Toppled Over nosleep

“Don’t you just love the taste of fresh strawberries?” She says with juices dribbling down her shirt. “Not really.” “You should dip them in sugar when we get home. They taste even better.” “Save some for me then, won’t you.” I grab her knee and slap it playfully and she roars at me in defense.

There were groceries in the back of the car sitting almost like dominoes, waiting to topple over in their paper prisons. One pothole and down they go. Cabbage and ice cream go everywhere and leaves a stain that I’ll never be able to get out of the car. I look at her and all of that fear fades away. I know that if I’m with her, she can turn any situation into a funny memory.

About a year ago we were driving to her parent’s house in the mountains and I got a flat tire. I was so pissed that I was yelling at the car and leaving dents in the side while almost breaking my toes. She came over to me and wrapped her arms around my waist.

“While you were yelling at the car, I called my dad and he said he’d come right away. They only live a couple of miles down the road.” I asked her why she didn’t tell me that and she said it was because I never gave her time to.

She was right. I jumped out of the car and started yelling automatically. She said it was funny watching me yell at an inanimate object. I started laughing, which until she had come up to me, I didn’t think was possible for days to come. But there I was, laughing with a flat tire and dents in my car. When her dad came and changed the tire, she rolled the flat one down the hill and yelled “You’re free now!” She changed the entire situation. She did it without even having to try.

We get home and put the groceries away. She always gets what goes in the refrigerator and I get dry goods. It’s a deal we made to avoid constant bumping into in a narrow kitchen.

“Honey, your butt is rubbing up against my leg.” She whispers as I put something into the cabinet below the sink.

“Oh, let me make it better for you.” I start backing up even more and she starts screaming like she’s touching a thousand rotten worms all at once.

We make love on the floor of the living room and then again in our bed upstairs. We fall asleep with the groceries still sitting on the table.

In the middle of the night, I wake up to use the bathroom. She’s dead asleep, but I know that one little sound will wake her up. I sneak quietly to the bathroom down the hall and she never wakes up. As I’m washing my hands I start thinking about how lucky I am to have her. How lucky she fell in love with a guy like me. When I met her, I had nothing to my name and she didn’t care. She loved me for me and I loved her for her. Just as I’m about to open the door, I hear the sound of paper bags toppling over from the kitchen downstairs.

Running across the hall on the tips of my toes, I crack the door open and she’s still asleep. I lock it the second I’m inside of our bedroom and rush over to her, shaking her, waking her up.

“Hey, hey, I don’t mean to scare you, but I think there’s someone in the house. I heard the grocery bags fall over in the kitchen when I was using the bathroom.” I say to her, very quietly. I don’t want to scare her.

“Is the door locked?” She yawns.

“Yes.”

“Have you called 911?”

I jump across her over to the phone and dial the numbers as quickly as possible. My fingers slip and I hit a four somewhere along the way. I hang up and call the right one this time and tell them I think there might be someone in my house. They tell me they’ll send a patrol car right away and not to panic. She tells me to stay on the line with her in case I hear anything. I ask her to hold on as I look at her and she’s asleep again. I shake her arm again and she turns over.

“What?” She says, real groggy-like.

“Why did you fall asleep? Shouldn’t you be freaking out right now?” I ask her in whispers.

“You’ve done everything you can. You have a bat in the closet. If he’s able to break the lock, just be quiet and when he walks in, bash his head in with it. I’m going back to sleep.” She turns back over and falls asleep in seconds flat.

The voice on the other end of the phone asks if I’ve heard anything else and I tell her no. Sirens light up the walls of the bedroom and shoot beams of light off of the mirrors. She wakes up this time and I’m still on the phone with 911. I tell them that the cops are here and what room I’m in. We hear a lot of footsteps walking around downstairs, then upstairs, then three knocks on my door followed by a “Are you in there? Are you okay?” We say yes and there’s nothing but the echo of static on walkie-talkies and a voice telling them to call off the ambulance.

They take us outside and sit us down on the grass, asking us questions. We tell them everything we know in as much detail as we can possibly tell it. They tell us they searched the house and couldn’t find any sign of a break in or that anyone had been there.

“You said you heard the grocery bags on the table downstairs fall down when you were in the bathroom upstairs, correct?” He asks me.

“Yes. It sounded like they fell over. We had left them stacked that way on the table.” I look over at her after I’m done with my statement and she looks like she’s falling asleep.

“Well, when we checked the kitchen the grocery bags were still standing up.”

“Did you see anything that had fallen over in the house when you checked it? Anything big enough to sound like a full bag of groceries?” I ask him and he says no.

He tells me it was probably just a mouse in the vents or the air conditioning kicking in that spooked me. That they get a lot of calls of people reporting break-ins when there’s no one breaking in. We go back inside and I sit down at the kitchen table and she kisses me on the cheek and puts her arm around my neck and tells me she’s going to sleep. I tell her I’m just going to hang down here for a while and I do. I go into the living room and watch TV until the sun rises with adrenaline rushing through my body.

I take a quick shower and then dress to go to work, not bothering to eat breakfast before I left. I didn’t want to wake her up again. After all the sleep she missed last night I’m sure she wants to break the snooze button on the alarm clock.

After almost passing out at work, I tell the boss what happened last night and he tells me to go home and get some sleep. On the drive back home I roll all the windows down and blast the radio to make sure I don’t fall asleep at the wheel. When I get back home her car isn’t there and I assume she went somewhere with a friend. Probably talking about what happened last night for three seconds and then moving onto a better conversation.

I walk inside and her stuff isn’t there. All of her things have teleported away. I go upstairs to the bedroom and check to see if any of her stuff hadn’t disappeared there. All of her clothes were gone, all of her jewelry, all of her everything had vanished into nothingness. I call her friends in a panic and ask all of them if they had known anything about this. They all thought I was playing a trick on them, but after assuring them I wasn’t, they told me she hadn’t said anything to them about it. I call her parents and ask them if they knew where she was and they told me they hadn’t heard from her in weeks but that they’d let me know if she got in touch with them.

I’m in a panic mode now because I don’t know where she could’ve gone and why she left. Wasn’t she happy with me? Maybe all of my late night conversations with her keeping her from sleeping secretly got on her nerves. My mind was jumping to every possible solution to my problem and not landing on two feet at any reasoning. I had checked every room of the house for a note. Some pre-written goodbye letter explaining why she was stealing the only love I had thought would last until we were both in the ground. But she hadn’t left any trace behind of why she was leaving me. No texts, no phone calls - no post-it notes on the fridge written in scribbles. I call her cell phone a million times and it never rings so I give up. I text her friends and ask if they have any updates but they all say no.

I walk down to the kitchen and look at the bags all standing up on the table, so uniform. I start unpacking the bags and putting everything away in its place. Cereal goes in the bottom cabinet because she’s too short to reach the top cabinet. I start crying and tears wet the tops of soup cans and boxes of snack cakes. As I pick the last grocery bag off the table, a letter written to me is hiding underneath. Hoping it might be some sign of why she’s gone, I rip the envelope open and it read:

“She’s so beautiful. You two really are so perfect together. I just had to see if I could live like you do. But I could never get a girl like her. At least while blood still flowed through their precious little veins. She screamed for you to come and rescue her before the blade started cutting off her skin. It’s such a sad thing to say goodbye to such sweet love.”

Submitted June 10, 2016 at 02:48PM by joenuck89 http://ift.tt/1YhvOiI nosleep