Katherine's Legacy
by Anthony Beal

Everything. Harold made Katherine do everything around their home. Always had. Katherine's jaw tightened with disdain as she mopped the rusted crimson-colored streaks from the north wall of the dining room. Her sponge had been blue once upon a time, as blue as youth, as blue as her eyes. Now its color bore a closer resemblance to that of the drying pool that had formed a crusty halo around her beloved husband's head during the night. She'd have to remember to kick her sweetheart in the balls on her way upstairs. Katherine promised herself she'd do precisely that, as soon as she finished obliterating the bit of inspired nonsense he'd left upon her dining room wall.

By the time her scrubbing and wiping was completed, no one would ever suspect that her husband's last act in life had been one of vandalism. It would seem as if no one had ever used their own blood as ink to scrawl "This HoUse
reMeMbers YOUr NaMe" upon the north wall of the dining room with his fingers.

From the living room came the obstinate chime of the stately grandfather clock that had been Harold's gift to Katherine for their five-year wedding anniversary. The time was two a.m. She would have to move more quickly if she intended to beat the sunrise.

Katherine dropped her sponge into the bucket of tepid, rust-colored water between her feet and stalked through the dining room, past the grandfather clock, toward the steps that led to the second floor. She stood over the place where Harold's twisted corpse had landed at the foot of the staircase in the dark. Katherine sighed at the dark, congealed blood, the bone chips that had collected on the floor around his head; more unnecessary cleaning he'd left behind for her. No amount of elbow grease was going to cleanse the Persian wool floor runner of Harold's blood. Katherine nudged his shattered head with a toe before planting a kick in his crotch. She grinned all the way up the stairs, imagining the piece of yelling he'd have put on, had he been alive to feel what she'd done.

"This HoUse reMeMbers YOUr NaMe", he'd written. Katherine barely suppressed a chuckle at her spouse's gullibility as she stepped into their daughter Caitlin's bedroom and flipped on the light. The teenager lay silent upon her bed, her face buried in her pillows as if she were hiding her eyes for a game of hide-and-seek. Katherine spent several moments studying the cold pallor of her daughter's nude, spread-eagled body. The girl's wrists and ankles were the only parts of her to which one could look to find color. The angry abraded pinkness of them signified that she struggled for quite some time against the steel handcuffs that still held her extremities wide apart, secured to the carved beech posts of her bed.

Laughter bubbled up from the pit of Katherine's stomach after a few moments. She spent a terrible few seconds of indecision regarding which aspect of the scene set before her was the more amusing. On one hand, she had the almost total baldness of her daughter's scalp, where the girl's father had gnawed away a substantial portion of her red curls. And on the other, she had the three lengths of green-painted broomstick that Harold had left protruding so
obscenely from the torn, blood-caked aperture of his daughter's anus. It was a tough choice indeed.

Katherine waited for the worst of her laughter-induced stomach cramps to fade. Then she stooped beside the girl's bed to scoop up dirty sock and jeans Caitlin had left strewn about. She retrieved a pair of Caitlin's sneakers from beneath the bed and sat them neatly in her daughter's closet. Katherine put Caitlin's shredded, bloodstained nightgown on a plastic hanger and hung it between Caitlin's grammar school graduation gown and the black strapless number she was planning to wear to her High School prom next month. It had taken a week's worth of Caitlin's pleading and Katherine's cajoling before Harold caved in and agreed to allow the girl to leave the house in it. Too "svelte" for a girl her age is what he'd called it. He always had been overprotective. Katherine imagined Caitlin was happy she'd never have to
hear that sort of thing from her father again.

Leaving the room with laden with her daughter's dirty laundry, Katherine cast a passing glance at the brown, dried blood staining the bedsheets between her daughter's legs and decided that Harold's slovenly habits had earned him
another kick in the balls.

Katherine took Caitlin's dirty garments downstairs. She dealt the father of her children another savage kick to the crotch as she carried the load into the basement laundry room. There, Katherine stuffed them into the washing machine, along with a few of her own dirties and Harold's soiled work shirts and trousers. She found the bottle of lighter fluid that always sat upon the utility shelf over the washer to be only half-filled, but Katherine figured that half a bottle would still burn nicely for quite a while. She emptied the plastic bottle over the clothing that packed the machine, and after soaking the cottons and rayons and twill blends with the flammable liquid, Katherine struck a wooden match she found in a box on the same shelf with the lighter fluid. She tossed it atop the dampened clothing, and watched for
several seconds as firelight danced upon the concrete basement walls. She'd always thought that firelight was the prettiest kind of light there was.

The upstairs bathroom was by far, the neatest of the rooms. Katherine had little to do here except wipe the bathroom mirror and look in on Robbie. She retrieved a wad of toilet paper from the sour-smelling toilet, gave it a squeeze, and ignoring the feces that coated her palm, began to clean the mirror. On first glance, Robbie seemed fine, appeared to be resting peacefully beneath the glass-like surface of the water that filled the bathtub. Bending to peer at him more closely, though, Katherine noticed the infant's mouth stretched open in a silent and eternal cry, as if he wished to
voice some degree of dissatisfaction with having been dispatched in such a way.

Katherine hated it when Robbie cried. She'd do anything to make him stop.

Anything.

"Shut up," she told him at little more than a whisper. Robbie's mouth remained open. His wide, dark eyes looked dazed and lost, accusing Katherine of some great evil.

"Shut up," she told him again "Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!" She roared at the drowned baby in her bathtub, the baby with one severed foot, the one whose pajamas she'd stuffed with dumbbells in order to ensure he'd be anchored
beneath the water. Katherine shut her eyes and wailed, smacked herself upon the forehead with her soiled palm, bit the insides of her cheeks. She knelt beside the tub and drummed her palms upon the surface of the cool water until it splashed onto the floor. She'd do whatever it took to drown the baby's silent cry as utterly as she had drowned his body.

Several seconds passed before Katherine could stand without wobbling on her legs.

"This HoUse reMeMbers YOUr NaMe", Harold had observed during his last fleeting seconds of sanity. Katherine chuckled at the recollection of first discovering it upon the dining room wall.

She washed her hands, washed her face and touched the still-tender place in her scalp where Harold had stabbed her with a knitting needle as he'd taken her upon the staircase. For the first time in the three days since he'd done it, her fingertips came away from the wound unstained with pus. Katherine smiled to herself, thinking that she would truly miss such episodes of wanton, primal whimsy. She spat a tooth into the wash basin, spraying fresh blood upon the rose-colored porcelain. Then Katherine went downstairs. Three a.m. was fast approaching and it had been hours since she'd last eaten.

Katherine retrieved a chilled snack bowl form the refrigerator and carried it into the living room, sat it upon a table beside her favorite reclining armchair. Twelve-year-old Derek sat propped upon the sofa behind her, seeming to track her progress despite the emptiness of his eye sockets, despite the ragged tear in his throat that no person could survive having inflicted upon their person. It occurred to Katherine that the boy would never again have the opportunity to peek in on Caitlin as she was dressing or undressing, and wondered if this saddened him.

"You won't be needing this, sweetheart," Katherine whispered to Derek, and smiled at her blinded son's corpse as she plucked the television remote control from his lap. The boy offered no resistance, although Katherine half-expected him to. Possession of the television remote had been the focus of many an argument in their family. But of what use was it to a boy whose thumbs had been torn off with bolt cutters? He would never be able to grasp the thing properly again.

Settling into the armchair in front of a thirty-six inch console television, Katherine held the snack bowl in her lap and used the remote control to channel surf until she found a good black-and-white movie to get engrossed in. She rummaged in the bowl for a moment before coming up with one of Derek's thumbs. She replaced it and decided to munch on Robbie's missing foot when she found it a moment later. They'd had all day to chill in the fridge after
she boiled them, so chances are they'd be lean.

Katherine gnawed contentedly on the soft, tender little toes and thought again of what Harold had scrawled in the dining room. She chuckled to herself. So what if this house remembered her name? This house was her legacy, had been ever since the night her father had taken a hammer to her sleeping mother's head before impaling himself on a hunting knife he'd purchased the same day. This house was Katherine's inheritance. It was supposed to remember her name.

Katherine lifted Caitlin's disembodied left eye to her lips. On the television, a black-and-white film starlet screamed as a dark hand closed around her throat.

©2001 Anthony Beal