Down the Rabbit Hole

Excerpt from Something New but Not Yet Named...

Elson woke as if from a bad dream, sudden and violently, the thinnest sheen of sweat covering her delicate features. She rose up in the darkness on shaking legs and stumbled across the unfamiliar terrain of the rented room to the tiny bathroom. She snapped on the light, squinted with the sudden glare and deliberately did not look at her reflection in the grimy mirror.

She tore the paper top off a glass and filled it from the tap, not bothering to wait until the water ran cold. She tilted the glass to her lips and noticed the small, italic P embossed into the bottom. She also noticed, too late, the tiny black hair stuck to the glass. She dropped the glass and gagged with revulsion. Elson had an almost visceral aversion to hair, body hair especially. She took great pains to keep her entire body free of the offending matter, religiously shaving and waxing all but her slender eyebrows. She even kept the hair on her head cropped to a brief, almost mannish pixie cut that she dyed the brightest shade of platinum blond money could buy.

Her phone was charging next to the sink. She looked at the luminous screen and read the time as 3:40am. It would still be dark outside she realized and was consumed with the sudden and powerful need to run. Elson pulled ratty tee-shirt over her sports bra, pulled on a pair of biker shorts and laced up her sneakers. She pulled open the door to the motel parking lot. The humid air smelled like an aquarium, an odor Elson found revolted her almost as much as the errant hair had. She started off across the nearly deserted lot, drawing comfort from the solid thumping of her feet on the pavement. After a few moments, she felt her body slip into a perfect rhythm.

Elson’s body was her temple, a tight and compact collection of muscles that she sculpted by a near compulsive routine of running and hot yoga. In her youth she had surrendered it to untold abuses and had spent most of her adult life regaining the natural force and power she had been born with. She was small but fierce. Her slight silhouette, soft mouth and blue eyes did nothing to convey the warrior confined within. A long-ago boyfriend had once jokingly compared her to a comic book character called “Tank Girl”. Elson had been flattered by the parallels he had drawn between her and the spirited heroine who piloted across a post-apocalyptic world in a great green tank. There had been a time when she had shared that character’s quick wit and good nature but those qualities had become casualties of her evolution, an evolution that had that strengthened her resolve and sealed off the great voids of pain in her soul but had also stripped her of her vulnerability and mirth.

Elson’s feet pounded against pavement down desolate streets where the houses all stood in the same state of neglect, worn out and overgrown. She passed one after another, dark houses set in uneven rows; their unkempt yards littered with refuse and junk, barely indistinguishable from one another behind their low chain link fences. Street after street, it was the same story, low-income living in the armpit of Middle America. Elson’s stomach tightened with tension as she neared the trailer park. The whole reason she had chosen that fleabag motel with the sub-par cleaning standards was its proximity to this place. The battered blue sign out front read, “Paradise Park”, framed with a flashing neon flamingo that blinked a sickly shade of pink in the still gloom of morning. Beyond the sign were six rows of ramshackle trailers loosely connected by a series of gravel footpaths and a broken main road.

Elson slowed her pace. One of those trailers would hold the individual who had become the very center of her world for the last several weeks. A vile and wretched waste of human space, David Cedars, career-criminal and child rapist. Elson had tracked him down and had journeyed here with the sole intention of killing him.

Elson had no personal connection to this man. She did not know the toddler he had raped but the spirit of that broken child had called to her, had found a space in her soul and snuggled down, clinging to the part of her that was still mercifully human. The child had come to her at night, as had so many others, and whispered in her ear, speaking those terrible truths in a voice spiked with anguish and pain. All those tortured children with whom she shared a kindred spirit, a history soaked in shame and pain, had spoken to her. Their voices had become the haunted mantra she had used to evolve from a victim into an instrument of perfect rage.