It started with a few visits. Harmless, I thought. Then the visits came more often. As long as she’s happy, I thought. Finally, those visits came abruptly. In the middle of the night. Early in the morning. Obsession, I thought. He was banging on the door at midnight, shouting and causing a riot. The hoarseness of his deep and powerful voice terrified me to the point where I would jump and then run to hide. Hiding was easy. It was instinctive. But not for her. She would make calls. Desperate ones where you could barely hear what she was saying through the wheezes. Everything seemed muffled. She would lock her door, sit behind it, forcing it closed as the banging continued. Straining her neck, she let out tiny shrieks of pain from every inch of effort she would put into keeping that door closed. Like it was a forcefield that could shield her from anything. Except it couldn’t.

He bursted through the door, wielding a screwdriver in one hand. He’d tried to get the door unlocked that way, but apparently his foot kicking it in worked better. I heard her whine loudly as she began to scramble across the floor. She slipped around, facing him as he towered over her weak and helpless body. I watched from afar. I wanted to help her, I swear. I just couldn’t pull myself away from the dark and safe hole I’d buried myself in. I was stuck. My body trembled and my fur stuck up straight from my petrification. She continued to scramble backwards on her hands as she kept facing him. By then she was completely out of breath, backing herself straight into a wall. With a loud thud, her head hit the wall and her hyperventilating stopped in an instance. Now it seemed as though she couldn’t breath at all. Like she was holding it in because she was afraid of making a single sound.

Her body still moved. It shook just as much if not more than mine was already shaking. She was trembling with fear of what he might do to her, and so was I. I almost stopped myself from watching. I didn’t want to see what was about to happen to my poor, sweet owner. I stared intensely as her eyes shut tightly. She was squeezing them shut. She couldn’t bare to watch what he did anymore than I could–but I forced myself. I had to know the truth of the story. Whatever pointless and fake story that he planned on telling; I wanted to expose it–somehow.

With my eyes wide open I felt like someone was latching onto my eyelids just holding them. I couldn’t close them or so much as blink them without a massive flow of guilt striking me. He raised a hand with his screwdriver, ready to jab it down towards her. She yelped out one final scream of desperation. She could barely manage to lift her hands up out of defense once again before the screwdriver swung rapidly into the center of her now cracked open chest.

The whole scene played out in front of me in what seemed like slow-motion. The screwdriver struck her, and then he twisted in out of her along with spews of blood and tissue. Her face fell, though she wasn’t dead quite yet. He threw the screwdriver back behind him. He discarded it as if it hadn’t just pulled the guts out of a woman. Then he reached down and hooked his hands over her wrists. He pulled her weak body off of the ground only to throw her back down against the wall. As the back of her head crashed with the wall, blood erupted from the back of her throat. She then lay hunched over as I watched every drop of blood drip off of her. No coughing. No cries of pain. She was dead. She was dead and he was running.