Jeg smider sgu lige min anden short story "House Call" her også. Jeg har fået lidt forskellige reaktioner på den. Dog vil jeg ikke komme med dem her da det er bedst folk læser den uden forudindtagede holdninger baseret på andres udtalelser. Den er lidt længere end "Watch" men ikke mindre ond og mørk. Booyaa!

House Call

He looks at this mother and smiles. She doesn’t smile back because she doesn’t see it. She’s too busy worrying about the welfare of her little girl. Katie went quiet 4 minutes ago and it has been the longest 4 minutes in this mother’s life. She feels like praying but is there any point when you don’t believe in God? Does God hear even the non-believers? She can remember when her parents took her to church and she sat there listening to the priest talking about salvation, belief, love and devotion to God. She spent most her time in church counting the stripes on her dress or looking in her father’s notebook even if she didn’t understand half of what was written. She has never prayed in her entire life but now it seems like the right thing to do…the only thing. It’s funny how people become religious when tragedy hits them. She can remember actually believing in life after death when her mother died. All of a sudden it seemed logic that her mother was in heaven and that she was with grandmother and granddad and that they were happy. It helped her get through the pain of losing her mother. But even then she didn’t pray and God never entered her mind.
He stands up from the chair he’s been sitting in for the past five minutes and walks into the kitchen. She wants to run into the bathroom to see what they’re doing to Katie but she can’t. Arms and legs are not supposed to bend back this way. But they are and it hurts. At least she’s no longer bleeding. She can’t stand the silence and feels like screaming but she remembers that that caused the bleeding to start earlier. She has no more blood to give. Except for Katie whom she would die for if necessary.
He comes back into the living room. He looks at her. His eyes seem black even though she noticed they were green when the three men entered the house. He has a scar on his forehead and his hair is crew cut military style. Perhaps that’s where he got the rifle that was pointing at her and her daughter just minutes ago. Katie had started to cry because her arms were tied back too tight. One of the men asked her to be quiet, but she wouldn’t listen. Her crying was what brought this mother back to her senses. It felt like she had been asleep for days. Opening your eyes only to see your daughter being slapped by a stranger holding a rifle only makes you want to close them again. This mother had screamed along with her daughter. The shortest of the men had kicked her hard in the back of her head causing her to fall down from the couch where she was seated. As if being tied up wasn’t bad enough, lying on the floor face down, tied up, was even worse. At one point she was close to drowning in a pool of her own saliva, tears and blood. Now the only life that matters is her daughter’s. The house is so quiet.
“Did you see how my friend was looking at your little girl?” asks the man and looks at this mother still smiling. She had seen it and she had hated it. She opens her mouth to answer the man but no words come out. Not even the only word worth saying: why.
“I would like to tell you that my friend is being nice to your little girl,” says the man and wets his lips. “Unfortunately, that would make me a liar. I am a lot of things but a liar is not one of them. Remember when we came into the house and I told you that we were here to pick up something? Again, no lies.”
Now he’s laughing. This mother is still trying to get the one word out that she’s been wanting to get out ever since the first knot was tied when they forced her arms behind her back.
The man leans forward. “How old is she anyway? Nine? Ten?” This mother coughs but finally manages to say something. “Ten,” she says and lets her head fall down to the floor again.
The man, seemingly not too interested in the answer, gets up again and this time he goes to the bathroom. This mother is starting to lose hope. She mouths the words “my baby” but no sound fills the room.

Her legs are spread apart and her panties are cut into laces. This is not the havoc created by a pair of scissors or a knife. The damage was done with simple words. Words so simple that they seem even normal and mundane. Words like, “bitch”, “whore”, “honey”, “slut” and “precious”. The words were spoken only minutes ago and yet they have destroyed 10 years of evolution. She cannot see anything. She knows the damage done to her because she has felt it with her own hands, her own mouth and her own soul. The remains of her soul are in those laces. The passing of the soul numbed her briefly but she can still feel. Anger, fluids, shame and guilt drench her body.
Her palms itch and her shoulders hurt from being in this position for what feels like an eternity.
A conversation goes on about her state of mind. Again, they laugh and she wonders if she’s been punished for not understanding what’s so funny. Maybe she’s the cause of their laughter. She remembers the man at her school who told her class that one of the greatest gifts a person can have is the ability to make people laugh. Even if achieved via agony and death it has to count for something. She tries to smile but fails to make use of whatever muscles make that happen. She frowns without any problems.
The men still smell sweaty but she has learned to live with it. She spent an entire school year learning how to add three or more digits together but this she learned within minutes. After she vomited upon having the smell of sweat violently forced into her noise, they made her take back what was once hers. She had started to cry but they made her do it. After a couple of tries she succeeded. She never asked what the point was since her mother usually just cleaned up stuff like vomit and never spoke of it again.
Now it had become a thing that triggered further punishment and a radical change of likes and dislikes in connection with what you ate. “You are what you eat,” one of the men had said and here it became truer than ever.
It sounds like somebody is singing somewhere. She sees a tunnel of light and remembers seeing this sort of thing in movies. Knowing what it usually means there, she is scared. Her ankles touch as her legs are violently crossed and she can no longer support the enormous weight of her own head. It drops and so does she.

My mother takes my hand and together we walk on what seems like a path made of stone. The wind is blowing and I feel the remains of my panties graze my thighs. My palms still itch and it’s being made worse by my mother holding my hand. She looks at me and I want to make a comment about her using too much red on her cheeks. However, she tells me to be quiet even before I finish the thought. The man is there. He’s looking at the both of us and he smiles. He’s dressed in black from head to toe and he’s clean-shaven. He looks like everyone she has ever seen.
“Welcome,” he says to us and tells us to sit down in the chairs in front of us. We sit down as told still holding hands.
“I hope you like the chairs,” he says and looks at my mother with an angry look. “My son made them. He is quite the craftsman.”
I look at my mother and I see a look of terror on her face that I have never seen the likes of before. Her bloody bottom lip is moving, dancing up and down and the side of her face gets wet.
He looks at me. “Katie, are you ready?”
Even though deep down I know the answer, I want to ask what I’m supposed to be ready for, but when I try to speak my mouth fills with vomit and blood. It stains my naked body.
“So dirty, so used. Such a little, filthy bitch!” The man stands up and points his little finger at my left arm. The itching in my palm gets worse and all of a sudden my arm is ablaze. I laugh and the vomit and blood runs like a river out of my mouth. My mother screams and I swing my flaming arm at her to make her shut up. Her hair catches on fire and she panics. The man looks at her and does nothing. My mother’s wings catch fire as well. Her screams now seem to annoy the man as he goes over to her. I stop laughing and swallow the vomit in my mouth.
The first punch floors my mother. The first kick keeps her down. The first stomp makes her quiet. The final kiss turns her into ashes. I look at the man and I wipe my lips. My one task in life has been completed.
“Is it necessary for me to tell you why this happened to your mother?” asks the man and sits down in the chair next to me.
“No,” I answer and look through the flames coming from my arm and see a blue dot slowly disappearing in the horizon. He puts out the fire by gently blowing on it and he embraces me. It feels good and warm and for the first time in this life I feel happy and complete. The sky is filled with birds and the sun shines through a hole in the clouds. A little white dove separates from the other birds and lands on my right shoulder. It looks at me with sweet, comforting eyes and I smile. I make a little sound with my tongue to make the bird come near my face. It does and the man smiles too. I get up with the dove still on my shoulder and shake the man’s hand.
He says, “Now Katie. The understanding of life is difficult and few have succeeded. It’s not about believing in me or believing in someone else. In fact, it’s not even about believing in yourself. My job is to oversee the doings and especially wrong doings of all mankind. Someone makes mistakes and lives on without scars. Others make mistakes and never get the opportunity to tell others about them. The men told you that you are what you eat. That is true. You are what you place inside your body. But it’s also true that you are what you leave. Whether it’s a house, a womb or a family, it becomes a part of you even after you’ve left it. The spawn of evil must be destroyed. I’m truly sorry.” He looks at me still smiling. I wonder why he’s sorry, but the air is so warm and everything is so wonderful that I won't be bothered with it.
I start walking down the path which has now turned to sand and it weighs down my feet as I walk away. After eight steps, I stand still. I turn my head and see the face of my mother in her final agonizing yet peaceful moment and I scream. The white dove twists its little head like a dog hearing a sound for the first time. It chirps, “see you in Heaven my love” and rams its beak into my eye.