The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

and reach into the cabinet above the sink. The hinges whine and a cockroach skitters over my fingers. The crank is hidden inside a box of baking soda, just in case John decides to go poking around.

I snort a line. It’ll get me through the morning, until the booze is out of my system, and then maybe by this afternoon, sleep will be possible. (Forget that I’ll likely need to crack open a second whiskey bottle to get to sleep; I’ve long since accepted that basic concepts like sleeping and waking are dependent upon my ingestion of dueling chemicals.)

After returning to my bedroom, I open my window and light a cigarette.

I’d be mistaken to call my house a rowhome. It had been, once, back when my grandparents lived here and there were actually other houses on the block. Now it stands alone on an otherwise vacant block, one of many, almost a quarter-mile in any direction. There was a time when my friends—when I had friends—would crack lazy jokes about how I’m the only white girl in my neighborhood. Had there been anyone in my life to make that joke now, I’d correct them: I’m the only person in my neighborhood, period.

Mother Nature has reclaimed these vacant stretches, filling them with weed trees, shrubs, briar, and bramble. The flora, I don’t mind, but the fauna is another matter entirely. Possums, rats, and raccoons prowl the dark. It’s wild country out here, making me feel like a homesteader in a city of over a million people.

Now and then I’ll spot a passing transient, but even the addicts keep away. No drug peddlers ‘round these parts, pardner, with the lone exception being the aging tweaker who delivers my crank.

That’s what makes it so peculiar when I spot a lone figure at the end of the block, standing on the corner across the street. The person raises a cigarette to their lips, the tiny red cherry a bloody pinprick in the gloom, but otherwise just stands there.

A hooker, perhaps? I doubt it. They usually post up closer to the drug markets or the main prostitute drag a few miles south on Kensington Avenue. I lean on the window sill, lighting another cigarette, watching the figure in the distance. The figure is black, not in skin color, but utterly bathed in shadow. Even so, I can tell when the figure cocks its head very slightly and I get the impression that this person is watching me back.

I furrow my brow—just fucking feeling another new wrinkle on my forehead—and raise the cigarette to my lips. The figure on the corner mimics me, showing me that murderous pinprick the moment I inhale.

I know I should pull myself away from the window. Humoring the weirdo watching me won’t do me any good, and yet, something compels me to keep an eye on the figure. I’m not eager to make friends but I feel a sudden and urgent need to keep track of this person.

My cigarette has burned down to the butt. I flick it out the window and light another.

Down at the corner, the figure flicks its cigarette into the gutter and lights a new one.

One would have to work extraordinarily hard to break into my house. Wrought iron bars on all the windows. Double locks on the back door, triple on the front. Nanna and Gramps were aware that their neighborhood was going down the tubes and shielded themselves accordingly well before I moved in.

But it’s not the idea that this person could get inside my house that unsettles me, as much as it is the anonymous nature of the figure’s gaze.

Then the figure starts up the sidewalk. It passes underneath the few working streetlights lining my street but remains completely dark, like a living shadow.

I’m about to shout that I keep an aluminum Louisville Slugger by the front door and I was one fuck of a softball player back in the day, but I’m not entirely confident that would dissuade the figure from approaching.

Just as this thought shoots through my skull, the figure stops and turns right, climbing into a dense thicket of foliage that the dull orange glow of the streetlights can’t penetrate.

The dark bushes ripple as the figure disappears inside and I lose sight of it.

For all I know, that person is a fellow tweaker and just wants to continue on his or her way, cutting through the vacant wilderness because they’re tired of the strange woman staring from her lonely bedroom window.

But I know better.

The movement within the bushes ceases; that, or it’s just too dark for me to see any, and I’m confronted by an entirely new sense of dread. My eyes strain. I’m looking for that burning cigarette cherry. Surely, the figure will take another puff.

My flip phone vibrates on the nightstand and I nearly shit myself. I snatch the phone and quickly return to the window.

Keeping one eye on the bushes, I flip it open. I’ve got a voicemail from a private number, though the phone never rang. Though it’s possible that the call came when I was sleeping and the voicemail notification was just delayed. It happens with these older phone models.

The voicemail begins with crackling static, initially faint, and for a moment, I assume the message will cut off. A wrong number, or a pocket dial, or a malfunctioning robocall. The static ebbs and flows, yet I hear something else, just under the crackle.

It’s a low voice, dark and ethereal, but unmistakably feminine. “Broken…cunt…” says the voice, gusting over the static. “You’re…broken…” The voice becomes clearer, taking on a slightly higher pitch. “Cunt.”

So I’m a broken cunt, huh? That’s an arguable point, but I’ve been called far worse in threatening phone calls.

Her voice takes on a singsong intonation. Two children chime in, singing along. The song becomes clearer, higher pitched, almost gleeful. And I’m wrong. They’re not calling me a broken cunt.

“Your broken cunt,” they sing. “The dead flesh from your…broken…cunt…”

Ice fills my bowels. I can no