This story is fictional. Any resemblances to any real events or people are entirely coincidental.
Content warning: domestic violence, not intended for readers under 18.
Disclaimer: the author does not support or endorse the actions of any of the characters in this story. The author is firmly opposed to violence, abuse, infidelity, and other legal crimes and moral sins.
***
I stood there in the misty darkness, engulfed by a fear which chilled me to my bones. My skeletal muscles trembled, attempting to make up for my jacket’s failure to keep me warm. The moisture of my breath condensed into tiny droplets, droplets that were visible thanks to nothing but the light of the full moon, which occasionally went into hiding behind the mass of milky clouds.
I was driving home from a small cabin in the woods. I should never have gone to that secluded house, but I had plenty of ways to explain myself. Anyway, I must not dwell on the past, for the past I cannot change.
As I was saying, I was driving home from a wooden house deep within the darkest of woods, woods which meandered through suburbs bustling with human activity. Most of the people who lived by this forest would never have entered into its depths; they’d rather remain confined to the comfort of their suburban lifestyles.
About fifteen minutes into my drive, having completed my business at the secluded cabin, my vehicle broke down at the side of the pothole-filled road. I stepped out of the car and attempted to call my wife. My mobile phone was on just five per cent charge, and I struggled to get any cell reception through the misty fog and the thick forest.
The cold air began to cause me pain, so I opened my car to turn the heater on once I arrived inside. However, I had locked the vehicle—a vehicle that I should have given to the scrap metal place many years ago—and I couldn’t find my keys. I looked everywhere around the car, and yet I could not find my keys. Thus, I was stuck outside in hypothermia-inducing temperatures.
I checked my mobile phone. It was eleven o’clock at night, and I presumed that my wife would be trying incredibly hard to fall asleep, but failing in her efforts due to her concern for me. I told her that I would be working late that night, but she was expecting me to arrive by around nine or ten.
As I wondered how I could survive the freezing temperatures, I rubbed my hands together in a bid to prevent frostbite. As the night grew darker, the weather became more ferocious, and I came face-to-face with a red fox as it crossed the road that divided the forest.
Somehow amid this chaos, I managed to fall asleep, and dreams began to fill my mind, almost as though to kill me. To make me oblivious to the harsh reality that I was at the mercy of the elements, and that I had to do something to stay alive.
Nonetheless, dreams filled my mind.
One of these dreams was particularly notable. I was sitting at a table in a coffee shop with my wife, and she stared at me with the most blank of blank expressions. We were the only people in the store, and an eerie silence filled the room as she asked me, “What were you doing on that fateful night?”
I awoke at this most terrifying of questions.
I attempted to look at the time, but my phone had run out of battery. I noticed that I no longer felt as cold as I did before I had fallen asleep. As my vision became clearer I noticed an amber glow beside me. It was a fire, and I realised that it must have kept me alive since the moment I fell asleep. I looked around, trying to figure out who lit the fire. I couldn’t understand why someone would do this for me or how anyone could have found me.
I stood up, and as I turned around, I saw a silhouette across from the road. My heart skipped a beat as I anxiously wondered who this person was. I mustered all of my courage and approached the mysterious shadow.
As I walked towards the figure in the darkness, the twigs snapping beneath my feet, I felt an intense sense of fear that minced my soul into tiny fragments scattered throughout the cool, damp forest floor along with the decaying wood and dead leaves.
I was expecting to see a ghost or a monster. A supernatural being that would lure me into its elaborate trap, just as a fringed jumping spider manipulates other spiders into willingly becoming its breakfast.
Instead, I saw my coworker. She turned around and had a blank expression on her face, not unlike that of my wife in the dream. The deadness of her appearance gradually disappeared as she began to smile ever so gently.
As she smiled, I felt shivers running down my spine. I could no longer tell whether I was shivering as a physiological response to cold weather or because my coworker seemed to desire my dying a painful death.
She took my hand, and whispered into my ear, “I was just driving down to the hospital. I have quite a terrible fever right now. That’s when I saw your car by the road, and I decided to light you a fire to make sure that you were warm. I can drive you home if you’d like?”
“What will I say to my wife?”
“Don’t worry about your wife. I am sure she is fast asleep right now. It’s three o’clock in the morning, I doubt she’s awake at this hour!”
Somehow, the words of my coworker reassured me, as her marble-like skin and pastel-pink lips lured me into her vehicle.
As we drove down the winding forest roads, she placed her hand in mine and said, “You were fun today evening. You should come to my place more often.”
I chuckled, feeling a childlike sense of embarrassment as I replied, “If only your place wasn’t a spooky cabin in the middle of nowhere, my darling.”
She smiled affectionately and turned her gaze back to the road. I didn’t know whether to feel guilty or not. This woman was not my wife, but my wife could never bring me this much joy.
My extramarital relation and I sat together in silence as we continued to drive. We saw numerous red foxes passing by us in the darkness, and I think I heard faint echoes of owls emitting their calls out into the frosty forest.
“Do you ever feel guilty about us?”, asked the object of my affection.
“I suppose I do. Now and then, yes. But I love you, and you love me, and the relationship I share with my wife is just, I don’t know.”
“Boring?”
“I suppose you could say boring. Pointless, really. Like, why are we even together?”
“Would you ever marry me?”
“Um, look, I don’t know”, I said, stumbling on my words in response to this unexpected question.
She began laughing, and spoke comforting words to me as she said, “Don’t worry, darling, I’m just messing with you!”
I laughed in reply, as we both said in unison, “Because messing with me is what you do!”
This phrase had been a staple of our relationship since it started about two months prior to this most unusual incident. I gazed out the window to see nothing but darkness, with the moon now taking refuge behind the blanket of clouds.
My thoughts began to run wild thanks to the lack of conversation and the lack of sleep. I began wondering whether the woman sitting beside me wanted to cause me harm. I took some deep breaths and reminded myself not to catastrophise.
Perhaps she noticed my deep breathing, so she picked up the conversation once more: “We still have half an hour until we get to your place.”
“Half an hour more that I can spend with you, my love.”
Though my words were sweet and my smile convincing, I’d never felt more afraid in my life. I wondered whether my punishment for betraying my dear wife was about to finally arrive.
My heart began to ache as a bead of sweat formed on my brow despite the cold. My breathing became laboured. My thoughts became cloudy. My vision became blurry.
I didn’t know what to do. Just like a rat who walks willingly into a trap laced with food, I too had fallen victim to the sweet words of my captor.
I kept my feelings concealed from the woman in the driver’s seat. I needed her to feel as though I still trusted her despite all that had happened; that I believed her nonsensical story about her early morning fever and going to the hospital.
“We’re nearly there”, she said, taking a left turn.
As her words jolted me out of my chamber of anxiety-arousing thoughts, I realised that she was telling the truth. The road that we were currently on was part of my daily commute.
In five minutes, I would be home.
I felt relieved as I realised that my extramarital affair could continue as is, free from the tight grip of fear.
As my coworker pulled into the driveway of my home, I sighed a breath of relief. She kissed me goodbye, and we gazed into each other’s eyes for some time. As I began the painful process of breaking eye contact with my darling, I saw my wife standing by the driveway.
I felt fear surge through my shaking body, a body which was trembling with uncertainty about its fate.
“I can explain!”, I cried, as I jumped out of my illicit relation’s car.
My coworker also stepped out of the car and began walking towards my front door. My wife’s fury seemed to be dying down. She held my hand and said, “Both of you come inside. I seldom judge based on incomplete information. Explain the situation to me and perhaps I will forgive you.”
At four o’clock in the morning, the three of us sat together in one room.
“Would anyone like to explain?”, my wife sighed with frustration. “I would like to forgive my husband, but to do that I need to understand what I just saw.”
“I have been betraying you”, I humbly admitted. “For the past two months, I have been seeing this coworker of mine who sits before you today, and thus, I have been betraying you, my dear wife.”
“Is that all you have to say?”, asked my coworker, the woman with whom I had illicit relations.
I was confused as to why my partner in crime would seek to vilify me in front of my wife, to whom I had just admitted my sins.
“Do you take me for a fool?”, my wife asked, the fires of fury once again appearing in her pitch-black eyes.
“Of course not, which is why I’ve admitted my wrongdoings. Please, darling, please forgive me”, I humbly pleaded.
“Darling”, said my coworker, “he calls me ‘darling’ too.”
“What are you doing?”, I screamed in agony as tears began cascading from my eyes.
“We are proving your infidelity, you unfaithful excuse for a husband!”, scowled my vengeful wife.
“‘We’, what do you mean ‘we’? You two have only just met! That too in unfathomable circumstances straight out of a horror film. What do you want to do with me?”, I screamed as my throat began to ache with intolerable pain.
“That’s what you think”, said my coworker. “You think that we have just met.”
My wife began laughing and my illicit relation followed in kind. As I struggled to understand what was occurring, my wife slapped me across the face and I came crashing down onto the wooden floor of my brilliant mansion.
“Do you, for a second”, began my wife, “believe that I think this woman is your first extramarital affair? You really do take me for a fool, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”, I cried.
“You know what I mean. All those late-night meetings and weekend retreats. You really thought I didn’t see through that?”
“Look, my darling, I am sorry. Please forgive me. Set aside your vengeance, for vengeance destroys even the kindest of hearts. Accept my apology. Please!”
“No!”, my wife screamed at me, “I refuse to accept apologies from unfaithful idiots, you pathetic excuse for a human being. This woman that stands before you, how do you think she entered your life, fool? She entered because of me!”
“How could that possibly be?”, I asked out of genuine curiosity.
Then the object of my immoral desires began to answer: “I work for your wife. I do not care for you at all, darling. My entrance into your boring life was a result of your wife’s desire to know whether you are the kind of man who would enter into an extramarital affair. I have been giving detailed reports of your immoral occupations to your wife every week. She knows everything, you loser.”
At that moment, I felt the joy in my life being pulled out of me. I lay on the hardwood floor crying a pool of tears as I drowned in the purest of all sorrows: the sorrow caused by regret.
“I’m sorry”, I cried, my strength dying down due to nothing but painful words, just as the strongest of rocks can be destroyed with time by the downpour of rain.
All this time, I feared that my coworker was like a fringed jumping spider, attempting to lure me with love and kill me with hate. But now, I realised that it was my wife who set the elaborate trap.
I realised that her vengeance knew no bounds. As she sat there in tears, I decided to do something I never thought myself capable of. I was going to kill both of them, as anger began rising in me just as lava rises from volcanoes to form obsidian as black as the raven’s gorgeous feathers.
I grabbed hold of the cricket bat beside the table and took a well-placed swing against the head of my coworker. Blood splattered everywhere across the wooden floor as my poor wife screamed in anguish.
I began to laugh as I wiped the spots of blood off my face. I was energised by this brand-new experience and realised that I had found a new and pleasurable hobby. The hatred within me was slowly building up, and my rising anger caused me to force my wife onto the kitchen table as I placed my hand over her tender neck.
She gasped for air but could not breathe. I felt ecstasy laced with unending rage as I gazed down at my powerless victim.
Just before I forced the life out of my wife, I felt something sharp pierce through my belly. As I gazed down I saw my wife withdrawing the knife, which was covered in my blood. I stood there powerless against my oppressor.
Epilogue
I died my painful death.
I looked around and saw many people just like me. People who had led normal lives, but housed deep desires within them. When they finally fulfilled those desires, they were seen as sinners. I noticed someone clasping my hand, and as I made eye contact with him, he smiled gently.
“Hello, where am I?”, I asked.
“You are precisely where you belong”, the man replied.
“Who are you?”
“I am an angel. An angel who fell out of favour and now I reside in this burning pit of magma. A place filled with light and heat, and yet darkness is all I’ve ever known. I failed to do what was right and just, and here I am now, separated from everything that once made me happy. My desires, my unethical desires, brought me so much pleasure. But giving in to my immoral urges is what has separated me from that which is good and just. In other words, that which makes all of us happy.”
“So, will I also lose all happiness?”, I asked, concerned about my future.
“Yes.”
I began weeping as my life flashed before my eyes. My gruesome, hedonistic life. As I sobbed, I asked the angel, “Is there anything I can do about my fate?”
The angel replied, “No, you have already sealed your fate. This is what you deserve.”
“I know, I know, but what about forgiveness?”, I asked, as discontentment enclosed me into darkness.
“If you wanted forgiveness, you should have changed your actions while you were still alive. No use in crying now.”
“No!”
“Yes. You are precisely where you belong.”
