In the Dark of the Night by Mickayla Jones
In the Dark of the Night by Mickayla Jones
Grace sits cross legged in the empty space of her apartment floor, overwhelmed by the sight of countless cardboard boxes that she can barely recall the contents of. A sole lawn chair sits idle in the center of the living room, for visitors, she tells herself. She places her hands palm down on the floor. The cold linoleum and its subtle indentations, cracks, and scratches draw her into the present as the stale, mildewy air fills her lungs to capacity. Grace embraces the false sense of security of a city where no one knows her or will ever know her. A city where she will walk only the distance of one end of her 500 sq ft apartment to the other, and no farther if she can help it.
With the sound of footsteps resounding just beyond the three-inch wood door, twice dead bolted, Grace springs to attention, first stealing a glance through the peephole. She barely draws back the blackout curtains she hung the moment she moved in earlier that day, her body hurling backwards at the sight of her own reflection. Her chest heaves. Her heart rate surges. And still, she rises back up to the window. A delivery man, clad in a dark, UPS brown walks down the exterior hallway of her apartment complex, cardboard boxes piled in his arms. She exhales and snaps the curtains closed, concealing her locked jaw, her shifting eyes, and the general look of lingering fear despite the absence of threat. In an effort to put as much distance between herself and the relentless noise beyond her door, Grace walks, just one pace below a run, towards her bedroom. Fists balled, she steals quick glances over her shoulder as if someone might follow her into her concrete box with only one way in and one way out.
The moment she sits in the chair before her oak wood desk, she finds solace in the familiar cracks of the black leather. Her focus shifts from perceived threats to the piles of black moleskin notebooks stacked in a semicircle around her. Grace grabs one, running her palm against the slight dimpling of the cover before she flips through it, scrawling notes only she can understand in the one fresh moleskin out of the dozens. The exposed page she hunches over reveals an intricate mapping of the dates of moments she can’t forget, places that she can still sense, and people with faces she can’t quite place.
After hours of pouring over pages she wrote, with the same swiftness that she does everything in her life, she slams her notebooks shut, reorders them chronologically, placing dull, yellow sticky notes as markers of where she left off. Her hands linger on the covers of closed notebooks; she skims the edges of post- it notes jutting out from between the pages. The clock strikes 10 exactly. She is fully aware that sleep will be a stranger well into the night, and still, she dims the lights, checks the locks on her door once, twice, and the third time’s the charm. With each movement she mutters, “Safe and Secure. Safe and Secure. Safe and Secure.”
Grace launches into bed, demanding that her brain retire, so much so that it refuses until minutes turn into hours. Before they even occur, she imagines the nightmares that will invade her sleep, dread rising from the pit of her stomach. Having learned the hard way, Grace reminds herself that sleep isn’t optional.
Moments after her eyes grow heavy and sleep prevails, her eyes move left to right, left to right, while images of the basement play like a sick highlight reel projected on her eyelids. She relives the events with clarity: the cat stench in the basement, the musk of the man, the sound of her ribs cracking. Even in her nightmares, the perpetrators are faceless, nameless monsters.
Before the nightmare has a chance to wake her, she startles awake to an insistent pounding on her door. The second she becomes fully aware of the thudding cadence traveling through her apartment, she can feel the pounding of her heart in her ears as blood courses through her extremities. Her hands tremble as they rest at her side. The booming thuds become long and drawn out, muffled by a flood of fear. Grace accepts the knowledge that there is nowhere to go, unless she plans on taking a dive through her third-floor window. She works to drown out the irrationality and convince her frenzied mind that the banging is on the neighbor’s door, not hers. It could never be hers. She whispers, “Safe and secure,”not believing it for a second.
The resounding banging ceases, and Grace lets out a sharp exhale as if she had been holding her breath the whole time. She eases her eyes shut, only to be reemerged in pure fear when the words, “I know you’re in there! I know what you’ve done!” permeate her senses, so much so that she questions her own perception. Her faculties have failed her before, who’s to say that’s not the case this time?
Every muscle of her body contracts and she lays inert in bed convinced that even the slightest movement will amplify the situation. Grace resolves to count, trusting the repetition far more than she could ever trust the police after so much disregard, so many let downs. She counts the tiled ceiling above her, one after another, over and over again, until finally, only silence surrounds her. Threat averted, she continues her ritual in a futile attempt to ease her pulsing nervous system, muttering aloud, “Safe and secure,” repeatedly, willing it to be true.
Just as a single ray of sunlight forces its way through the sole crack in her curtains, she loses count and sleep prevails, hurtling her through the time and space held in her memories.
She startles awake once more, but this time not to the crashing bangs on her door. Grace checks the clock and silently scolds herself for sleeping in so late. Her eyes fix on the flashing red numbers on her alarm clock, a late 9 am. She allows her gaze to drift to the framed photograph of her sister and her heart aches at the thought of her. Grace hurls the mound of sheets and blankets off her, throws her legs over the side of the bed, and stands. She moves according to her daily routine, brushing her teeth with efficiency, pulling her hair back in a slick and tight bun, dressing in her favorite sweats and hoodie, without once looking at her reflection in the mirror. Her day officially begins with the satisfying crack of a Red Bull opening: her sustenance.
Plopping into her desk chair, Grace reaches for the next black notebook on her stack and scans for where she left off last, thinking nothing of the human need to eat, to drink (anything but Red Bull), and to commune. With each self-inked word she reads, she spirals deeper within herself, only tied to the present by the feel of the thin, bleached paper between the tips of her fingers and her black, Pilot G-2 gliding like a figure skater across the empty canvas of the page. Her endless cycle of referencing and scrawling is interrupted only by the nagging impulse to check the two dead bolts securing her from the outside world. In a frenzy of frustration, but also necessity, she repeatedly flings herself from her desk, towards the front door, twisting the deadbolts as if they could turn any farther than they are already turned. Just the feel of the deadbolt against her hand allows her to sigh in relief and return to her desk.
Midway through the day, Grace opens the fridge and is dismayed to discover that her coveted Red Bull supply is depleted. She stands in disbelief, her jaw slack, her eyes wide, her hands trembling at her side. Grace navigates in her browser to place a grocery delivery, thrown by the alert that her order cannot be completed until the next day. Exhaustion creeping up on her, she rubs her puffy eyelids and accepts the fact that she will not make it a moment longer without a heavy dose of caffeine. Living only minutes from the nearest grocery store, Grace’s trembling hands reach for her keys. She wraps herself in a black, nondescript coat, and pulls a beanie over head with the firm belief that if she is not seen, she cannot be hurt.
Breaking the threshold, Grace plunges into the outside world and turns to secure the locks on her door. Head down, hands raised to the sides of her face, she traverses the exterior hallway, down the concrete steps, to her grey Toyota Corolla that hasn’t moved an inch since her arrival. Before she starts her car, she backtracks to her apartment door, up and down the stairwell three times, shoving her key in the door to confirm that it is in fact locked. Each trip, she ridicules herself for being so weak, for submitting to the gnawing compulsions clawing their way out of her mind and into action.
Grace counts 27 steps to the automatic entrance. As she enters the grocery store, she catches the gaze of women, men, children, convinced that they’re all staring at her, laughing at her. A cacophony of sound envelopes her: the repetitive beeps as clerks ring up items, a jumbled mix of conversation, rattling grocery carts, the elevator music lingering in the background, all while the smell of rotisserie chicken makes her stomach growl.
Grace’s chest visibly heaves and she struggles to take a breath. Head back down, she counts the tiles on the floor, glancing up every seven steps to search the shelves. The boxes and cans, the jars and bags, all a blend of colors rushing past her. Spotting what she desires most, Grace snatches two cases of Red Bull, peaking over her shoulder. One case under either arm, Grace reaches for a third for good measure. Right as she turns out of the aisle towards the checkout line, the third case tumbles out of her arms, cans bursting open and spraying across the mute, grey flooring. Grace’s jaw drops, an array of people staring in her direction. Breath caught in her throat, she looks up toward the harsh fluorescent lighting, willing the tears away, struggling to determine if the cackling laughter exists in her mind or in the world.
Grace counts 15 steps to the check out, throws her Red Bull on the belt to be scanned, and shoves a 50-dollar bill to the woman, snatches the cases, and sprints out.
Two cases of Red Bull under both arms, Grace kicks her apartment door closed behind her without reaching for the deadbolts. She trudges to her nearly empty fridge and places them precisely, as if an inch or two to the left or right of either case would taint them somehow. Thrown by a break in routine, Grace retreats back to her safe space, wheeling her desk chair into place beneath her, prying open a Red Bull, and diving back into the mystery of her life unfolding on paper. Out of pure exhaustion, she collapses on the grey clad mattress and drifts off, defiantly trusting that her relentless desire to check the deadbolts could go unentertained just this once.
Right on cue, just as the clock strikes 1:30 am, Grace’s eyes snap open to the sound of a steady thud beating against her door, followed by the nonsensical and disorganized demands weaseling their way into the corners of her mind. She remains still, determined to ignore the hostile disturbance once more. A sigh of relief escapes as she reminds herself that her compulsions have yet to fail her.
The doorknob turns to the left, then to the right. Grace sits up in her bed, recognizing the familiar sound of the door unlatching when it’s unlocked. Forcing herself out of a near-catatonic state, Grace becomes aware that whoever has been banging on her door and shouting obscenities for the past three nights, stands between her and escape. If history and the last few days have taught her anything, it’s that her fear is often unfounded, though that hasn’t always been the case.
Grace peers around the edge of her bedroom door just as the front door swings open, revealing a figure silhouetted against the night. The glow of her motion activated night light illuminates his face and as she locks eyes with the intruder. A sly, satisfied smile spreads like butter across his face. She traces his face with her eyes. Salt and pepper stubble lines his chin and neck, his sunken eyes are dark and wide, his head is shaved, collar bones emaciated. A heaviness settles on her chest, a surge of adrenaline courses through her veins, and something deep inside of her whispers, “This is it. This is the end.”
With that, in the only act of defense she can muster, she slams her bedroom door shut, cursing the genius who did not feel it necessary to install a lock on an interior door. Grace pushes her back up against the door and slides down, cradling her head between her knees, praying to a God she doesn’t believe in, shooting a glance towards her iPhone that feels a million miles away.
Even and steady footsteps grow more thunderous as they near. Grace holds her breath like a child who knows there are monsters lurking just beyond her perception. The door works its way open in a jerking motion, the intruder throwing his shoulder into it one steady blow at a time until the threshold between safety and an enigmatic threat ceases to exist.The man stands there with a wide grin, a crazed look in his eyes. Grace is entranced by the menacing expression that tells her with certainty that her fear is not unfounded, that this threat can’t be fiction.
They look at each other in silence, fear mounting with every second. In agony, still curled up on the floor, Grace’s voice shakes as she whispers, “What do you want?”
Though it seems impossible for his sinister smile to get even wider, it stretches to each end of his face, partially obscured by the shadows of the night. He begins with a low, unsettling snicker, then responds, “Don’t worry sweetheart,” his voice a silken caress, “I don’t want your money.”
“I don’t understand.”
He steps closer, the metal of the gun in his hand catching a sliver of moonlight filtering through the window. “I want information,” he rasps, a slight slur between his words, “and by information, I mean secrets.”
Grace’s stomach somersaults as she notices something in his voice resembling a fragmented sound stalking her nightmares. Her mind instantly recollects all the moments that she has never given words to save for the abbreviations scrawled in her notebooks.
“What do you really want?”
The man chuckles again, sending chills down Grace’s spine, then retorts, “Oh, I think you understand what I want. You and I both know you have a lot to hide.”
He gestures with the gun, a subtle reminder of the power imbalance, just as he explains, “We are going to play a game. A game of secrets. Now, talk.”
Without another word, the intruder sits on the linoleum, in the middle of the floor, and crosses his legs like a child eager for story time. With the gun, he points towards the open space in front of him and utters a terse, pointed, “Sit.”
Grace’s legs refuse to move and she tugs on each of her fingers, counting under her breath. He points again, followed by the same demand, this time the single syllable word filling the space between them. Willing the muscles of her legs to behave, to take one step after the other, Grace finds herself a mere three feet across from him, hoping that will suffice as she eases herself to the ground.
With a wave of a gun, he growls under his breath, “Closer.”
Grace’s eyes widen and she contemplates the demand as if she has a choice. She scooches an inch forward, if that, and he lets out a single guffaw, followed by a slow, booming enunciation, “Clo-Ser,” as he taps the steel edge of the gun on the grey streaked floor.
This time, she hoists her body up and forward, legs still crossed, dropping on the ground just before the intruder. The man rolls his eyes and splits the difference, easing his crossed legs towards her until their knees graze each other. Resting his hands and the gun on the floor, he edges his upper body towards her until she can feel his rancid breath brush her face, marked by the stench of spoiled milk and cigarettes. Grace’s eyes are downcast and the intruder corrects her posture, lifting her chin with the end of his gun. He stares, free of the human need to blink and Grace shoots her eyes upward. The art of eye contact, a vital social skill, has evaded Grace since her youth. Even on her best day, she could only hold her beloved sister’s gaze for a fraction of a second.
The intruder insists, “Now look me in the eyes.”
She attempts, and fails, and just as her eyes dart down and to the right, he interrupts, “Hey. hey. Eyes up here. Now. You are going to look me in the eyes. You are going to open the shades and let me see in.”
Catching another glimpse of the pistol, its charcoal grey illuminated by the single ray of artificial light beaming through a slight crack in her curtains, she looks in his eyes for more than a moment. They’re dark, the deep brown of his irises blending with the black of his pupils. She recognizes a distinct lifelessness in them that she can’t quite place.
Breaking the silence, the intruder growls, “Well, go ahead. What are you waiting for?”
Grace searches her mind and imagination for something that will satisfy his clear desire for guilt, for regret. She breaks eye contact for a moment to steal another glance at the gun; its presence is all the motivation she needs to speak. Not quite willing to divulge what lays in the depths of her soul, Grace steals from her younger sister, the wild child, and stammers over her words before she mutters, “Long before marijuana was legalized, I would buy it, I mean score it, off the streets back in high school. And you know, smoke it.”
The intruder scoffs and throws his head back in roaring laughter, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in unison with each laugh. Just as quickly as it started, his laughter ceases altogether. The intruder snaps his head back down, guides her eyes back up to his, a scowl etched across his face. In a tone as matter of fact as someone reading from a dry history book, he says, “We both know that’s not true. When you were eleven you vowed you’d never touch drugs because you always feared that you’d become your mother.”
The man cocks his gun, lets her feel the cold steel rest against her cheek, and asks, “You ready to try again? And if you wouldn’t mind, make sure it’s the truth this time.”
Without thinking, Grace raises her nimble fingers up to her lips and compulsively rips at the dry skin clinging to them. Bits fall to the ground between her crossed legs. Her mind detaches from the moment along with every ripped piece of skin falling from her lips. She is revived when her tongue instinctively searches through the raw patches, its edge touching a pool of blood collecting on the inside of her bottom lip. Regardless, her fingers search for the next peeling edge of skin and are ultimately batted away from her mouth with cold steel. She looks down like a child caught picking her nose.
Taunted by a deadly weapon, she knows what she must do. Grace focuses her eyes just beyond his, the only way she can get through the agony of holding his gaze. In an almost robotic tone, Grace mutters, “I had to get out. I left my sister there. With them. Whatever happens to her from that moment on is my fault.”
“Now we’re talking! Abandoning your sister? Leaving her there with those monsters? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it?”
The intruder turns his head, a half-smile creeping up the side of his face, and winks just as she bats a single tear away from her eye and fixes her gaze on the empty wall to her left.
The lax tilt of the gun invading her field of vision, Grace continues. Unlike her rituals and paranoia, her life actually depends on it. Trying to determine the next confession in a long string of regrettable, haunting moments, she settles on a feeling of true hunger that she will never forget. Grace gathers herself and her words for a moment, and begins, “I was young. In middle school probably. And I was just getting home from basketball practice. I was so hungry, or at least I thought I was. I knew that we only had enough ramen for my sister and I to share a cup each night. I ate all three.”
“You two went hungry that long weekend, isn’t that right?”
“Our stomachs felt like they were shrinking and we searched the cabinets for food, only to find mouse droppings. We didn’t eat again until Tuesday at school.”
“And whose fault was that?”
“I starved us. It was my fault.”
The intruder sighs with a mockingly sympathetic look on his face, then retorts, “Stealing food from your own sister’s mouth. That’s low, even for you.”
Grace looks back down at her socked feet resting beneath her legs, nods, and reaches her hand back up to her lips.
The intruder raises his hand, and begins tapping his thumb to his fingers, his eyes studying the ceiling. With each thumb tap, he begins his list: “Let’s see here. Okay. So, you abandoned your sister. And if that wasn’t enough, you also made her go hungry beforehand. You threw yourself at all those men. You became a hermit, and you drove your mother to a heroin addiction. Sound about right?”
As he gives words to her sins, Grace catches secrets that only live in her mind and still blames herself for clearly not remembering all her monstrous confessions. Grace’s eyes wander around the room, searching for some remnant of reality, finding only white walls, cardboard boxes, and the yard chair, for visitors. Remembering the rules, she locks her gaze back on him and wonders if that will be enough to keep her alive. While she hopes for another day, another hour even, she chastises herself, convinced that she deserves whatever happens next.
Shifting her focus, the intruder leans closer, still smiling, and nods as he says, “There’s a big one isn’t there? Something you did for months, and then years. You dream about it still, don’t you? You relive it. But the people, the faces, those are shoved down so deep even you can’t reach them. That’s the weight of your guilt holding it all down, huh? Own it.”
Unable to resist, Grace tears off the single remaining piece of dried-up skin off her top lip and feels for the dripping blood where her lips meet. She knows exactly what he’s talking about. Without time to question the eerie accuracy of each comment, every moment he hints at, Grace is flooded by endless snapshots of a time she lives to forget. She feels the body weight on top of her, fingertips sinking into the skin of her neck, leaving black and blue traces behind, stealing her breath. She smells cologne, attached to a distinct moment in time, to a distinct man, though she struggles to decipher the details of his face. She can hear his threats, feel his blows, and remembers each unique variation of violation. Grace struggles to string words together that can capture that period of her life and her complicity. Hesitant, she begins with, “Well there were a lot of drug addicts around. All the time. For years. And my mom. She had to stay well somehow. So, I spent a lot of time down in the basement. He would visit. I fought. Hard. I guess he broke me. The moment I gave up, the moment I stopped fighting, the blame became mine. There was just one moment, when everything inside of me turned dead and cold, and I lost myself in the rows of popcorned ceiling tiles above me. I left part of myself, most of myself, down there. And it’s my fault.”
“It sounds like you’re the center of all that suffering. And that’s why you left, right? Because you couldn’t live with yourself?”
Inches apart, as the last word leaves the intruder’s mouth, his neck twitches to the right, barely perceptible, taking a fraction of a second to snap back to place before he plasters that same sinister, anticipatory smile across his face. In that fleeting moment, Grace’s eyes grow wide in recognition, searching the lines of his face, tracing his silhouette until she fixes her gaze on the shadowed wall behind him as if in a trance. For just a moment, her eyes, her face, are lifeless. Her presence is stifled by the familiarity she saw in him for the first time when he forced his way into her apartment, and ultimately, back into her life.
The intruder remains fixed in time, smiling, seeming to relish in her absence of mind, up until she returns from the distant land she drifted to, her eyes lit. Each breath she takes grows in rapidity and each movement accentuates the tension mounting in her muscles. Shoulders tensed up to her ears, she kicks her feet in front of her, scooting backwards until her back hits the wall bordering the kitchen, its stability a chilling reminder that escape does not exist. It never has. The man sits and watches, letting out an echoing laugh of twisted glee, nodding his head as if this is exactly what he had hoped for, what he had planned.
Images of the intruder appear with a clarity her memories have been lacking for years. He was the orchestrator. She sees this now, placing him in every adverse, violent moment of her life, either lingering in the background, or asserting himself as the perpetrator. He is the common thread. She opens her mouth to speak and, in a firm, even tone, she says, “You’re Dennis.”
Dennis’s eyes widen even further. He tilts his head to the side, forcing the corners of his mouth to extend outwards in a twitching motion, his best attempt at a smile.
“This is all because of you. I mean, all of it happened to me, to us. But it was you on the other end. That has to count for something. I mean, there’s something so wrong with me, but it was you doing it too, right?”
Dennis nods, looking down in feigned disappointment and holds up the gun, first pointing it at Grace, then slowly turning it towards himself. He smiles, tears streaming down his face, and squeezes the trigger.
Grace recoils in shock, pushing herself all the way up the wall behind her. It holds her up, stable, secure, and she watches the blood pool beneath him. And she feels. She feels something other than dread and fear; she thinks it must be relief. Her shoulders relax, she unclenches her jaw and wipes away the blood smeared across her lips. Grace steps away from him, back towards her bedroom, and reaches for her phone, eyes wide and unblinking
Before she can dial 911, tears fall down her cheeks for who she was and who she has become. Her thumb imitates dialing 911, but resists touching the glass. Grace inches back towards the living room, punching in those three numbers, then deleting them three times in a row. First peering around the wall separating the living room from her kitchen, she stares in stunned silence at the empty floor. No blood. No corpse. Not a trace of anyone or anything.
Grace’s phone drops from her hand, eyes fixed on the empty, spotless floor. At first, she grapples with her perception of reality, with the game of secrets that she felt, heard, smelled, touched. She runs her hands across the surface of the floor where he was laying, searching for traces of blood. She sits and inhales through her nose, searching for his rancid stench lingering in the air. She peeks through the peephole and draws the curtains back and the hallways, stairwell, and courtyard are still and empty. She shakes away confusion and doubt, grabs her keys off the hook by the door. Grace swings the door open in a swift motion, strides across the threshold, and walks out into the world without hesitation.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Mickayla Jones 2025
