The Pendant and the Tacklebox

Even angels of mercy have their limits.

The Pendant and the Tacklebox
Rain hammered the cracked shingles of the Starn bungalow, each splash echoing through the hallway where Ms. Gorz lingered with her bag of clinical supplies—a blood‑pressure cuff coiled like a snake, a gleaming stethoscope, a mercury thermometer, a battered cellphone, and a rainbow of rubber gloves waiting for the next contaminant. At sixty-seven, the nurse’s hands still bore the faint tremor of grief; three months earlier, Donald had slipped away, his final gift a delicate gold chain and pendant that rested against her throat, a token of a love that had, until that morning, kept her steady beneath the weight of a lifetime of patients.

Mr. Starn, eighty‑nine, sat in his worn armchair, his eyes like cold lenses focusing on an invisible audience. The former salesman of fishing tackle had spent his youth hawking hooks, pliers, and line, each sale a glint of triumph, each customer a potential bait-and-switch. Now his existence was reduced to a chorus of insults, each word a harpoon aimed at the nurse who dared to enter his domain. “You think you can fix me, little nurse?” he snarled, his voice a rasp of rusted metal. “You’re just a wrinkled‑face with a bag full of toys.”

Ms. Gorz kept her voice calm, the professional mask never slipping. She slipped the cuff around his wrist, lifted his arm with practiced ease, and began the routine check. Her gloves clicked against the skin of his forearm—blue, pink, and teal—tiny shields against a world that seemed to be closing in. She noted the tremor in his hand, the sigh that rose like steam from a kettle, and the way his teeth clacked with each insult. “Your blood pressure is high, Mr. Starn,” she said, the tone as neutral as a thermometer’s mercury.

The old man’s eyes narrowed. “High? You’re the one who should be low, you—”

He lunged. His fingers, gnarled like the hooks that once hung in his shop, yanked the chain from her neck. In one fluid, brutal motion, he wrenched the pendant free and, with a grin that made the room feel colder, tossed both into the toilet. The porcelain gurgled, swallowing the gold as if it were a fish swallowed whole by a gaping mouth. Ms. Gorz stared at the swirling water, the pendant disappearing beneath a vortex of filth. A crack snapped inside her, a thin line of sound that no one else could hear.

She swallowed, feeling Donald’s voice whisper from the back of her mind, “You’re not alone.” The nurse’s breath caught, then steadied. She placed a fresh pair of gloves on the table—this time a stark, clinical white that seemed to hiss in the dim light.

The next evening, the rain had not ceased. The storm outside sang a mournful hymn as Ms. Gorz entered the house again, her bag now a heavier burden. She found Mr. Starn slumped on the floor, his shirt torn, his chest a gaping wound that stretched from clavicle to pelvis—a clean, surgical cut that seemed too precise for a man who had spent his life handling crude metal. The refrigerator door stood ajar, a cold breath leaking into the hallway. Inside, on a shelf, a green tackle box—its lid half‑opened—contained a macabre assortment: hooks of all sizes, needle‑nose pliers, a stringer for holding fish, and a very sharp knife glinting like a moonlit blade. Between the compartments lay his internal organs, cold and still, arranged in a grotesque display that would have made any fisherman choke on his own pride.

When the police eventually arrive, their flashlights slice through the darkness. “No signs of forced entry,” the officer would say, glancing at the scene with a practiced detachment. Lifting the knife, examining the handle—a simple stainless steel, and had no fingerprints. Yet the forensic team would discover faint, oily impressions on the blade, the only prints belonging to Mr. Starn himself, as if his dead hands had somehow managed the final act.

In the omniscient quiet, Mr. Starn’s house seemed to breathe. The walls, once saturated with the stench of stale fish and tobacco, now reverberated with the echo of a mind frayed beyond repair. The storm outside intensified, rain lashing out the windows, wind rattling the door hinges as if the house itself were trying to scream.

Back in her kitchen, Ms. Gorz’s bag lay open on the counter. The rubber gloves were scattered, the cuff loosened, the stethoscope draped over a chair like a noose. A faint humming emanated from her cell phone; a missed call from Donald's number pulsed onto the screen. She stared at it, tears gathering, the weight of the pendant’s loss a tangible ache in her throat.

She reached for the green tackle box, her fingers trembling. The hooks, gleaming with a metallic promise, sang a siren song. The needle‑nose pliers whispered of precision, of control. The stringer dangled, a reminder that even the most chaotic catch could be bound. The knife, still warm from the act of dissection, beckoned like a surgeon’s scalpel, an instrument of release. In her mind, the chain and pendant became symbols of a love she could no longer clutch—a love now as lost as the gold that vanished down the toilet.

She sank onto the cold floor, the green tackle box at her side, the smell of metal and fish filling her nostrils. The storm roared outside, a relentless drum that matched the rapid beating of her heart. In that moment, the line between caretaker and captive blurred beyond recognition, and the horror settled not in the corpse of Mr. Starn, but in the shattered psyche of the woman who had once believed that compassion could tame even the most vicious of beasts.

Word Count: 953
Prompt: Write a story or poem about a caretaker whose mental health cracks suddenly after the person for whom they are caring is nasty and mean all the time. What happens?