunday, isn’t it? Where’s Mom? Oh, Christ, she must have gone to church. She still couldn’t get used to that, Sunday mornings having been lazy for most of her life.


She’d yet to lift her head from the pillow and her voice was groggy and dull even as she called “Hey Steve? Where is everyone? Katie? Are you guys here? Hello?” She was having an especially hard time waking up. It wasn’t a hangover, and she hadn’t been up especially late, only until about midnight playing Scrabble with her mom, brother and sister-in-law. They’d finished the game when Katie played her last tile, an X, on a triple word score when she turned Janet’s word “on” into “exonerate”. That much she remembered clearly, even though she still felt dead to the world.

Lying in bed, very still even yet, she began to piece together the previous evening. Sitting around her dining room table, Mom, Steve and Katie eating popcorn and playing Scrabble, quiet and typical enough, except that there was weightiness to her memory. Had they argued? It was coming back; there had been an argument. It was over dad’s old gun box, the one he’d made to house his first pistol that they used to shoot at the old barn out at Lake Wauenpaupak when they were kids. Steve thought it should be his, but Janet taunted him, just like the old days, saying that he could have the box, but she still had the key.

Man that had pissed him off. As she recalled the scrabble squabble she realized that her hand was clutched tightly under the covers, still holding that key. She tried to relax her hand and release it, but it felt stuck, almost as though the key had adhered to her skin. She managed to bring her arm out from beneath the covers and look down at her hand. Bloody Sunday, indeed. That was no key. It was a small, sharp knife, dried blackish blood fusing it to her fingers. Janet shook her hand in recoil, fully awake now, the knife flying across the room and landing, holy shit, right next to Katie’s dead body. “Exonerate this”, Janet thought.

Janet knew that knife. It was the one Katie always carried to trim her cuticles at odd moments. She also kept a wad of steel wool for buffing her nails, which she kept oiled with lanolin from her very own sheep. Her nails were at a high shine, perhaps even shiny enough to reflect other people’s scrabble letters.

The dead body wasn’t all that was amiss – there was no smell of coffee, an arena that had always been Steve’s. He insisted on having a Melitta coffee maker wherever he went, ever trying to keep Katie happy, right from the first caffeine drip of the morning when she rang her bell signaling her readiness. Janet could have used that coffee at that moment as she tried to wrap her head around a missing brother, a dead sister-in-law, a bloody knife in her hand and a mother off at Mass.

Little by little images of the evening began to form. In fact, there had been more than a scrabble squabble, more of a scrabble scuffle. Janet recalled how badly Katie had wanted an “X”, and how she’d begun to pester Steve that he probably had one and was too stupid to know what to do with it. At just about the same moment that Janet had been taunting Steve with the key to the gun box, Katie had been brandishing her knife and muttering something about an “X”.   Mom just kept saying that if god wanted her to have an “X” he’d give her one, and that we should all just feel the glow of peace around us. Details were flooding back by now:  Mom playing with her string of beads, the nice ones that her friend Helen had given her, the bitch slapping, the politically incorrect Indian burns, the hair pulling, the kicking, the kidney punches. It was enough to put Mom to sleep with her rosary in her hand, her children playing together just like old times.

Janet recalled Steve trying to pry the key out of her fingers, and her clutching it so hard her fingernails dug into her palms making them bleed. Meanwhile, Katie had gone after Steve with the knife, convinced he had not only the “X” but that he was going to fill up the triple word space before she had her turn. Unfortunately, Janet recalled nothing after the skirmish; she’d probably passed out the way she usually did from the pain of Steve twisting her arm.

As Janet sat alone drinking Melitta coffee and thinking things through, she knew that the most likely scenario had been the simplest. Steve, with the ringing of his wife’s bell in his ears for the last thirty years, had finally lost it over a Scrabble tile and stabbed Katie with her own cuticle knife. In the skirmish he’d seen his chance to twist his sister’s arm behind her back and at the same time exchange the gun box key for the knife, and then tuck her, unconscious, into bed thus affirming his innocence, leaving him to run off to parts unknown – maybe Lake Wauenpawpak.

God knows we all had motive to kill Katie every time she defined the word she’d just made; indeed, any jury in the world would reach the same conclusion: exonerated.