Riss by Kathi S. Barton Page B

He’d even promised her on the Bible.
    “ Do you know what they did to me? They put electricity to my ears and balls. They told me that I was a degenerate. I’m not that.” He’d had to look the word up when his momma had told him what it meant. He’d never believed her, but it turned out while she wasn’t really giving him the real definition, she’d told him that he was a monster.
    When Randy continued to cry and whine about him killing his wife, Dan started explaining to him how he knew he’d not done those horrible things. “I’m not depraved, immoral, and corrupt, or perverted either. I got standards, and I take my medications.”
    He hadn ’t taken them for a long time, but he’d been well for so long that he felt that taking them was stupid. Dan had even started to stockpile them in the event that he might need them later again. But when he’d accumulated over a thousand of the pills he’d had to take four times a day, he’d stopped and dumped them in the toilet. He often wondered if there was a big alligator somewhere all doped up.
    Dan sat down at the table and looked at Randy as he kept crying like he ’d hurt him, and going on and on about his dead wife. It was making Dan’s head hurt again, and when that happened, he would go black. He hated not remembering what happened to him when he’d go black.
    “ Shut up.” As soon as Randy’s mouth snapped closed, Dan got up to pace again. There was something too wrong about all of this, he was going to get to the bottom of it. Now, right now.
    “ The police were here, huh? That’s who did this? You called them when you saw me at the door? They’d do something like this to blame it on me.” Randy was shaking his head, then was accusing Dan again of killing his precious wife. “You know you can tell me the truth. I won’t be mad at you. Just tell me who came in here and beat that woman up.”
    “ You did it, you motherfucking asshole. You came into my house with a bat and hit her when she opened the door. My poor Connie never did anything to anyone, and now you’ve killed her. I’m going to make you pay for this.” Dan started to hit Randy again when he realized that was what he wanted. He wanted something else to blame on him.
    “ Well, I’m not going to do it. You can just fuck off. We both know what happened, and I had nothing to do with that shit in the other room. The dog either.” Randy tried to pull at the tape on his wrists that Dan had put around them to keep him in the chair. “You can’t get up just yet. I need you to call Kala.”
    “ I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I’ve told you this several times. I wrote the letter a long time ago. It’s a form letter that they send out when they have to let someone go. I had nothing to do with you or this Kala person receiving it. I don’t even know anyone by that name.” Dan snorted and hit him again. “I swear to you, I don’t know.”
    He was getting on his nerves , and Dan had to go to the door and open it again. He’d been doing that for his entire life when he was really overwhelmed like he was now. It helped him to work something out by breathing in the fresh air. Dan supposed it had something to do with being locked up in the bad place, but he couldn’t think while he was feeling this way. When the urge to hurt seemed to lessen, he turned to look at Randy again. But someone had gotten to him while Dan had been breathing in the cool air.
    Randy ’s head was laying in his lap, blood streamed from his open neck like a geyser, and Dan felt his belly jump. And he would swear that Randy was looking at him with those blank, dead eyes. Picking up the placemat from the table, Dan tossed it over the face and watched in horror as blood soaked through it in seconds. Dan moved out of the house and into the yard, where he threw up several times before he finally fell into the bush he’d used.
    “ Someone is trying to make it so I have to go back. I won’t do it. Never