Sex and Murder Magazine

By Josh Olsen

When the doorbell rang, I knew it was my neighbor, Marie. She was the only one who ever came by so early and she did it several times a week, so I laboriously lifted myself from the couch, mug of steaming coffee in my hand, took a dramatic breath, and opened the door. It was the middle of May, but sheets of ice cold rain were falling from the steel gray sky.

“Good morning,” I said, my voice groggy with phlegm, and forced a smile.

Marie craned her neck into my house. “Is, uh, Cathy home?” she asked in a disconcerted tone.

My wife’s name was Katie, but I didn’t bother to correct her. “Working,” I answered, and took an audible sip of coffee. Marie then proceeded to ask me if I wouldn’t mind looking after her infant daughter, Celia, while she ran a quick errand. “She’s sleeping,” she said, “upstairs.”

She asked if I could stop over every fifteen minutes or so to see if Celia was crying, then left without waiting for my response. This was the kind of shit she did all the time.

About ten minutes passed before I decided to check in on Marie’s daughter. Her front door was unlocked, slightly ajar, in fact, and I laughed to myself at her general lack of common sense and safety. The house was quiet. Celia wasn’t crying, so I didn’t feel the need to stay any longer. Besides, the smell of the house, like body odor and sour fruit, turned my stomach.

I checked in twice more within the next hour, but even though there still was no sound from the sleeping baby, I was becoming more and more aggravated by how long Marie was taking with her errand. Granted, I was presently unemployed, but I had things I wanted to do, like shower, and felt as though she was taking advantage. By the fourth time I checked in on Celia, I was becoming somewhat accustomed to the smell of her house. The odor wasn’t quite so shocking, so offensive, and so I lingered longer than I had upon my three previous visits.

The home showed all the customary symptoms of a family with multiple children, the clutter, the disarray, which I was used to, having a young son and daughter myself, but I questioned their choice of household furnishings. They were wealthy, to say the least, but all of their belongings, their furniture, their toys, their clothes, came from yard sales or thrift shops.

On one hand, I admired their thriftiness, surely they enjoyed a level of financial comfort I would never experience, but on the other hand they seemed miserly and unnecessarily cheap, especially when they came, as they often did, to our door asking for a glass of milk or several slices of sandwich bread.

I was about to open their refrigerator when I heard Celia fussing upstairs. She wasn’t quite crying, but she was definitely unhappy and more than likely hungry. I considered walking out the door, leaving her to cry, alone, in her crib until her mother came home, but decided against it. Celia heard me ascending the stairs and instantly began to cry. She must have assumed I was her mother, coming to feed her, coming to change her diaper and walk with her and caress her. She was standing in her crib, half crying, half laughing, but when I entered her bedroom she jumped like I had never seen any infant jump before. Terror sucked the wind from her lungs and it was a good twenty to thirty seconds before her first scream came pouring out. I found it difficult not to laugh at her, this fat, white, grub-like, screaming thing, and my laughter only caused her to scream even more, which of course resulted in me laughing even harder, but this carousel of fear and laughter soon got old and it wasn’t long before I just wanted her to shut up and go back to sleep.

Celia was wearing an old pair of my son’s cotton pajamas, just one of several pairs we had given her. They were powder blue and had tiger cubs stitched on the collar. They had looked brand new when we first gave them to her, but now they were filthy and discolored and caked in milk, baby food, spit up, and snot. Celia, in general, was filthy. Her face and hands were smeared with dirt and thick green and yellow mucus. I had absolutely no desire to pick her up.

“Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?” I begrudgingly cooed, but my voice failed to soothe her. I concluded that I would have to do something to comfort her. I reached in the crib to pick her up, but she threw herself down in order to avoid my embrace. Her screams bored into my skull, but my conscience wouldn’t allow me to just walk away. I had to make her stop. I wanted to put my hand over her mouth, but didn’t want to touch the glistening slime slathered over her dimpled face. I picked up a decorative pillow nestled in the corner of the crib and placed it over Celia’s face.

She squirmed and struggled under the weight of my hand, but to little effect, and it wasn’t long before she was silent. When I lifted the pillow, her face held a look of wide-eyed content, of repose.

Marie was just pulling into her driveway as I was exiting her house. She didn’t apologize for taking so long. She didn’t even thank me for looking after her child. As I crossed my front yard, the cold, wet grass numbed my bare toes. I closed and locked my front door and hustled into the shower.

The doorbell rang, but I refused to answer.