“Jesus H. Christ,” she muttered through clenched teeth as she heard him begin that awful scrape of sliding Styrofoam boards. He was attempting to remove the slabs of (probably fucking fake) wood from the box to assemble the first piece of furniture they would own together as a married couple, the Ikea coffee table, which she’d hated upon first seeing in the catalogue—it was unoriginal and for some reason dauntingly despairing—but had been advised by her mother that it was “certainly worth the money.” Katharine thought nothing was ever “worth the money.” Fearing marriage to be another piece of evidence to add to this empirical absolute, as it had cost her seven grand and had earned her a jeweled piece-of-shit dress, she crept from the bedroom, where she’d been sorting clothes into “his” and “hers” piles, to the kitchen, where she intended to sneak a swig of gin which she’d carefully hidden when she’d been in charge of organizing the pots and pans, it being of course “woman’s work.”

As she headed over to the kitchen, while trying to avoid the prying eyes of her new lifelong mate, she began to contemplate what the “H” in “Jesus H. Christ” really stood for. Certainly Jesus didn’t have a middle name.

Having become trapped in her religious reverie, Katharine walked into the kitchen only to find she’d forgotten exactly why she’d come into this room in the first place. Yet she couldn’t go back to the bedroom—she’d risk him seeing her, and then he’d want to talk about the damned table or check on how things were going “on her end,” and she’d have to smile.

“Fuck,” she whispered to herself. Luckily her newlywed husband remained safely in the living room, trying to make sure he had “all his ducks in a row,” which he yelled out as if offering an explanation as to why it was taking him so fucking long to remove the Styrofoam-encased pieces of the Hazelnut Haven coffee table from their box. Why he considered it at all appropriate to deliver this offensively loud newsfeed was beyond her comprehension.

Derailed by the scraping, grating Styrofoam, she abandoned her forgotten mission in the kitchen and headed straight to the garage, where she’d hidden some cheap vodka she’d purchased at a gas station on the twenty-one hour drive to this new house in this new subdivision—Green Valley Acres, what a joke! There were only five completed houses in the whole damned lot, and the rest of it consisted of crumbling cement, mounds of dirt, and unfinished foundations, beams and boards hanging precariously over the ominous desolation from which they’d emerged.

She went to the shelves hanging on the far side of the garage, opened the box marked “Christmas Decorations – Katharine,” which he’d never care to deal with, and rummaged around for the vodka. Finding a little less than a quarter of the bottle left, she went to stand by the garage door so that she could gaze out of the already dirty windows as she drank.

The solitary streetlamp cast pale, flickering light upon the torn-up street. She couldn’t even fathom the damage she’d probably done to her car in the short drive up to their new house, but she supposed it didn’t matter, anyway. Mark wanted to buy a new car—one that was safer, with clear approval from Car and Driver magazine—something more appropriate than her beat up Kia for a child, or, if things went as planned, a couple of children. One boy and one girl.

And there it came. The sudden panic and terror. She felt as though she could feel the child already growing within her, scraping its fingernails within her stomach, ballooning up at a monstrous rate of growth. She needed to destroy something.

Searching through the garage, she couldn’t find much. Many of Mark’s tools had not yet been unloaded from the trunk, where he’d kept them “just in case they got into some sort of pickle” while making the drive.

Yet she did find one screwdriver, some screws, some nails, and a hammer, all of which he’d probably left out in case he needed them to build any of the furniture (he always planned ahead). Considering the options, she thought the hammer would be the most likely to cause the most damage.

She didn’t plan on slamming herself in the head or anything of the sort—she wasn’t crazy. She just needed something to center herself, to allow her to escape the incessant err-errring of scraping Styrofoam, that buzzing, flickering lamplight, that persistent, nagging persistent child begging for birth. So she placed her left hand upon the wooden workbench and positioned her thumb so that it lay vulnerable and ready.

Then, she lifted the hammer as one always raises a hammer, with deliberation and care, and brought it down straight upon her thumb. The pain was beautifully immediate. Her thumb seemed to ring from the pain, and all the other thoughts stopped swirling as the blood rushed to her extremity. “Fuck!” she cried.

“You okay, hon? What are you doing out there?” Mark yelled out from the house.

“Helping find tools for you. Just dropped one on my foot. No big deal,” she responded through clenched teeth.

“Honey, it says right here on the box: No additional tools required. Don’t worry about it. I’m just getting my ducks in a row.”

“Fucking ducks,” she mumbled to herself, shaking her hand vigorously to ease off the pain. What would she do if he noticed? She could always claim she had dropped another tool, this time on her hand. Chalk it up to her feminine clumsiness around tools.

Not that he thought of her that way—not in the least. He did not see the world in the way she sometimes painted him to see it. If anything, Mark had chosen her, married her, in large part for her tremendous reliability, her ability to hold her own, her lack of the hysteria his own mother possessed in reaping, seeping heapfuls.

“I’m just so glad to’ve found someone so stable and so supportive. You’re my rock,” he’d offered up in their self-written vows.

What would happen if he discovered that “his rock” was made of water (perhaps, more aptly, wine)? What would happen if he discovered that when she was struck—by emotion, by a flickering streetlamp or, for God’s sake, by the fucking incessant scraping of Styrofoam boards in her ears, she might explode into a heavenly mead of alcohol and inexplicable havoc? What would he do then?

Fearing the worst, Katharine looked down at her hand. This was always both the worst and best moment of the mutilation—the pain would flare up in raving flames as soon as her eyes turned to whatever part she’d just cut, smashed, ripped, or scratched. It always seemed to offer proof that perception was reality, for once she looked upon it, it became real.

But this time, as she set her eyes upon her left thumb, something strange happened—nothing. No pain. No throbbing redness, no immediate bruising as she’d seen when she’d smashed her hand into the wall of the solitary band practice room when she was in college. There was absolutely no discoloration. No swelling, no feeling of the blood rushing towards the pain. Nothing.

“What the fuck?” she thought. Hadn’t she done it? Hadn’t she actually hit herself with the hammer? Surely she hadn’t made it up, dreamed it. She hadn’t had that much to drink.

She drank some more, to ease the disquiet seeping steadily and irrevocably in. This was her form of meditation, of isolation, of calm. When the therapist had been called in to see her that one time freshmen year, he’d told her, mistakenly, to find something she loved, something that centered her, and do that thing every time she felt the world spinning. Every time she felt that over-stimulation–that’s what he would call her Styrofoam scraping, lamplight flickering, fetus scratching anxieties–become too overwhelming.

And so Katharine had found not one, but two things that brought her peace and quiet: getting pissed drunk to ease her mind, and, in the steady grace that always followed liquor filling her stomach, drowning all noise with the sudden and immediate desecration of some part of herself. She’d done it all, though never in obvious places. She wasn’t crazy. She knew the drill. Those bitches who cut wrists were cliché, attention-seeking. No, she’d sliced her elbows with a knife, cut her ankles up with razors, scraped her knees with a cheese grater.

And Mark. Good old Mark. How could he ever notice? He knew she worked out hard. He loved her fastidious, driven approach to exercise. And how could he find fault with her bruises, burns, and scrapes, when she was merely committed to running and riding her bike so that she could maintain her youthful health? She was so sturdy. And so unlike his mother, who had eaten her way into a nearly fatal obesity at such a young age.

Those scrapes, those scratches, those burns—those were her connections with a sort of dreamlike solitude that existed only in brief and fleeting moments. Those moments when her head would stop its screeching and its cage-rattling. When her body would stop its twitching and its pussy-aching.

Every time she felt the pain, her strength was regained. She was refreshed. And it wasn’t only in the moment. Every time she saw a slight red scab, or felt herself, while straddling Mark during sex, begin to burn the scrapes on her knees with the friction of the sheets beneath her, she felt the waves of calm come easing in, setting her adrift, far from the shore, with its moaning, landlocked demons, and into a world all her own. A world of blues and calms and setting suns as she looked out across glassy waters.

So what the fuck? Why wasn’t there any pain? Why wasn’t there any swelling? She’d hit it hard, she knew she had.

“Hon? Would you mind taking a look at this for me?” Mark yelled out from the living room to the garage. “I don’t see a letter label on this piece.”

Fucking idiot. Just look at the diagram. Glancing once again at her despairingly healthy pink thumb, Katharine put down the useless hammer and hid her vodka in the Christmas box again.

Sophie’s fingers splay slowly against the door. She slides her long blonde hair out of the way and presses her ear firmly to the beige-painted wood grain. Light moves all around the door’s frame, centers on her feet, and stops. She freezes. She doesn’t even breathe. Her mouth is fixed in a tight little line. Her wide eyes lift to the surveillance camera.

I replay the tape several times a day, every day. In that moment, before she enters the windowless storage room and never comes out, I like to think that her eyes gazing into the black bulb on the ceiling are telling me good-bye. I imagine that she knows everything I meant to say but didn’t, and that she is okay with all of it. Of course, I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. Sophie is gone.

In the video, there is a horrifying moment where she reaches for the doorknob, her delicate fingers closing slowly on the handle. I scream at my computer monitor every time, begging her not to go into “that room,” as it is known now. But every maddening time, the door opens and light floods her face. She doesn’t move. No matter how many times I yell at her to run, she doesn’t move. The light blinds out the camera for a moment, then fades. All that is left is an empty hallway.

The police tore the place apart. They even dug up the floor and ripped the walls down to the bare studs. They played the tape over and over, too. The Captain of the police force assured the worried office staff that people don’t just disappear. Someone knows something, he had said, his gaze falling on me. Everyone was questioned, but I was questioned last and the longest. People had talked about how much I’d liked her, how we spent every lunch hour together. We were friends, but it was no secret I wanted more. The only person that didn’t know that was Sophie.

Her motorcycle was taken by the police. I had laughed when she bought it and taught herself to ride. It was a gas saver, she had reasoned, and gave me a wicked smile. She swung one long leg over the silver bike and dropped her helmet over her head. “Plus,” she added wistfully, “it makes it easier to imagine my getaway.”

“Your getaway?”

“You know, just walk away from the world. No more work, or bills, or expectations. Just the road and some freedom, you know? Don’t you ever think about that, Cam? Just saying ‘To Hell with it, it, I’m out!’”

“Well, yeah, but what adult doesn’t think about that? Sometimes I think about selling everything I own and hitchhiking across the country. But would I ever do it? Of course not.”

“You would leave me?” she asked in mock despair, placing her hand over her heart. “What on earth would I do?” She fanned her face and pretended to blot tears away. I burst out laughing.

“Hey, you brought it up first. I’d go nuts here without you,” I said, feeling awkward.

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just something I think about sometimes. It’s good to know I’m not the only one, though.”

“Nah, it’s everybody. We all dream of escaping.”

She had shrugged and looked away. That short conversation took place only two weeks before she vanished, and I wish now, more than anything, that I’d asked her what she meant, asked her if she was all right. But instead I watched her start the bike and ride away. She had looked so beautiful with her blonde hair whipping wildly behind her, and the first rousing piano and guitar notes of “Bat Out of Hell” blasting out of speakers mounted on the bike. I had thought that a song about a bike wreck was asking for trouble, but I never said anything about it.

Sophie’s disappearance has weighed my mind down, drowning it over and over, turning a mystery into an unhealthy obsession. I haven’t slept in a year. I get to the office early every day, usually before dawn and even on weekends, and I stand in front of that door and watch. I wait for the noise she heard and I wait for the light, and so far I’ve gotten nothing but sidelong stares from the cleaning crew.

I have exhausted all possible venues for answers. I’ve delved deeply into science: wormholes, black holes, sink holes, any way possible that the world could have opened up and swallowed her. I’ve poured over science fiction as well: parallel dimensions, aliens, or some bizarre magnetic shift that could have de-atomized her. It all sounds possible and impossible at the same time. I even checked into the building, like I’m a Ghostbuster. It wasn’t built to align with stars a certain way, or constructed on some ancient, cursed burial ground. It wasn’t holy. It wasn’t unholy. It was just dirt. And she was just gone.

Now I wish I could tell her how she is driving me crazy.

A year to the day after Sophie vanished I wake up to the foul taste of last night’s drinking binge on my tongue. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and suddenly feel disgusted. I have lost weight and there are circles under my eyes. I need a shave and a haircut. It dawns on me that I haven’t seen my family in a very long time, and that my one houseplant died from neglect long ago. Everything in my fridge is rotten or freezer-burnt. I feel like I’ve been dead a year.

I send a quick email to the office manager to let him know that I quit, and I am about to turn off my computer for good when I decide to play the tape one last time.

Sophie is walking down the hall, carrying a stack of papers when she abruptly stops at the storage room door. She leans forward, angling her head to hear. She puts the papers down on a nearby chair and steps forward. She slides her fingers over the door, and then places her ear against it. I watch the tape as earnestly as I did the first time I saw it. Everything is the same. The light shines through the door frame, bouncing at first, and then stops.

Her eyes stare into the surveillance camera and she smiles. Stale coffee dribbles down my chin.

She is smiling at me. I know it. Her fingers slide down to the handle and open the door. She gives the slightest, left-sided nod, and then light floods the view. The rest of the tape plays normally. I back the recording up and the same thing happens, except this time her nod is a little more pronounced, insistent.

Come here.

I jump up to run out the door and fly to the office when I hear a noise coming from my bedroom. It is a mechanical sound, raising in pitch and then dropping off with a slight rumble. I recognize the sound. My heart flutters. I stumble over dirty clothes and takeout boxes in my desperate run to look out the bedroom window.

Nothing.

I hear the rumble again, and I see lights dancing under my closet door. My feet pull me forward. I splay my fingers slowly against the cheap corkboard, and press my ear to the center. The sound of motorcycle tires spinning on pavement and the roar of an engine that could go faster than any boy could dream fill my head. As my fingers slide down to the handle, I hear familiar guitar and piano notes, coupled with the thundering machine. I take a deep breath and open the door. Before the bright headlight can blind me, I see a flash of long blonde hair under a black helmet. Relief washes over me, pure and sweet. I’m going to tell her everything.

Growing up in poor Northeastern Arkansas, Julie used books and stories as an escape from everyday life. She still does that, even though everyday life is much improved. She also likes to cook, make jewelry, and care for some very ungrateful rescued rabbits. You can follow her on twitter at JulieEmerson10.