The World of Myth Magazine

Clyde Davis may have hurt my body, but he never touched my soul. Looking down at my withered arm, the one that hangs lifelessly from my body with irreparable nerve damage, so the doctors tell me, I remember how desperate people, will do desperate things.

It's so strange to have an appendage you no longer feel. It's just there, atrophying a little more with each passing week of nonuse. I mourn its loss but thanked my withered arm for saving my life, as he tried to slam my head in the freezer door, but instead got my arm.

Again, and again, he slammed the door in a blind rage until the bone shattered, and my arm hung lifelessly by a small piece of tendon or something, that held it to my body.

The doctor saved it so aesthetically I looked as if I had two arms. But as my arm shrunk so did my decision to retain it. How vain I was, trying to make things normal in my life, when nothing would ever be normal for me again.

It was too late by the time he cooled down and I was allowed to seek medical attention. Too late to fix the arm, too late to take back what he had done. It was too damn late to expect me to ever love him again. It was one thing when the wounds healed and I was able to pretend like what he had done to me never happened, but it is another thing to know that you will never play an instrument again or pull your hair in to a ponytail with a rubber band, dry a dish, and the million other things that require two hands. Every day, a reminder of what he caused me to lose, allowed my anger to fester.

"Kat, I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry, but you make me so mad when…" I'd heard it all, somehow it was always my fault when it came to his explosions.

I know the ER doctor suspected I was lying. But he let it go. I wasn't willing to press charges, I did not want to incur Clyde's wrath, and I had other plans for my husband. I didn't know where, how or when, but I would extract my pound of flesh from Clyde Davis.

"Where's supper?" Clyde walked through the door with his backpack of dirty clothes after he'd been gone for a week on the road driving a semi.

"I didn't know you'd be here." I told him.

"What's with the arm?"

"You know what's with the arm. You slammed it in the freezer door." I touched the cast which was only there so the bones could mend. Clyde shook his head and rolled his eyes like I was a drama queen. I ignored him. He would no longer trigger me.

"I am going to bed I took a pain pill, and I am woozy." I walked past him to the spare room. He didn't dare stop me. The only advantage of being beaten is that he had to rebuild the relationship, and we both understood that part. If I left, he'd have to groom some other person to stay and take his abuse. This time I would not take him back. I needed to build myself up to leave him.

The call came a few days later, that my father died. We weren't close especially with my mother gone for years. She was my only connection to him. He tried, or rather, we tried to bridge a relationship. Too many years had gone unresolved. I was polite, so was he, but we were socially distanced. I didn't have a way to support myself, and I needed my arm to heal so that I could be gainfully employed. My arm would never heal, but my father left me a nice amount of money. Enough for me to leave Clyde.

Now I had money and lots of time to think. An efficiency apartment was all I needed. It would cost next to nothing to live there. Some people go crazy when they fall into money and spend it lavishly. I knew I had to live quietly and under the radar, Clyde's radar, he had no idea that my father died and that I inherited money, I kept that part to myself. We no longer lived as husband and wife, not that Clyde would have cared. He always had some lot lizard on the side.

I planned my revenge. It took me a while to think it up. I took my queue from the Old Testament in the Bible, "An eye for an eye." It was the way I planned it that felt ingenious.

I knew Clyde would be home on Friday night. I pulled the car into the garage managing to get a jack under the front tire. I turned the lever until the car was awkwardly in the air.

Once I had the car jacked up without any brakes, I was able to wedge my feet on the front bumper with my back pushed up against the very freezer he used to break my arm.

With all my strength I pushed the car until the flimsy jack fell over, collapsing on the garage floor. It tore at the undercarriage just as I'd planned. Pulling the car out, I parked it in front of the garage and closed the door to wait. I knew that the car being parked outside the garage would get him going. Clyde would think that I'd been driving around, wasting gas. I positioned myself in the garage and waited.

It was a long wait, jumping when the side door of the garage opened, just as I planned. Clyde came in slamming the door behind him. I must have made an involuntary sound. He looked up, our eyes met, then his eyes trailed down my useless arm and he huffed. I can't tell you the rage that surged through me.

"What are you doing here?" he glared at me and for a moment I was afraid, but I didn't show it.

"I need closure." Clyde laughed at me.

"You got it, pack up and move out. We're finished." He walked past me and did not expect the steel rod that came down on his head. He went down to the garage floor. Blood oozing from the sizable divot I had made on the right side of his head. Just as if the car falling off of a jack would have hit him. He landed perfectly and was out cold. I checked his pulse, he was breathing, Extending his arm onto the garage floor positioning it just so, I opened the garage door and brought the car back inside, making sure to pin his arm under the front wheel. The full weight of the tire was near his shoulder. That woke him up.

Judging by his screams it must be a pretty painful ordeal. Did it hurt as much as my now wasted arm being slammed in the freezer door, repeatedly?

"Kat! Help me." Clyde wailed. Every time he tried to jerk his arm out he'd scream again.

"Does that hurt, Clyde?" Grabbing a rag I wiped the fingerprints off his pocketknife, dropping on the floor near him.

I'd read where a cliff climber in the desert got his arm stuck between some rocks and saved himself by cutting off his arm with a pocketknife. Clyde was getting the same chance. He grabbed the knife hitting the button that flipped it open swinging wildly at my feet.

"You bitch, I'm going to kill you, now," I stepped out of his range.

"You can escape this, anytime you want." I smiled sweetly. "You just have to cut off your arm." Walking into the kitchen leaving him a note that said my arm hurt so bad I was taking a cab to my friend Amy's house; she would take care of me. Also, noted that I thought the driver's side brake was hung up, it was pulling the car to the left. Please come and get me when you get home. Love Kat.

Coming out into the garage I noticed poor Clyde, still pinned under the car.

"Kat, you are crazy, please, get this car off me." At first Clyde said it so nicely I doubted myself, but only for a second until I saw my dangling arm, a reality check.

"Clyde, you will need to cut your arm off to get out of this garage, alive. Without two arms, you will know and understand just what it was you did to me. My work here, is done."

"Kat! KAT!" his voice followed me out of the garage.

Living in the country has its advantages, no one hears. The same protection Clyde was afforded when he beat me on a regular basis, now protected me. I left him to his own resources.

I wonder how long it takes before someone is desperate enough to attempt cutting off their arm? How much time should I allow Clyde to do that act and how long does it take for the average two-hundred and twenty-five-pound man to bleed out? I dare not google that information on the world wide web. Smiling with satisfaction thinking of the dull blade given to him to work with.

An eye for an eye, the Old Testament says.

"An arm for an arm," is what I believe. Clyde Davis will never touch me again.

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